Just imagine how much you’ll love having adverts streamed to you by your LG TV as it tries to boost corporate revenues. CC-licensed photo by LG Electronics PR on Flickr.

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

Last Friday, there was another post at the Social Warming Substack. It’s about news, politics and Threads.

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

Woman’s iPhone photo of son rejected from Sydney competition after judges ruled it could be AI • The Guardian

Tory Shepherd:

»

Suzi Dougherty was chuffed when a happy snap she took of her son on her iPhone turned out so well.

She was so happy with the sharp, colour-saturated picture of him posing with mannequins at a Gucci exhibition that she had a copy printed off for her mum and entered it in a local photography competition.

Four judges considered the photo – and they loved it. Then they rejected it. They were suspicious it had been generated by artificial intelligence. Dougherty jokes that she’s just upset she didn’t win. “I was flattered,” she says, adding that her 18-year-old son, Caspar, thought it was hilarious.

The pair had been to Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum exhibition of props and sets used in advertising campaigns by the luxury fashion house.

“He was wearing a cardigan that matched, and posed for a happy snap,” Dougherty says. “We really liked it, so we had it printed for my mum who loves Gucci but couldn’t get there because she was sick.”

…Dr Patrick Hutchings studied the creative application of AI at Monash University, and is now the head of AI at generative music platform, Aimi. He says it used to be easier to tell if AI had been used on a picture – it is hard to get the hair and the eyes right – but the technology is now so good it’s really difficult.

“Generally the images look like they’ve had some digital processing, but a lot of photos have had digital processing either by the camera or someone’s put it through Photoshop,” he says, adding that people can also put photos through software to change the metadata and disguise the AI elements.

“I don’t believe you can tell for certain.”

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It is a lovely picture – worth clicking through for. And now the next story..
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Why AI detectors think the US Constitution was written by AI • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

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If you feed America’s most important legal document—the US Constitution—into a tool designed to detect text written by AI models like ChatGPT, it will tell you that the document was almost certainly written by AI. But unless James Madison was a time traveler, that can’t be the case. Why do AI writing detection tools give false positives? We spoke to several experts—and the creator of AI writing detector GPTZero—to find out.

Among news stories of overzealous professors flunking an entire class due to the suspicion of AI writing tool use and kids falsely accused of using ChatGPT, generative AI has education in a tizzy. Some think it represents an existential crisis. Teachers relying on educational methods developed over the past century have been scrambling for ways to keep the status quo—the tradition of relying on the essay as a tool to gauge student mastery of a topic.

As tempting as it is to rely on AI tools to detect AI-generated writing, evidence so far has shown that they are not reliable. Due to false positives, AI writing detectors such as GPTZero, ZeroGPT, and OpenAI’s Text Classifier cannot be trusted to detect text composed by large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.

If you feed GPTZero a section of the US Constitution, it says the text is “likely to be written entirely by AI.” Several times over the past six months, screenshots of other AI detectors showing similar results have gone viral on social media, inspiring confusion and plenty of jokes about the founding fathers being robots. It turns out the same thing happens with selections from The Bible, which also show up as being AI-generated.

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So we have humans thinking a human-generated picture is AI-generated, and AI systems thinking a human-generated piece of text is AI-generated. Bit of a theme there.
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The Twitter bot tracking Elon Musk’s private jet resurfaces on Threads – The Verge

Jess Weatherbed:

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Jack Sweeney, the college student and creator of the banned @ElonJet Twitter account that tracked the movements of Elon Musk’s personal jet, has now launched the tracking project on Meta’s rival platform, Threads. “ElonJet has arrived to Threads!” Sweeney posted to the new @elonmusksjet account on Thursday. As of Monday, July 10th, the Threads account currently has 80,000 followers. [Sunday 16th: 119,000 followers.]

Sweeney addressed his second posting on the @elonmusksjet Threads account directly to Mark Zuckerberg, asking the Meta founder if he can remain on the platform. Sweeney includes a shoutout in the Threads bio of @elonmusksjet to the @zuckerbergjet account dedicated to tracking the location of Zuckerberg’s private jet. That account hasn’t posted any live information yet, but Sweeney has been actively tracking the movements of Zuckerberg’s jet across Meta’s Facebook and Instagram services for some time.

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Sweeney clearly has a keen sense of humour. I suspect Mark Zuckerberg will find it convenient enough not to ban the account (only 6,000 Threads followers) for the nose-tweaking that allowing both to exist on his network provides to his self-important rival.
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Every time you click this link, it will send you to a random Web 1.0 website • Wilby.me

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Every time you click this link, it will send you to a random Web 1.0 website

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Certainly is a reminder of what Web 1.0 was like: not pretty.
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Elon Musk says Twitter’s cash flow still negative as ad revenue drops 50% • Reuters

Jahnavi Nidumolu and Krystal Hu:

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Twitter’s cash flow remains negative because of a nearly 50% drop in advertising revenue and a heavy debt load, Elon Musk said on Saturday, falling short of his expectation in March that Twitter could reach cash flow positive by June.

“Need to reach positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else,” Musk said in a tweet replying to suggestions on recapitalization.

Musk said on Sunday in another tweet that Twitter did not see the increase in advertising revenue that had been expected in June, adding, “July is a bit more promising.” Twitter Spaces also hasn’t generated revenue yet and is “all-cost”, Musk said.

…After laying off thousands of employees and cutting cloud service bills, Musk had said the company reduced its non-debt expenditures to $1.5bn from a projected $4.5bn in 2023. Twitter also faces annual interest payments of about $1.5bn as a result of the debt it took on in the $44bn deal that turned the company private.

It is unclear what time frame Musk was referring to by the 50% drop in ad revenue. He has said Twitter was on track to post $3bn in revenue in 2023, down from $5.1bn in 2021.

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Anyway, wait until Threads turns on its advertising and see how bleak things look then.
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FaceTime on Apple TV with tvOS 17 is actually a pretty cool feature • 9to5 Mac

Filipe Espósito:

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tvOS 17 lets users FaceTime directly from the TV, and while I first underestimated this feature, I’m now in love with it.

Now that the first public beta of tvOS 17 is available, I gave it a shot and installed it on one of my Apple TVs (more specifically, the 2021 4K version with the A12 chip). Immediately, I saw the FaceTime icon on the Home Screen and thought “I need to check how that works.” Of course, Apple TV has no built-in camera, so Apple’s solution was to bring a feature from macOS to tvOS: Continuity Camera. When you open the FaceTime app on your Apple TV, your iPhone immediately asks if you want to connect it to your TV.

If you tap to connect, you’ll see an instruction to put your iPhone in landscape mode with the rear camera facing you. After that, your iPhone becomes the webcam for your Apple TV. It’s that simple (sometimes, because the feature is still quite buggy in the beta versions, and I often had to ty pairing my phone multiple times before it worked).

When your iPhone is connected, the FaceTime app shows a very similar interface to the app on iPad and Mac, with a column showing your contacts on the right side of the screen. From there, you can start a FaceTime call with anyone you want.

FaceTime on Apple TV uses the iPhone’s ultra-wide lens as default. As a result, you can enable Center Stage so that the image is always focused on you, even when you move around. There are also options to enable Portrait Mode and 3D reactions. In short, it works pretty much the way you would expect.

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However, he points out, you do have to put the phone in front of your TV – which is a bit odd in itself. You’d perhaps want a zoom control.. except that would be on your phone, which is currently being your camera. A zoom control on the TV remote, perhaps?
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Google rolls out AI chatbot Bard in EU • POLITICO

Clothilde Goujard, Pieter Haeck and Gian Volpicelli:

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Google is rolling out its artificial intelligence chatbot Bard in the European Union next Thursday, it announced, after resolving concerns raised by the bloc’s key privacy regulator, the Irish Data Protection Commission.

The U.S. technology giant in June delayed the release of its competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT after the Irish regulator said the company had given insufficient information about how its tool respected the EU’s privacy rules, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The Irish watchdog is Google’s main data regulator in the EU because the U.S. firm has its European headquarters there.

“Google have made a number of changes in advance of [the] launch, in particular increased transparency and changes to controls for users,” the Irish regulator’s deputy commissioner and spokesperson Graham Doyle told POLITICO in a statement ahead of the announcement.

Google’s senior product director Jack Krawczyk told reporters ahead of the launch that Google enhanced Bard with new features to boost “transparency,” “control,” and “choice” for users. Users will be able to know how their information is being used, to opt out of some uses and to control what conversations with Bard are saved or deleted by Google.

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Doesn’t seem like a lot to have to change. You’d even think that Google would have had this already prepared before it came to the regulators, so there could be stroking of the corporate chin and “let us get back to you” and then quick implementation. After all, it’s not as though this has been much of a holdup.
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LG to offer subscriptions for appliances and televisions • The Register

Laura Dobberstein:

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LG Electronics has outlined its ambition to grow the conglomerate’s revenue from $51bn to $78bn over the next six and a half years, thanks in part to ads streamed to its tellies and subscription services for its appliances.

“LG will innovate with a platform-based service business model that continuously generates profits, such as content and services, subscriptions and solutions, to the hardware-oriented businesses, which generate sales and profits at the time of purchase,” the company said on Wednesday.

LG called this a “customer engagement” centered business model that relies on appliances already present in customers’ homes, such as 200-million strong fleet of its smart TVS currently already in use. Those tellies, including the premium end OLED and QNED TVs, will soon have content, services and product ads expanded in an attempt to turn the company into a media and entertainment service provider.

LG has already offered a taste of its intentions: in 2022 it revealed a scheme called “Evolving Appliances For You” that promised software upgrades to home appliances. The company offered the example of a family that moves to a different home, and different climate, and upgrades its clothes drier with routines suited to local conditions.

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Hard nope on that one. Smartphones didn’t cut it, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to all accept tons of ads on our TVs.
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Elon Musk’s Twitter employees seem happy using Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads • Daily Beast

Noah Kirsch and Emily Shugerman:

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Ever since Meta launched its competitor to Twitter last week, Elon Musk has been attempting to tear it down, denouncing Threads’ approach to content moderation, threatening to sue for the supposed theft of “trade secrets,” and even challenging Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a penis-measuring competition.

Some of his employees, however, are thoroughly enjoying the new app.

“I’m going to get fired for this, but I work at Twitter right now and have never really used it. Threads is just better,” a current staffer wrote on Threads last week. “Here’s to a new world!”

“[Not gonna lie] the signup flow was really nice,” another Twitter employee posted, referring to the process by which users register for an account.

The Daily Beast took a random sample of 133 current Twitter employees, identified by their LinkedIn accounts, and found that 31 of them—nearly a quarter—appeared to already be on Threads. Musk said in April that Twitter employed roughly 1,500 people, suggesting that hundreds of its workers may be using its rival.

A portion of those staffers may simply be sniffing out the competition. One Twitter employee threaded that he was “here to learn stuffs,” while another staffer’s sole post read “Test 1.”

But others appeared to be there for their own enjoyment—or, in some cases, to trash talk their boss. One user re-threaded a post making fun of Musk for the dick-measurement challenge and another that read “somebody check up on elon. he’s not taking this well.”

…Esther Crawford, a product manager who was reportedly laid off in February, once cheered Musk’s draconian management style. In November, she slept on the ground at Twitter headquarters to help meet his deadlines, according to a tweet she cheerfully hashtagged “SleepWhereYouWork.”

Now Crawford is railing against her old boss. “I’ve repeatedly thought ‘it doesn’t have to be this way’ and yet I’m repeatedly disappointed that it is,” she wrote on Threads this week, referring to Musk’s Twitter overhaul. “This is what happens when a powerful person lives in an echo chamber of their own creation.”

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Meta cut election teams months before Threads launch, raising concerns for 2024 • CNN Business

Donie O’Sullivan and Sean Lyngaas:

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Meta has made cuts to its teams that tackle disinformation and coordinated troll and harassment campaigns on its platforms, people with direct knowledge of the situation told CNN, raising concerns ahead of the pivotal 2024 elections in the US and around the world.

Several members of the team that countered mis- and disinformation in the 2022 US midterms were laid off last fall and this spring, a person familiar with the matter said. The staffers are part of a global team that works on Meta’s efforts to counter disinformation campaigns seeking to undermine confidence in or sow confusion around elections.

The news comes as Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is celebrating the unparalleled success of its new Threads platform, surpassing 100 million users just five days after launch and opening a potential new avenue for bad actors.

A Meta spokesperson did not specify, when asked, how many staffers had been cut from its teams working on elections. In a statement to CNN on Monday night, the spokesperson said, “Protecting the US 2024 elections is one of our top priorities, and our integrity efforts continue to lead the industry.”

The spokesperson did not answer CNN questions about what additional resources had been deployed to monitor and moderate its new platform. Instead, Meta said the social media giant had invested $16 billion in technology and teams since 2016 to protect its users.

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One feels that Meta has something of a “oh sod it, too hard” attitude to the whole election disinformation topic. It’s not just the US; there are elections going on all over the world, in some of which Meta’s apps are the most-used social networks by far.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Countries around Europe are going to see exceedingly high temperatures during July due to the ‘Cerberus’ anticyclone. CC-licensed photo by Jeremy Casey on Flickr.

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

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

Hollywood studios proposed AI contract that would give them likeness rights ‘for the rest of eternity’ • The Verge

Andrew Webster:

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During today’s press conference in which Hollywood actors confirmed that they were going on strike, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA’s chief negotiator, revealed a proposal from Hollywood studios that sounds ripped right out of a Black Mirror episode.

In a statement about the strike, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) said that its proposal included “a groundbreaking AI proposal that protects actors’ digital likenesses for SAG-AFTRA members.”

When asked about the proposal during the press conference, Crabtree-Ireland said that “This ‘groundbreaking’ AI proposal that they gave us yesterday, they proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get one day’s pay, and their companies should own that scan, their image, their likeness and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity on any project they want, with no consent and no compensation. So if you think that’s a groundbreaking proposal, I suggest you think again.”

The use of generative AI has been one of the major sticking points in negotiations between the two sides (it’s also a major issue behind the writers strike), and in her opening statement of the press conference, SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher said that “If we don’t stand tall right now, we are all going to be in trouble, we are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines.”

«

The Black Mirror episode in question, Joan Is Awful, is from the latest series on Netflix: actors’ CGI versions are made to act out the events of ordinary peoples’ lives, and have little or no recourse, even when the events are gross. It’s an excellent episode. And for all those people who keep saying “how far ahead of real life is Black Mirror?”, well…
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Farmers Insurance pulls out of Florida, affecting 100,000 policyholders • CNN Business

Jordan Valinsky:

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Farmers Insurance will stop offering its policies in Florida, including home, auto and umbrella policies, in a change that will force thousands of people to change their insurance provider.

The company said in a statement that its decision to get out of Florida was a business decision necessary to manage its risk exposure in the hurricane-prone state. Farmers serves 100,000 customers in Florida but said there will be no impact to customers who use Farmers’ owned subsidiaries like Foremost Signature and Bristol West.

“Such policies will continue to be available to serve the insurance needs of Floridians,” Farmers Insurance spokesperson Trevor Chapman said in a statement. “Affected customers will receive notifications detailing when their coverage will end and will be advised of options for replacement coverage.”

National insurers don’t have a major presence in Florida, including Farmers, which has barely a 2% share of the state’s insurance market. Florida requires affected policyholders to receive a 120-day notice that their policies aren’t being renewed.

“Over the past 18 months in Florida, 15 home insurers have placed moratoriums on writing new business, four carriers have announced plans to voluntarily withdraw from the market and seven companies have been declared insolvent,” Mark Friedlander, a spokesperson for Insurance Information Institute, told CNN. “Currently, there are 18 Florida residential insurers on the state regulator’s watch list due to concerns over their financial health.”

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In June CNN had a story about how insurance rates for homeowners in Florida are four times higher than the national average, as much as anything because of fraudulent claims. But in a hurricane-prone state, you stand to lose everything if insurers withdraw. (And don’t forget the tower block that collapsed because of seawater intrusion just over two years ago.)
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Celsius founder Alex Mashinsky arrested and charged with fraud • Financial Times

Stefania Palma in Washington, Scott Chipolina in London, and Mark Vandevelde and Joe Miller in New York:

»

Alex Mashinsky, the founder of bankrupt cryptocurrency lender Celsius Network, has been arrested by US authorities and charged with fraud and market manipulation.

Prosecutors allege that Mashinsky misled investors into ploughing billions of dollars into Celsius, portraying it “as a modern day bank, where customers could safely deposit crypto assets and earn interest”.

An indictment unsealed shortly after Mashinsky’s arrest on Thursday said that by contrast the cryptocurrency platform had operated “as a risky investment fund” that was far less profitable than Celsius had led investors to believe.

The criminal case, brought by federal prosecutors in Manhattan, added that Celsius also used some customers’ money to manipulate the market for a cryptocurrency token called CEL. This, they said, allowed Celsius to sell its own holdings of the token at prices that exceeded its market value.

Celsius, which is now being run by a team of restructuring professionals led by former JPMorgan Chase banker Chris Ferraro, has accepted responsibility for its part in the alleged scheme, according to a non-prosecution agreement with the Department of Justice also unveiled on Thursday.

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Well now. It seems like all the crypto bros are being rounded up. This story is notable too for the cast of thousands around the globe who assembled it – I left the datelines in on purpose. Usually they don’t mean much, but–Washington, London, and New York? That’s quite the assembly.
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Various conservative grievances and hyperfixations • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

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While it’s doubtful that real human people are watching [ex-Fox personality Tucker] Carlson’s terrible bad show with any actual active interest, it is fascinating from a content standpoint to watch him seemingly blindly try and figure out how to recapture what he was doing at Fox. I assumed Carlson was much more cynical and self-aware, but after watching this new show, I’m beginning to think he didn’t actually understand what his role was within the larger right-wing media infrastructure.

Carlson’s Fox News show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, basically served one function from 2016-2023, which, aside from providing background noise for Texas airport food courts, was to give legitimacy to deranged right-wing internet ramblings. That was the whole deal. It was the conservative equivalent of, idk, Mindy Kaling’s Velma reboot. The novelty with these kinds of shows is that they say things you half-remember seeing on the internet a few months ago. And I assume that novelty is heightened for Carlson’s viewers, who, if they use the internet at all, are definitely not coherently following its various macro conversations.

But now that Carlson isn’t on TV and doesn’t have an army of producers crawling subreddits for 4chan screenshots to spin up into story ideas, he now has two choices: Go full internet native and start making content at the speed of other right-wing influencers in formats preferred by algorithmic platforms or try and just simply pretend his show can still effectively launder various conservative grievances and hyperfixations like it used to. Even though it has a fraction of the audience and budget. He seems to be choosing the second option. For example, it appears he went to Romania to interview Tate and yet no one on his team suggested filming it as a travel vlog or even as a dramatic intro to the episode, which makes me think there’s no one around him who actually understands how to make content.

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Love it: “background noise for Texas airport food courts”. Broderick has a novelist’s eye and ear.
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The Barbie-Oppenheimer double feature is really happening, data shows • Bloomberg via The Straits Times

Sarah Rappaport:

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Barbenheimer isn’t just a meme. There’s plenty of evidence that people around the globe are making plans to see two of the most-anticipated movies of the summer–which happen to be stark contrasts of each other – on the same day.

UK cinema chain Vue says that as of Tuesday, 19% of people who booked tickets to see Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer also bought tickets for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.

“We’ve put on as many screenings as possible of both films to accommodate high demand,” says Rob Lea, head of screen content for UK & Ireland at Vue, one of the UK’s largest cinema chains with more than 870 screens.

AMC, the world’s largest movie chain, says more than 20,000 of its AMC stubs members have already booked Barbie and Oppenheimer on the same day.

“The growing online conversation around seeing both of these incredible films is turning into ticket sales,” Elizabeth Frank, executive vice president of worldwide programming and chief content officer at AMC Theatres, said in a statement. More sales are likely ahead of the July 21 releases, she said.

Barbie is tracking to sell more tickets overall, with low-end estimates from Box Office Pro showing at least a US$85m (S$113.8m) opening weekend for the pop delight, compared with US$45m for Oppenheimer.

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Save time, just go to the double-header below. (Though in passing, those opening weekend predictions are pretty modest compared to the past. Filmgoing has changed.) Better enjoy it: the writers’ strike plus the actors’ strike means the movie companies are going to struggle to have anything next year.

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Global foldable smartphone market continues to expand • Counterpoint Research

Jene Park:

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According to the Counterpoint Research Foldable Tracker and Foldable Insight Report, the global foldable smartphone market increased 64% YoY in Q1 2023, based on sell-in volume, to reach 2.5 million units. This is quite significant because the foldable market rose amid a 14.2% year-on-year decline in the overall global smartphone market during the same period. Foldable smartphone markets in almost all major regions, including China, North America and Western Europe, displayed strong growth in Q1 2023.

The robust growth in the global foldable market was largely driven by the growth in the Chinese foldable market. Although the Chinese smartphone market declined by about 8% YoY in Q1 2023, the domestic foldable market continued to grow, surging 117% YoY to 1.08 million units.

Commenting on this phenomenon, Research Analyst Woojin Son said, “In China, new foldable products such as the OPPO N2 and N2 Flip had grand releases. These big launch events constantly pique the market’s interest. Consequently, Chinese consumers have become more familiar with foldable products compared to other regions.”

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That’s 2 POINT 5 million units: two and a half million. Out of a market that’s how big? 280 million units, according to Counterpoint. That makes the foldable market, kicked off by Samsung in September 2019, nearly four years old. True, it’s a difficult product to make in volume, but there just doesn’t seem to be an appetite for foldables in the way there was for large-screened phones when Samsung came out with those early in the smartphone wars.
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Europe braces for sweltering July • European Space Agency

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Temperatures are sizzling across Europe this week amid an intense and prolonged period of heat. And it’s only just begun. Italy, Spain, France, Germany and Poland are all facing a major heatwave with temperatures expected to climb to 48°C on the islands of Sicily and Sardinia – potentially the hottest temperatures ever recorded in Europe.

An anticyclone – a high-pressure area – named Cerberus (named after the monster from Dante’s Inferno) coming from the south will cause temperatures to rise above 40°C across much of Italy. This comes after a spring and early summer full of storms and floods.

The highest temperature in European history was broken on 11 August 2021, when a temperature of 48.8°C was recorded in Floridia, an Italian town in the Sicilian province of Syracuse. That record may be broken again in the coming days.

The animation below uses data from the Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission’s radiometer instrument and shows the land surface temperature across Italy between 9 and 10 July. As the image clearly shows, in some cities the surface of the land exceeded 45°C, including Rome, Naples, Taranto and Foggia. Along the east slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily, many temperatures were recorded as over 50°C.

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These press releases are often dressed up in jolly language – sizzling, record-breaking – but that belies the truth, which is that excess heat leads to premature deaths; and not only among older people. Climate change is becoming attritional.

More detail of the effect on humans in this BBC story; and a dramatic map showing how heat kills orders of magnitude more people than cold in Europe between 1990 and 2016.
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Revisiting the Long Boom • kottke.org

Jason Kottke:

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In 1997, Wired magazine published an article called The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980–2020 (archived). The subtitle reads: “We’re facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world. You got a problem with that?” As you might expect, the piece makes interesting reading here in the actual future, particularly the sidebar of “10 Scenario Spoilers”:

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The long boom is a scenario, one possible future. It’s built upon the convergence of many big forces and even more little pieces falling into place — all of them with a positive twist. The future of course, could turn out to be very different — particularly if a few of those big pieces go haywire. Here are 10 things that could cut short the long boom.

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The scenario spoilers that they chose are all pretty reasonable. So reasonable, in fact, that when Kottke checked in on them he found that 7 of the 10 had happened, which is part of why the Long Boom shuddered to a stop in 2007-8 (but was stuttering even before then). The ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) era wasn’t so much a boom as a running-on-fumes coda.
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Anthropic’s Claude is competing with ChatGPT. Even its builders fear AI • The New York Times

Kevin Roose:

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Just a few years ago, worrying about an A.I. uprising was considered a fringe idea, and one many experts dismissed as wildly unrealistic, given how far the technology was from human intelligence. (One A.I. researcher memorably compared worrying about killer robots to worrying about “overpopulation on Mars.”)

But A.I. panic is having a moment right now. Since ChatGPT’s splashy debut last year, tech leaders and A.I. experts have been warning that large language models — the A.I. systems that power chatbots like ChatGPT, Bard and Claude — are getting too powerful. Regulators are racing to clamp down on the industry, and hundreds of A.I. experts recently signed an open letter comparing A.I. to pandemics and nuclear weapons.

At Anthropic, the doom factor is turned up to 11.

A few months ago, after I had a scary run-in with an A.I. chatbot, the company invited me to embed inside its headquarters as it geared up to release the new version of Claude, Claude 2.

I spent weeks interviewing Anthropic executives, talking to engineers and researchers, and sitting in on meetings with product teams ahead of Claude 2’s launch. And while I initially thought I might be shown a sunny, optimistic vision of A.I.’s potential — a world where polite chatbots tutor students, make office workers more productive and help scientists cure diseases — I soon learned that rose-colored glasses weren’t Anthropic’s thing.

They were more interested in scaring me.

In a series of long, candid conversations, Anthropic employees told me about the harms they worried future A.I. systems could unleash, and some compared themselves to modern-day Robert Oppenheimers, weighing moral choices about powerful new technology that could profoundly alter the course of history.

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Everyone, of course, wants to think they’re the modern-day Oppenheimer: an iconic figure labouring to control a new way to wield power and dominate the world. Or you might just be someone at a tech company which slurps up Reddit threads and writes sonnets in the style of Kanye.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In San Francisco, a new generation of hackers is using these to disable self-driving vehicles. CC-licensed photo by Jacqui Brown on Flickr.

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

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

WhatsApp voice notes revolutionize farming in Senegal • Rest of World

Jack Thompson:

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Ousmane Sambou, a farmer in Casamance in southern Senegal, relied on what he learned from his father and village elders to make a living until 2015, when a colleague introduced him to a local WhatsApp group. In it, users sent voice notes sharing the latest farming practices and tips for navigating environmental challenges.

Sambou has since joined six other farming-related WhatsApp groups, and spends anywhere between 30 minutes and three hours a day exchanging voice notes with the other members. “We share our experiences and challenges, and learn about practices like organic fertilizers and how to fight pests without chemicals,” he told Rest of World. WhatsApp has changed the way Sambou farms, thanks to its voice notes feature.

In a country where nearly half the population cannot read or write, WhatsApp voice notes have become a vital tool for farmers to collaborate and access information in local languages to improve their produce, according to 15 WhatsApp groups that Rest of World monitored between May 29 and June 2, 2023.

Low literacy in Senegal is as much of an intrinsic linguistic issue as an educational one, according to Sophie Nick, project engineer at Com4Dev, a social engineering organization that aims to improve development through communication innovations. “Across Africa, people function orally because the languages aren’t really written,” Nick told Rest of World. Even though French is the official language of Senegal, most people in the country speak Wolof, Pulaar, or Diola. These languages are primarily oral and not written, said Nick. Nor do they have a phone keyboard adapted to the languages’ intricacies.

«

Wonderful reporting. An iconic piece of research in 2007 found that owning mobile phones made a significant different to fishermen’s income. (Revisited in 2013.)
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Twitter owes ex-employees $500 million in severance, lawsuit claims • Reuters via CNBC

»

Twitter on Wednesday was hit with a lawsuit accusing it of refusing to pay at least $500m in promised severance to thousands of employees who were laid off after Elon Musk acquired the company.

Courtney McMillian, who oversaw Twitter’s employee benefits programs as its “head of total rewards” before she was laid off in January, filed the proposed class action in San Francisco federal court.

McMillian claims that under a severance plan created by Twitter in 2019, most workers were promised two months of their base pay plus one week of pay for each full year of service if they were laid off. Senior employees such as McMillian were owed six months of base pay, according to the lawsuit.

«

Seems like the unfair dismissal/lack of payment story gets bigger and more problematic for Twitter. Though lawsuits like these tend not to move with alacrity.
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When AI overrules the nurses caring for you • WSJ

Lisa Bannon:

»

Melissa Beebe, an oncology nurse, relies on her observation skills to make life-or-death decisions. A sleepy patient with dilated pupils could have had a hemorrhagic stroke. An elderly patient with foul-smelling breath could have an abdominal obstruction.

So when an alert said her patient in the oncology unit of UC Davis Medical Center had sepsis, she was sure it was wrong. “I’ve been working with cancer patients for 15 years so I know a septic patient when I see one,” she said. “I knew this patient wasn’t septic.”

The alert correlates elevated white blood cell count with septic infection. It wouldn’t take into account that this particular patient had leukemia, which can cause similar blood counts. The algorithm, which was based on artificial intelligence, triggers the alert when it detects patterns that match previous patients with sepsis. The algorithm didn’t explain its decision.

Hospital rules require nurses to follow protocols when a patient is flagged for sepsis. While Beebe can override the AI model if she gets doctor approval, she said she faces disciplinary action if she’s wrong. So she followed orders and drew blood from the patient, even though that could expose him to infection and run up his bill. “When an algorithm says, ‘Your patient looks septic,’ I can’t know why. I just have to do it,” said Beebe, who is a representative of the California Nurses Association union at the hospital.

As she suspected, the algorithm was wrong. “I’m not demonizing technology,” she said. “But I feel moral distress when I know the right thing to do and I can’t do it.”

Artificial intelligence and other high-tech tools, though nascent in most hospitals, are raising difficult questions about who makes decisions in a crisis: the human or the machine?

«

“Could expose him to infection and run up his bill”. Ah, American healthcare, the gift that keeps on taking. (The full article should be free to read via the link.)
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Stage Manager in iPadOS 17 almost makes Apple’s iPad multitasking work • The Verge

David Pierce:

»

When Stage Manager first launched last year as part of iPadOS 16, I turned the setting off as fast as I could and never looked back. It was a half-hearted attempt to build a better multitasking system, with too many quirks and complications that all added up to more clutter and confusion on my iPad.

But this year is different. Ish. I’ve been using the iPadOS 17 beta for a while ahead of the public beta that’s available today, and I have good news: Stage Manager feels much closer to the multitasking system Apple always said it was trying to build. It’s still nowhere near perfect, and Stage Manager still interacts with apps and even other iPad features in odd and confusing ways. But for the first time, I can at least say the iPad is a half-decent multitasking machine.

The upgrade that matters is a simple one: instead of having your windows at only a couple of set sizes and orientations, you can now make most apps as tall or short and skinny or wide as you’d like, and you can place them almost anywhere on the screen. Sometimes it looks bad! That’s okay! Choice is a good thing.

As you move a window around the screen, it still sometimes subtly bounces back to the center or the edge, and there are some places — such as way into the corner — that you can’t put an app at all. But it’s close enough. I can have a bunch of small, iPhone-sized windows haphazardly strewn about my screen.

«

So it sounds like they’ve changed it so you can resize windows? Like you can on a Mac?
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San Francisco protestors are disabling autonomous vehicles using traffic cones • TechSpot

Rob Thubron:

»

Anti-car activists have come up with a novel and effective way of disabling driverless vehicles owned by Waymo and Cruise in San Francisco: placing traffic cones on their hoods. It’s the work of a group called Safe Streets Rebel, which has launched a protest dubbed “Week of Cone.”

Safe Streets Rebel’s protest comes after automatic vehicles were blamed for incidents including crashing into a bus and running over a dog. City officials in June said there have been ninety incidents involving Alphabet’s Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise vehicles since January.

Adding to Safe Streets Rebel’s anger is an upcoming ruling by the California public utilities commission that will decide whether autonomous vehicle companies can expand both the number of vehicles they operate in San Francisco and robotaxis’ hours of operation, from the middle of the night to 24/7.

A video from the group that has gained almost 5 million views on Twitter points out that AVs block buses, emergency vehicles, and everyday traffic. It also claims that they’re partnering with police to record everyone all the time without anyone’s consent. And, most importantly, they require streets designed for cars, not people or transit.

The video goes on to explain how to disable one of the vehicles by simply finding a traffic cone, which are “everywhere,” and gently placing it on the hood – but make sure the car is empty first.

«

The question I have is, how did they discover that this would disable the car – that it would make it think there was an unavoidable obstacle directly in front of them? Put like that it sounds obvious, but all great discoveries have that property.
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‘It’s absolutely guaranteed’: the best and worst case scenarios for sea level rise • The Guardian

Karen McVeigh:

»

Not only is dangerous sea level rise “absolutely guaranteed”, but it will keep rising for centuries or millennia even if the world stopped emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow, experts say.

Rising seas are one of the most severe consequences of a heating climate that are already being felt.

Since the 1880s, mean sea level globally has already risen by 16cm to 21cm (6-8in). Half of that rise has happened over the past three decades.

It is accelerating, too: the ocean rose more than twice as fast (4.62mm a year) in the most recent decade (2013-22) than it did in 1993-2002, the first decade of satellite measurements, when the rate was 2.77mm a year. Last year was a new high, according to the World Meteorological Organization. It is no coincidence that the past eight years were the warmest on record.

The numbers might seem small. Even 4.62mm is just half a centimetre a year. So why did the UN secretary general, António Guterres, warn in February that the increase in the pace of sea level rise threatens a “mass exodus” of entire populations on a biblical scale?

Part of the problem is the that even if the world stopped emitting greenhouse gases immediately – which it will not – sea levels would continue to rise. Even in the best-case scenario, it’s too late to hold back the ocean.

«

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Rising heat underground is sinking chicago ever so slightly • The New York Times

Raymond Zhong:

»

Underneath downtown Chicago’s soaring Art Deco towers, its multilevel roadways and its busy subway and rail lines, the land is sinking, and not only for the reasons you might expect.

Since the mid-20th century, the ground between the city surface and the bedrock has warmed by 5.6 degrees Fahrenheit on average, according to a new study out of Northwestern University. All that heat, which comes mostly from basements and other underground structures, has caused the layers of sand, clay and rock beneath some buildings to subside or swell by several millimeters over the decades, enough to worsen cracks and defects in walls and foundations.

“All around you, you have heat sources,” said the study’s author, Alessandro F. Rotta Loria, walking with a backpack through Millennium Station, a commuter rail terminal underneath the city’s Loop district. “These are things that people don’t see, so it’s like they don’t exist.”

It isn’t just Chicago. In big cities worldwide, humans’ burning of fossil fuels is raising the mercury at the surface. But heat is also pouring out of basements, parking garages, train tunnels, pipes, sewers and electrical cables and into the surrounding earth, a phenomenon that scientists have taken to calling “underground climate change.”

Rising underground temperatures lead to warmer subway tunnels, which can cause overheated tracks and steam-bath conditions for commuters. And, over time, they cause tiny shifts in the ground beneath buildings, which can induce structural strain, whose effects aren’t noticeable for a long time until suddenly they are.

“Today, you’re not seeing that problem,” said Asal Bidarmaghz, a senior lecturer in geotechnical engineering at the University of New South Wales in Australia. “But in the next 100 years, there is a problem. And if we just sit for the next 100 years and wait 100 years to solve it, then that would be a massive problem.”

«

(Thanks G for the link.)
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Tests to assess newborns’ health not effective for BAME babies in UK • The Guardian

Anna Bawden:

»

Tests to assess newborn babies’ health are not effective for non-white children and should be replaced, according to the NHS Race and Health Observatory.

In the UK, neonatal death rates among black and Asian newborns are much higher than for white babies.

A review of neonatal tests by Sheffield Hallam university, commissioned by the Race and Health Observatory, found that the Apgar score, used at birth to assess a newborn’s health, can give misleading scores for BAME babies, because it was developed for white European babies in 1952.

Tests involve assessing the baby’s skin tone, heart rate, reflexes, muscle tone and breathing within a few minutes of birth.

The review analysed about 200 studies and more than 80 policies about assessing newborn babies’ health. Researchers also conducted interviews with 33 healthcare professionals and 24 parents.

They found that some guidance on a healthy newborn’s skin tone still referred to terms such as “pink” “blue” “pale” or “pallor”, with no reference to alternative descriptions for black, Asian and other skin types.

«

Rather like the oxygen sensor that doesn’t function effectively on darker skin. We forget how, well, Caucasian a lot of modern medicine is.
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Global PC shipments continue to decline in the second quarter of 2023 • IDC

»

Global PC shipments declined 13.4% year over year during the second quarter of 2023 (2Q23), according to preliminary results from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. This was the sixth consecutive quarter of contraction brought on by macroeconomic headwinds, weak demand from both the consumer and commercial sectors, and a shift in IT budgets away from device purchases. Despite the poor showing, the market performed better than forecast for the quarter.

The overall weak demand has caused inventory levels to remain above normal for longer than expected. This includes finished systems at the channel level, as well as the supply chain. So far, no PC maker has been immune to the challenges presented by the market. Except for Apple and HP Inc., all the leading companies experienced double-digit declines during the quarter. But Apple benefited from a favorable year-over-year comparison as the company suffered supply issues during 2Q22 due to COVID-related shutdowns within the supply chain. Meanwhile, HP has faced an oversupply of inventory in the past year and is finally approaching normalized levels of inventory, allowing its growth rate to shine during this downturn.

«

Down from 71.1m in 2Q 2022 to 61.6m in 2Q 2023. Apple the only company (IDC thinks) that showed growth, though that’s down to having had a bad comparator quarter a year back.

I wonder how the profitability of the industry is going. Covid probably helped everything for a while. Now that’s over, though, and the winds are much colder.
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Why we don’t recommend Ring cameras • WIRED

Adrienne So:

»

When you set up a Ring camera, you are automatically enrolled in the Neighbors service. (You can go into the Ring app’s settings and toggle off the Neighbors feed integration and notifications, but the onus is on you.) Neighbors, which is also a stand-alone app, shows you an activity feed from all nearby Ring camera owners, with posts about found dogs, stolen hoses, and a Safety Report that shows how many calls for service—violent or nonviolent—were made in the past week. It also provides an outlet for public safety agencies, like local police and fire departments, to broadcast information widely.

But it also allows Ring owners to send videos they’ve captured with their Ring video doorbell cameras and outdoor security cameras to law enforcement. This is a feature unique to Ring—even Nextdoor removed its Forward to Police feature in 2020, which allowed Nextdoor users to forward their own safety posts to local law enforcement agencies. If a crime has been committed, law enforcement should obtain a warrant to access civilian video footage.

Multiple members of WIRED’s Gear team have spoken to Ring over the years about this feature. The company has been clear it’s what customers want, even though there’s no evidence that more video surveillance footage keeps communities safer. Instead, Neighbors increases the possibility of racial profiling. It makes it easier for both private citizens and law enforcement agencies to target certain groups for suspicion of crime based on skin color, ethnicity, religion, or country of origin.

…We believe this feature should not exist.

«

Not only that, but they think the hardware’s lousy.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Ben, a barrister, writes on the matter of the latest Right To Be Forgotten ruling:

“The ECtHR and the European Court of Justice (the ECJ – an organ of the EU) are two different things: the UK’s compliance with the case law of the ECtHR (which decides cases using the ECHR, not EU treaties or Regulations such as GDPR) comes from non-EU treaty obligations and the provisions of the Human Rights Act 1998. Brexit does nothing to oust the applicability of caselaw from the ECtHR.

The full decision is here should you want to see / read it. Although the Court refers to GDPR, the decision is not based upon it; it is based on the court’s interpretation of Article 10 of the ECHR.

In short, it applies here irrespective of us leaving the EU.”

Thanks Ben for the clarification. (I dislike the ruling even more now.)

A Russian submarine commander has been shot dead on a run. Did Strava show where he’d be found? CC-licensed photo by Richard Masoner \/ Cyclelicious on Flickr.

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

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

Microsoft-Activision deal moves closer as judge denies FTC injunction • CNBC

Jordan Novet:

»

A federal judge in San Francisco has denied the Federal Trade Commission’s motion for a preliminary injunction to stop Microsoft from completing its $68.7bn acquisition of video game publisher Activision Blizzard.

The deal isn’t completely in the clear, though. The FTC can now bring the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, and the two companies must find a way forward to resolve opposition from the Competition and Markets Authority in the United Kingdom.

“This Court’s responsibility in this case is narrow. It is to decide if, notwithstanding these current circumstances, the merger should be halted—perhaps even terminated—pending resolution of the FTC administrative action,” Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley wrote in her decision, published Tuesday. “For the reasons explained, the Court finds the FTC has not shown a likelihood it will prevail on its claim this particular vertical merger in this specific industry may substantially lessen competition. To the contrary, the record evidence points to more consumer access to Call of Duty and other Activision content. The motion for a preliminary injunction is therefore DENIED.”

…“We’re optimistic that today’s ruling signals a path to full regulatory approval elsewhere around the globe, and we stand ready to work with UK regulators to address any remaining concerns so our merger can quickly close,” Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick wrote in a memo to employees.

«

Only took five days of hearings, which doesn’t seem like a lot. Now all eyes are on the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, which has blocked the deal in the UK.

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Samsung was so impressed with Apple Vision Pro it delayed its new headset • Android Central

Nicholas Sutrich:

»

The Apple Vision Pro isn’t expected to make its way into the hands of consumers until sometime in early 2024; now, it looks like Android fans will have to wait even longer to give Samsung’s version a try. While it was planned to launch later this year, Samsung has reportedly delayed its XR headset until sometime close to mid-2024.

A report from SBS Biz states that Samsung sent memos to display panel partners saying to expect delays in the Samsung XR headset project which was originally announced in February 2023. According to the report, an internal memo reads, “we decided to review all internal specifications and performance, such as the design and panel of the new XR product.” For note, XR is a term used to encompass AR and VR under one umbrella.

If the report is true, Samsung’s XR headset is going to see a design change and potentially faster performance and higher-resolution displays to better compete with the $3,500 Apple Vision Pro. If that’s true, then it’s clear that Samsung is more interested in competing against Apple’s “laptop for your face” form factor rather than challenging the upcoming Quest 3 for the crown of best VR gaming console.

«

Samsung is going to make something as close as it can to Apple’s product? Shocker.
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Sarah Silverman sues OpenAI, Meta for being “industrial-strength plagiarists” • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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Last Friday, the Joseph Saveri Law Firm filed US federal class-action lawsuits on behalf of Sarah Silverman and other authors against OpenAI and Meta, accusing the companies of illegally using copyrighted material to train AI language models such as ChatGPT and LLaMA.

Other authors represented include Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, and an earlier class-action lawsuit filed by the same firm on June 28 included authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad. Each lawsuit alleges violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, unfair competition laws, and negligence.

The Joseph Saveri Law Firm is no stranger to press-friendly legal action against generative AI. In November 2022, the same firm filed suit over GitHub Copilot for alleged copyright violations. In January 2023, the same legal group repeated that formula with a class-action lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt over AI image generators. The GitHub lawsuit is currently on path to trial, according to lawyer Matthew Butterick. Procedural maneuvering in the Stable Diffusion lawsuit is still underway with no clear outcome yet.

In a press release last month, the law firm described ChatGPT and LLaMA as “industrial-strength plagiarists that violate the rights of book authors.” Authors and publishers have been reaching out to the law firm since March 2023, lawyers Joseph Saveri and Butterick wrote, because authors “are concerned” about these AI tools’ “uncanny ability to generate text similar to that found in copyrighted textual materials, including thousands of books.”

The most recent lawsuits from Silverman, Golden, and Kadrey were filed in a US district court in San Francisco. Authors have demanded jury trials in each case and are seeking permanent injunctive relief that could force Meta and OpenAI to make changes to their AI tools.

«

This has the potential to grind on and on and on. Are there any instances where a case like this has led to a change in practice of something that’s already in widespread use, as AI is going to be without a few months.
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Did Ukraine use Strava to assassinate a Russian submarine captain? • Task And Purpose

Matt White:

»

Stanislav Rzhitsky was a dedicated mountain biker and runner, who went on rides in nearby mountains and kept a regular running route through the city he lived in, Krasnodar, Russia.

He was also, according to Ukrainian defense officials, a submarine captain who ordered a notorious attack on civilians in 2022 and was shot dead by an assassin while out for a jog on Monday.

And some online sleuths think Ukrainian intelligence operatives might have set up the ambush using Rzhitsky’s account on Strava, a fitness tracker app.

One hint: an otherwise dormant account tagged Rzhitsky with a “kudos” (the Strava version of a “Like”) to one of the dead sailor’s last entries that showed a run on what appears to be his favorite route. That dormant account is named “Кирилл Буданов,” the Cyrillic spelling of Kyrylo Budanov — the name of Ukraine’s shadowy spymaster who runs the nation’s intelligence services.

Budanov, a Ukrainian major general who heads Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence within its military, is widely credited with a long string of intelligence coups before and during the Russian invasion. In 2016, two years after Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine, Budanov led a raid into Crimea that destroyed several Russian helicopters and went toe to toe in a gunfight with elite Russian FSB troops.

Since Russia’s latest invasion in February 2022, Ukrainian intelligence coups include a string of early deaths of Russian Generals, the assassination of a Russian banker and a car bomb attack in Moscow on an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Budanov’s intelligence arms have also been linked to a string of damaging fires in Russian cities and a long string of tactical victories in the field in which Ukrainian forces appeared to be one-step ahead of Russian strategies.

«

Strava considered harmful?
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Nebraska mom pleads guilty to giving abortion pills to her teen daughter • Jezebel

Susan Rinkunas:

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Jessica Burgess, 42, admitted to helping her daughter end her pregnancy in the spring of 2022—before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Madison County prosecutors claim that, in April 2022, Burgess gave abortion pills to her then-17-year-old daughter, Celeste, who gave birth to a stillborn fetus estimated to be at about 29 weeks’ gestation. The pair then burned and buried the remains with the help of another person; a 21-year-old man who only got probation.

Someone tipped off the police that Celeste had a stillbirth and buried the remains, and then cops obtained a warrant for Facebook messages between her and her mother. Facebook parent company Meta complied and provided the messages, in which the pair allegedly discussed ending Celeste’s pregnancy with pills. A friend of Celeste’s also told the police she was there when Celeste took the first abortion pill. (Most people charged for self-managed abortion were reported by health care workers or friends and acquaintances.) Celeste was charged as an adult and plead guilty in May; she faces a two-year prison sentence.

«

A lot of anger directed at Facebook for handing over the messages. Were the same people who are angry about this also angry when Facebook handed over messages that had passed between January 6 insurrectionists? You can’t have one without the other. One has to wonder who the “someone” who tipped off the police was, since they’re proximately much more responsible for all this.
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The trouble with content moderation in the Fediverse • Alex Stamos on Threads

Alex Stamos, who used to be the top security guy at Facebook:

»

Some thoughts on the challenge of @threadsapp integrating ActivityPub support while living up to their normal obligations.

1) Enforcing actor and behavior-based content moderation will be hard.

All content moderation is either against the actor, behavior, or content (ABC model). With Federation, the metadata that big platforms use to tie accounts to a single actor or detect abusive behavior at scale aren’t available (IPs, cookies, JS proof-of-life, TLS signatures, etc).

This is going to make stopping spammers, troll farms, and economically driven abusers much harder. I expect Threads will end up with some kind of soft downranking enforcement on fediverse servers with large numbers of abusive accounts, and hard enforcement when they allow things like CSAM [child sexual abuse material].

Oh, BTW, the CSAM problem in the fediverse is very real. More on that soon, but Meta’s NCMEC reports are going to start including content they get on ActivityPub and that’s going to be dramatic.

«

There’s more to the thread (on Threads). Note too that there’s now a web interface to Threads which is visible to anyone. Stamos, like Eugene Wei, is obligatory reading.
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You’re so vain, you probably think this app is about you: on Meta and Mastodon • Coyote Cartography

Watts Martin:

»

Threads is not an attack on Mastodon to subvert it for nefarious purposes.

How can I say that so confidently? Because Threads is not a Mastodon instance. It is its own self-contained, centralized social network with plans to let its users follow Mastodon accounts and vice versa.

The difference is not mere semantics. Mastodon doesn’t care what client software you use—or even what server software you use. Threads does. Threads needs you to use their app. It’s baked into the business model. Facebook and Instagram never killed their robust third-party client ecosystem the way Twitter and Reddit recently did, because they never had one. They understood their business model from the get-go.

When push comes to shove, Threads is Instagram. That’s how, as of this writing, it already has over 100M accounts created. If you have an Instagram account, you have a Threads account. If you get a Threads account, you get an Instagram account. Threads has zero-effort access to over one and a half billion users who, by definition, tolerate Meta’s privacy policies and Instagram’s monetization strategies.

By contrast, Mastodon is maybe two and a half million users on a network explicitly positioned as “social networking that’s not for sale”. The users are much less receptive to monetization strategies. And as Mastodon founder Eugen “Gargron” Rothko notes, the design of the network makes it effectively impossible for Threads to collect personally identifiable information on Mastodon users merely interacting with Threads users.

«

This is all a bit “As a Linux user, I’m going to tell you 500 ways that Windows is inferior to Linux”. Mastodon’s problem is that its users are much less receptive to monetization strategies. And it’s harder to use or get into.

I’ve been on Threads for a week; I’ve been on Mastodon for about nine months. I’ve got about a third as many users on Threads as Mastodon. (Neither compares to the raw number on Twitter, but I’ve been on that – and amplified by working at a national news organisation – for about 15 years.)
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Security researchers latest to blast UK’s Online Safety Bill as encryption risk • TechCrunch

Natasha Lomas:

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Nearly 70 IT security and privacy academics have added to the clamour of alarm over the damage the UK’s Online Safety Bill could wreak to, er, online safety unless it’s amended to ensure it does not undermine strong encryption.

Writing in an open letter, 68 UK-affiliated security and privacy researchers have warned the draft legislation poses a stark risk to essential security technologies that are routinely used to keep digital communications safe.

“As independent information security and cryptography researchers, we build technologies that keep people safe online. It is in this capacity that we see the need to stress that the safety provided by these essential technologies is now under threat in the Online Safety Bill,” the academics warn, echoing concerns already expressed by end-to-end encrypted comms services such as WhatsApp, Signal and Element — which have said they would opt to withdraw services from the market or be blocked by UK authorities rather than compromise the level of security provided to their users.

«

There’s a long summer recess coming, and the government is in trouble, and it’s going to start running out of Parliamentary time, especially if the (ruling) Tories decide to go for a spring 2024 election – winter 2023 is very unlikely, as is autumn 2023. It’s just possible that the Online Safety Bill will bounce around a bit more and eventually die with this Parliament. Well, we can hope.
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The Rise of the AI Engineer • Latent Space

“swyx”:

»

I think software engineering will spawn a new subdiscipline, specializing in applications of AI and wielding the emerging stack effectively, just as “site reliability engineer”, “devops engineer”, “data engineer” and “analytics engineer” emerged.

The emerging (and least cringe)1 version of this role seems to be: AI Engineer.

Every startup I know of has some kind of #discuss-ai Slack channel. Those channels will turn from informal groups into formal teams, as Amplitude, Replit and Notion have done. The thousands of Software Engineers working on productionizing AI APIs and OSS models, whether on company time or on nights and weekends, in corporate Slacks or indie Discords, will professionalize and converge on a title – the AI Engineer. This will likely be the highest-demand engineering job of the decade.

AI Engineers can be found everywhere from the largest companies like Microsoft and Google, to leading edge startups like Figma (via Diagram acquisition), Vercel (eg Hassan El Mghari’s viral RoomGPT) and Notion (eg Ivan Zhao and Simon Last with Notion AI) to independent hackers like Simon Willison, Pieter Levels (of Photo/InteriorAI) and Riley Goodside (now at Scale AI). They are making $300k/yr doing prompt engineering at Anthropic and $900k building software at OpenAI. They are spending free weekends hacking on ideas at AGI House and sharing tips on /r/LocalLLaMA2. What is common among them all is they are taking AI advancements and shaping them into real products used by millions, virtually overnight.

Not a single PhD in sight. When it comes to shipping AI products, you want engineers, not researchers.

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In cricket, where and when should a batsman look as the bowler runs up and then releases the ball? CC-licensed photo by WeLiveCricket.com on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Not four or six. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

How to blow up a timeline • Remains of the Day

Eugene Wei:

»

This past year, for the first time, I could see the end of the road for Twitter. Not in an abstract way; I felt its decline. Don’t misunderstand me; Twitter will persist in a deteriorated state, perhaps indefinitely. However, it’s already a pale shadow of what it was at its peak. The cool kids are no longer sitting over in bottle service knocking out banger tweets. Instead, the timeline is filled with more and more strangers the bouncer let in to shill their tweetstorms, many of them Twitter Verified accounts who paid the grand fee of $8 a month for the privilege. In the past year, so many random meetings I have with one-time Twitter junkies begin with a long sigh and then a question that is more lamentation than anything else: “How did Twitter get so bad?”

It’s sad, but it’s also a fascinating case study. The internet is still so young that it’s still momentous to see a social network of some scale and lifespan suddenly lose its vitality. The regime change to Elon and his brain trust and the drastic changes they’ve made constitute a natural experiment we don’t see often. Usually, social networks are killed off by something exogenous, usually another, newer social network. Twitter went out and bought Chekhov’s gun in the first act and use it to shoot itself in the foot in the third act. Zuckerberg can now extend his quip about Twitter being a clown car that fell into a gold mine.

«

Absolutely anything that Wei writes is obligatory reading. Read all this post. He feels things that others do, but then he puts it into words and you say “oh, that’s what I’ve been feeling”.
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What does a batsman see? • Cricket Monthly

SB Tang:

»

[Australian Test batman Greg] Chappell realised that he had three ascending levels of mental concentration: awareness, fine focus and fierce focus. In order to conserve his finite quantum of mental energy, he would have to use fierce focus as little as possible, so that it was always available when he really needed it. When he walked out to bat, his concentration would be set at its lowest, power-saving level: awareness. He would mark his guard and look around the field, methodically counting all ten fielders until his gaze reached the face of the bowler standing at the top of his mark.

At that point, he would increase his level of concentration to fine focus. As the bowler ran in, he would gently and rhythmically tap his bat on the ground, keeping his central vision on the bowler’s face and his peripheral vision on the bowler’s body. He believed that a bowler’s facial expression and the bodily movements in his run-up and load-up offered the batsman valuable predictive clues as to what ball would be bowled. He would not look at the ball in the bowler’s hand as he ran in.

As the bowler jumped into his delivery stride, he would switch up his concentration to its maximum level – fierce focus – and shift his central vision the short distance from the bowler’s face to the window just above and next to his head from where he would release the ball. Once the ball appeared in that window, Chappell would watch the ball itself for the first time. He could see everything. He could see the seam of the ball and the shiny and rough side of the ball, even when he was facing a genuine fast bowler. Against spinners, he could see the ball spinning in the air as it travelled towards him. In the unlikely event that he failed to pick what delivery it was out of the hand, he could simply pick it in the air.

“There weren’t too many balls that I faced that I was unsure about,” Chappell tells the Cricket Monthly matter-of-factly. Because he was able to so quickly decipher where a ball was going to be, he was able to confidently move into position early to, if at all possible, play an attacking, run-scoring shot.

«

Fascinating account of how Chappell turned his mediocre batting around. If you’ve read Tim Gallwey’s book The Inner Game Of Tennis you’ll recognise a lot of what he then says.
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CURSED HEIDI: AI-generated movie trailer • YouTube

I watched this, so I think you should. It’s like something generated by a field of magic mushrooms.
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Apple purges predatory lending apps in India following scrutiny • TechCrunch

Manish Singh:

»

Apple removed several predatory lending apps from the App Store in India this week, days after users and media questioned the legitimacy of those services.

Pocket Kash, White Kash, Golden Kash and OK Rupee are among the apps that Apple pulled from the store this week. The apps offered fast-track lending to consumers in India, climbing to the top 20 of the finance list on the App Store in recent weeks. But they also levied outrageously superfluous charges, according to hundreds of user reviews.

The lenders also employed downright unethical tactics to get the borrowers to pay back.

“I borrowed an amount in a helpless situation and […] a day before repayment due date I got some messages with my pic and my contacts in my phone saying that repay your loan otherwise they will inform our contacts that you r not paying loan,” a user review from last month said.

The apps — whose developers had strange names and suspicious websites — were littered with hundreds of similar reviews, some sharing even more alarming threats that they allegedly received from the lenders.

«

Seems it was particularly the media making a noise to Apple which led to this.
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AI-text detection tools are really easy to fool • MIT Technology Review

Rhiannon Williams:

»

Within weeks of ChatGPT’s launch, there were fears that students would be using the chatbot to spin up passable essays in seconds. In response to those fears, startups started making products that promise to spot whether text was written by a human or a machine.

The problem is that it’s relatively simple to trick these tools and avoid detection, according to new research that has not yet been peer reviewed.

Debora Weber-Wulff, a professor of media and computing at the University of Applied Sciences, HTW Berlin, worked with a group of researchers from a variety of universities to assess the ability of 14 tools, including Turnitin, GPT Zero, and Compilatio, to detect text written by OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Most of these tools work by looking for hallmarks of AI-generated text, including repetition, and then calculating the likelihood that the text was generated by AI. But the team found that all those tested struggled to pick up ChatGPT-generated text that had been slightly rearranged by humans and obfuscated by a paraphrasing tool, suggesting that all students need to do is slightly adapt the essays the AI generates to get past the detectors.

“These tools don’t work,” says Weber-Wulff. “They don’t do what they say they do. They’re not detectors of AI.”

«

That noise you heard was the starting gun being fired on the arms race between the chatbots and the wannabe chatbot detectors. Chatbots well in the lead so far.
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This is how the Netflix generation will watch F1 in the future • Forbes

Barry Collins:

»

Formula 1 fans may one day be able to watch races via an augmented reality headset, accessing live data feeds that will “make everybody a race engineer.”

Speaking ahead of the weekend’s British Grand Prix, Rob Smedley—the former Ferrari race engineer and now an F1 consultant—told me in a video interview that the sport is looking at new ways to engage the younger generation of fans that have flooded to F1 in recent years on the back of Netflix’s Drive to Survive series.

Smedley is part of the team that has delivered F1 Insights powered by AWS, a series of innovations that rely on cloud computing to deliver real-time data such as predicted pit-stop strategies or forecasts of forthcoming track battles, which are relayed live by race broadcasters.

Soon, Smedley believes that viewers wearing augmented reality headsets will be able to choose which data and video feeds they want to see, creating a virtual dashboard similar to that used by team race engineers.

Talking of Apple’s recently announced Vision Pro headset, Smedley described it as “really cool technology because you’re still in the room with everybody, but you’ve got this 4K screen in front of you. That, for me, is the future of sports watching.”

F1 and AWS are currently working on what Smedley described as “the second screen”, where a user-configurable dashboard of data is presented to viewers. That will intially be delivered via tablet devices that users can access alongside live race feeds, but Smedley said the project could eventually find its way into AR headsets such as Apple’s Vision Pro.

«

Sports is going to be such a huge thing for AR headsets once you can get the feedthrough. It’s odd, really, that Facebook/Meta hasn’t tried to focus more on it.
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European court extends ‘right to be forgotten’ to news websites • Press Gazette

Charlotte Tobitt:

»

The European Court of Human Rights has been accused of approving the “rewriting of history” by backing the extension of the “right to be forgotten” from search engines to cover news websites more broadly.

The case, involving French-language Belgian newspaper Le Soir, last year saw an intervention from UK publishers Times Newspapers and Guardian News and Media alongside press freedom organisations as they argued forcing news websites to remove archive material, an “essential component of modern-day newsgathering and reporting”, would not be a “proportionate restriction on freedom of expression”.

However the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights, of which the UK is still a participating country despite Brexit, has now ruled in favour of a driver who had wanted to be anonymised in reporting of a deadly car crash for which he was responsible.

The original article was written in 1994 but went online in 2008 when Le Soir created an online version of its archives dating back to 1989. The driver, a doctor, first wrote to the newspaper’s owner asking for the article to be removed, or for him to at least be made anonymous, in 2010 – but his request was refused.

‘Right to be forgotten’ judge says decision does not ‘sacrifice press freedom’
Two years ago the ECHR rejected a free speech complaint from Le Soir publisher Patrick Hurbain who had argued that a Belgian court’s order to remove the name breached his rights under Article 10 (freedom of expression) of the European Convention on Human Rights, even when balanced with the right to be forgotten under Article 8 (privacy).

«

I backed the original RTBF because the information still existed in newspaper and other archives. This, though, is wrong: it’s memory-holing the truth, and only the rich will really be able to afford to hassle the news organisations to make them expunge this. I rarely say this, but: the judges have got this completely wrong, and it’s good not to be in the EU so that this doesn’t apply to British publishers.
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“We have built a giant treadmill that we can’t get off”: sci-fi prophet Ted Chiang on how to best think about about AI • Vanity Fair

Delia Cai talks to Chiang:

»

DC: How plugged in are you to the daily churn of tech news? I’m curious if you keep up with things like Marc Andreessen’s blog post about AI.

Ted Chiang: I am not, although I guess I’ll say I’m not super interested in what Marc Andreessen has to say. In general, I can’t say that I really keep up in any systematic fashion. But nowadays, you almost have to make a deliberate effort to avoid hearing about AI.

DC: Would you consider yourself to be an early adopter?

TC: Not of most technologies. I feel like being an early adopter requires a real commitment to constantly getting used to a new UI. I’m interested to see what is happening in technology, but in terms of my day-to-day work, I’m not looking for new software unless there’s an actual problem that I’m having. I wish I could still use a much older version of Word than I have to.

DC: How did your relationship with The New Yorker come about? The first couple of things you wrote for them back in 2016 and 2017 weren’t about tech per se. Who put it together that you should do those AI explainers?

TC: The first thing I wrote was the one about Chinese characters—they approached me, and I was totally flabbergasted. You know, I come from a science fiction background, and within the science fiction community, there’s a very clear border between science fiction and the literary establishment. It boggled my mind that anyone at The New Yorker had even heard of me.

There’s a piece from 2021, “Why Computers Won’t Make Themselves Smarter”, that is about some thoughts I had for a long time about the whole discourse around singularity and the explosion in machine intelligence, which I’m super, super skeptical of.. Earlier this year, I’d been reading about ChatGPT, trying to make sense of it for my own purposes, and around that time, [my editor] emailed me and said, “Do you have any thoughts on ChatGPT?” I was like, coincidentally, I do!

«

Chiang’s always worth reading. His short stories are fantastic.
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Meta’s new Threads app raises potential privacy concerns over data sharing • Fox Business

Kelly O’Grady:

»

Meta’s new “Twitter killer” app Threads is the latest social media platform to burst onto the scene and is taking the industry by storm, with over 100 million users signing up less than a week after it launched.

But experts are warning of potential privacy concerns, particularly in the way Meta handles the data it collects from users when they subscribe to the new service. This includes sharing it with other platforms, including ones that may not have as strict data privacy protections, or that could even have servers in China.

Buried in the terms of service is a pledge to soon make Threads part of the “fediverse” – a decentralized network of servers that allows member social networks, like Mastodon, to communicate with each other. For example, a Threads user would be able to interact with a Mastodon user seamlessly, despite being on different platforms.

The upside is an online network that can be used without ever creating a profile or sharing personal data. The downside is Threads users with a public profile have already signed away that access.

Once the app is a part of the fediverse, Meta says: “Please be aware that you are directing us to deliver your information to services not controlled by Meta… Information sent to Third Party Services is no longer in Meta’s control and is subject to the terms and policies of those Third Party Services.”

«

Mastodon users: haha! Look, you sheeple, all your data might be in CHINA because it’s being spread around by Meta, because it’s in the fediverse, just like… Mastodon?

And – 100 million signups. That’s astonishing. It hasn’t been a week yet.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Is the condemnation of Russian (and Belarusian) tennis players such as Victoria Azarenka justified? CC-licensed photo by Su–MaySu–May on Flickr.

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

There was another post 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:

»

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.”

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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

»

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:

»

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…

«

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:

»

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.”

«

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:

»

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.

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A confluence of events, including the El Niño ocean current, are warming Earth dramatically. CC-licensed photo by NOAA ESRL 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. Currently. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads • Semafor

Max Tani:

»

a lawyer for Twitter, Alex Spiro, sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg accusing the company of engaging in “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”

“Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” Spiro wrote in a letter obtained exclusively by Semafor. “Twitter reserves all rights, including, but not limited to, the right to seek both civil remedies and injunctive relief without further notice to prevent any further retention, disclosure, or use of its intellectual property by Meta.”

Spiro accused Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.”

He also alleged that Meta assigned those employees to develop “Meta’s copycat ‘Threads’ app with the specific intent that they use Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta’s competing app, in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter.”

«

Absolutely hilarious. Twitter fired a ton of employees and acts surprised that the competent ones got hired somewhere? Is Musk trying to make it impossible for them to get work? Meta has been running social networks for a little while now, and if Twitter really wants to start something it might find Meta holding a lot of nasty patents that cover exactly what it does.

Meanwhile, Meta says it had more than 30 million signups within less than 24 hours, though it’s not yet available in Europe due to GDPR considerations.
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Twitter refuses to pay for arbitration it forced on 891 ex-employees, suit says • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Twitter started this year with a legal victory that forced thousands of laid-off employees into arbitration. These employees had been suing over grievances like unpaid severance and discrimination, and the win spared Twitter from facing a class-action lawsuit. Now, hundreds of ex-employees have sued again, this time alleging in a class-action claim that “Twitter has refused to engage in arbitration—despite having compelled employees to arbitrate their claims.”

According to the complaint, filed Monday in a San Francisco federal court, Twitter won’t come to the table simply because the company doesn’t want to pay for arbitration. Its arbitration agreements require ex-employees to pay a nominal filing fee to launch claims with the Judicial Arbitration and Mediation Services (JAMS), but after that, Twitter has to pay “all other arbitration fees.”

Faced with paying perhaps millions in fees for approximately 2,000 laid-off employees, Twitter allegedly sent a letter to JAMS in early June, requesting that the fees instead be split between parties.

However, granting that request would be a breach of JAMS’s rules. Thus, JAMS responded by telling Twitter that it would not proceed with any arbitration that did not meet JAMS’s standards, the complaint said. After that, Twitter allegedly told JAMS that it “would refuse to proceed with arbitrations in most states outside California,” attaching “a list of 891 arbitrations in which it was refusing to proceed.”

«

It’s just astonishingly miserly. When you treat the people you used to employ like this, how would you expect the people you want to employ, and the people you do employ, to react? What message does it send to them?
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Instagram Threads: why Meta is competing with Twitter • The Verge

Alex Heath:

»

Threads is strikingly similar to Twitter in key ways. The app’s main feed shows posts (or, as Mosseri calls them, “threads”) from accounts you follow, along with accounts recommended by Instagram’s algorithm. You can repost something with your own commentary, and replies are featured prominently in the main feed. There is no feed of only people you follow, though that could be added later.

Posts on Threads can be up to 500 characters long and include photos or videos that are up to five minutes long. There are no ads, at least for now — adding those will be a “champagne problem” if Threads achieves enough scale, per Mosseri.

There also isn’t a paid verification scheme that unlocks additional functionality, though Instagram’s blue checks will port over to Threads accounts. With some exceptions for extreme cases like the sharing of child exploitation imagery, moderation actions Meta takes against a Threads account will not impact its associated Instagram account, according to internal documents I’ve seen.

Thanks to the deep ties between Threads and Instagram, you can quickly share posts from Threads to your Instagram story or feed. There’s also the ability to share links to Threads posts in other apps, which Mosseri predicts will be helpful as “we try to bootstrap it out from nothing.”

Meta has been busy this week onboarding a bunch of celebrities from the worlds of Hollywood, music, professional sports, business, and the like to Threads ahead of its public release. Celebs already spotted on the app include Karlie Kloss, Tony Robbins, Dana White, Gordon Ramsay, Ellie Goulding, Jack Black, Russell Wilson, and the Brazilian pop star Anitta.

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Very clever, and hustled along by Musk screwing up Twitter over the weekend.
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Smuggler caught with 420 M.2 SSDs strapped to his stomach • Tom’s Hardware

Zhiye Liu:

»

In the latest instalment of hardware smuggling busts by Chinese customs, the authorities have arrested a hardware trafficker who tried to sneak 420 M.2 SSDs into China. Customs estimated the seized SSDs are worth around HK$258,000 or $32,984.94. Perhaps some of those drives are among the best SSDs.

Chinese news outlet HKEPC first spotted the story and reported that the smuggler tried to slip the illicit goods from Macau to Zhuhai through the Gongbei Port. Given the proximity between Macau and Zhuhai, the passage is one of the most popular trafficking routes for mules. It wasn’t long ago that a woman hid more than 200 Alder Lake chips inside her fake silicone belly, or another man tried to stroll into China with 160 Intel processors taped to his body.

Normally, traffickers try to smuggle high-value goods, such as processors or graphics cards. A recent attempt to conceal 70 graphics cards among 617 pounds of live lobster comes to mind. On the contrary,  this SSD smuggler opted to sneak in lower-value hardware instead. It isn’t the first time we’ve seen M.2 SSDs transported into China. A recent bust from this year detained a man that hid 84 SSDs inside his scooter. M.2 SSDs still contain metallic parts, so it’s close to impossible to get past metal detectors without raising the alarm with the metal detectors.

Instead of hiding the SSDs inside a package, the perpetrator opted to tape the drives around his body for a bigger haul.

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They do it to avoid the customs duty, and one has to suppose that the penalties are less dramatic than smuggling drugs. Although why would you strap them around your stomach, given that they’re metal and would set off metal detectors?
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Heat records fall around the globe as Earth warms, fast • The New York Times

Brad Plumer and Elena Shao:

»

The past three days were quite likely the hottest in Earth’s modern history, scientists said on Thursday, as an astonishing surge of heat across the globe continued to shatter temperature records from North America to Antarctica.

The spike comes as forecasters warn that the Earth could be entering a multiyear period of exceptional warmth driven by two main factors: continued emissions of heat-trapping gases, mainly caused by humans burning oil, gas and coal; and the return of El Niño, a cyclical weather pattern.

Already, the surge has been striking. The planet just experienced its warmest June ever recorded, researchers said, with deadly heat waves scorching Texas, Mexico and India. Off the coasts of Antarctica, sea ice levels this year have plummeted to record lows.

And in the North Atlantic, the ocean has been off-the-charts hot. Surface temperatures in May were 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.6 degrees Celsius, warmer than typical for this time of year, breaking previous records by an unusually large margin.

The sharp jump in temperatures has unsettled even those scientists who have been tracking climate change.

“It’s so far out of line of what’s been observed that it’s hard to wrap your head around,” said Brian McNoldy, a senior research scientist at the University of Miami. “It doesn’t seem real.”

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Lessons learned from first genetically-modified pig heart into human patient • ScienceDaily

»

the research team performed extensive testing on the limited available tissues in the patient. They carefully mapped out the sequence of events that led to the heart failure demonstrating that the heart functioned well on imaging tests like echocardiography until day 47 after surgery.

The new study [published in The Lancet] confirms that no signs of acute rejection occurred during the first several weeks after the transplant. Likely, several overlapping factors led to heart failure in Mr. Bennett, including his poor state of health prior to the transplant that led him to become severely immunocompromised. This limited the use of an effective anti-rejection regimen used in preclinical studies for xenotransplantation. As a result, the researchers found, the patient was likely more vulnerable to rejection of the organ from antibodies made by the immune system. The researchers found indirect evidence of antibody-mediated rejection based on histology, immunohistochemical staining and single cell RNA analysis.

The use of an intravenous immunoglobulin, IVIG, a drug that contains antibodies, may also have contributed to damage to the heart muscle cells. It was given to the patient twice during the second month after the transplant to help prevent infection, likely also triggering an anti-pig immune response. The research team found evidence of immunoglobulin antibodies targeting the pig vascular endothelium layer of the heart.

Lastly, the new study investigated the presence of a latent virus, called porcine cytomegalovirus (PCMV), in the pig heart, which may have contributed to the dysfunction of the transplant. Activation of the virus may have occurred after the patient’s anti-viral treatment regimen was reduced to address other health issues. This may have initiated an inflammatory response causing cell damage. However, there is no evidence that the virus infected the patient or spread to organs beyond the heart.

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Just in case you’d forgotten: this dates back to January 2022, when David Bennett received a pig heart transplant. He died within two months. There hasn’t been another as far as I can tell.
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The Broke Ape Yacht Crash: lessons for Justin Bieber and other NFT collectors • Coindesk

David Morris:

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Bitter finger-pointing and recrimination are swirling among and around investors in Bored Ape Yacht Club, the “profile pic” (PFP) NFT collection that skyrocketed to immense values in early 2022. The market for Apes has been brutally hammered by a lull in NFT interest, with floor prices – the lowest price for which an Ape can be purchased – declining to 27.4 ETH, from a high of 153.7 ETH in April of 2022.

Floor price is a proxy for the overall value of an NFT collection, so that 82% floor decline can translate into even bigger drops in the value of individual Bored Apes and related assets. In one notable example, Justin Bieber owns an Ape that was supposedly worth $1.3m at one point, and now the highest bid for it is just over $58,000 – a 95% decline.

It should be noted that early Ape holders are still in decent shape, and Bored Apes are still very highly valued and traded relative to other NFT collections. They were also far from the only crypto-asset to experience a wild runup and crash over the last few years. And they are slumping roughly in line with the broader NFT market, which by some measures is at its lowest point in two years.

«

A “lull” in NFT interest? More like a complete becalming, though a 95% decline is still, to my mind, about 5% less than it should be. The uselessness of NFTs has been made crystal clear; and even those who believe in them keep finding themselves being hacked. It’s dead, Jim.
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Amazon’s iRobot deal in EU antitrust crosshairs • Reuters

Foo Yun Chee:

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Amazon’s $1.7bn acquisition of robot vacuum cleaner maker iRobot may reduce competition and strengthen Amazon’s position as online marketplace provider, EU antitrust regulators warned on Thursday.

The European Commission opened a full-scale investigation and will decide by November 15 whether to clear or block the deal.

“We continue to work through the process with the European Commission and are focused on addressing its questions and any identified concerns at this stage,” an Amazon spokesperson told Reuters.

Antitrust enforcers around the world have stepped up scrutiny of Big Tech acquiring smaller rivals, concerned about the accumulation of troves of data by a few companies, and big players leveraging their dominance into new markets.

The acquisition announced in August last year would add iRobot’s Roomba robot vacuum to Amazon’s portfolio of smart devices, which include the Alexa voice assistant, smart thermostats, security devices and wall-mounted smart displays.

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Noticeable how much more closely big tech acquisitions are being examined now. It’s taken the EU a hell of a long time to decide to investigate, though.
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As businesses clamour for workplace AI, tech companies rush to provide it • The New York Times

Yiwen Lu:

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For the most part, tech companies are now rolling out four kinds of generative A.I. products for businesses: features and services that generate code for software engineers, create new content such as sales emails and product descriptions for marketing teams, search company data to answer employee questions, and summarize meeting notes and lengthy documents.

“It is going to be a tool that is used by people to accomplish what they are already doing,” said Bern Elliot, a vice president and analyst at the I.T. research and consulting firm Gartner.

But using generative A.I. in workplaces has risks. Chatbots can produce inaccuracies and misinformation, provide inappropriate responses and leak data. A.I. remains largely unregulated.
In response to these issues, tech companies have taken some steps. To prevent data leakage and to enhance security, some have engineered generative A.I. products so they do not keep a customer’s data.

When Salesforce last month introduced AI Cloud, a service with nine generative A.I.-powered products for businesses, the company included a “trust layer” to help mask sensitive corporate information to stop leaks and promised that what users typed into these products would not be used to retrain the underlying A.I. model.

Similarly, Oracle said that customer data would be kept in a secure environment while training its A.I. model and added that it would not be able to see the information.

Salesforce offers AI Cloud starting at $360,000 annually, with the cost rising depending on the amount of usage. Microsoft charges for Azure OpenAI Service based on the version of OpenAI technology that a customer chooses, as well as the amount of usage.

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$360k as the starting price? Yikes. It really is a goldrush out there.
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Amazon Studios: big swings hampered by confusion and frustration • The Hollywood Reporter

Kim Masters:

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When it comes to movies, where Amazon’s footprint is expanding following the $8.5nb acquisition of MGM a year ago, a veteran producer says that, in recent years, “there has been no sense of what the philosophy is.”

On the series side, numerous sources say they cannot discern what kind of material Salke and head of television Vernon Sanders want to make. A showrunner with ample experience at the studio says, “There’s no vision for what an Amazon Prime show is. You can’t say, ‘They stand for this kind of storytelling.’ It’s completely random what they make and how they make it.” Another showrunner with multiple series at Amazon finds it baffling that the streamer hasn’t had more success: Amazon has “more money than God,” this person says. “If they wanted to produce unbelievable television, they certainly have the resources to do it.”

But Salke believes the studio’s approach fits Amazon’s broad remit. “I have never been one to say [to the creative community] ‘We need five action franchise shows and three workplace situation comedies.’ That’s the kiss of death,” she says. “You don’t reverse-engineer true creative vision. We are programming for over 250 million households across the entire globe. We would say we have a big, broad audience, and we are looking for content that entertains the four quadrants.” (That is, male and female, under 35 and over 35).

The question that makes many in Hollywood nervous is whether the Amazon Studios overlords in Seattle believe they are getting enough bang for their megabucks. The last thing the industry wants at a time of belt-tightening is a cutback in spending from a deep-pocketed buyer. According to Salke, that concern is misguided. “The proof exists that the giant tentpole shows are driving people to subscribe to Prime,” she says. “Do we pressure ourselves to be more disciplined, more strategic? Of course. We consistently examine if we’re producing the right amount of content at the right value to drive the most engagement across our service.”

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It is a puzzle: now Amazon has MGM, what’s its plan for it? Personally, I watch Prime Video principally for the sport. Citadel, the incredibly expensive thriller, just couldn’t sustain interest – for me and apparently lots of people.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Recursion is the key to human consciousness – but what would the first experience of it have been like? CC-licensed photo by John Fowler on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Don’t get the needle. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The link rot spreads: GIF-hosting site Gfycat shutting down Sept. 1 • Ars Technica

Kevin Purdy:

»

The Internet continues to get a bit more fragmented and less accessible every week. Within the past seven days, Reddit finished its purge of third-party clients, Twitter required accounts to view tweets (temporarily or not), and Google News started pulling news articles from its Canadian results [false: Google says it will do that when the law comes into effect, at the end of the year – Overspill Ed].

Now there’s one more to add: Gfycat, a place where users uploaded, created, and distributed GIFs of all sorts, is shutting down as of September 1, according to a message on its homepage.

Users of the Snap-owned service are asked to “Please save or delete your Gfycat content.” “After September 1, 2023, all Gfycat content and data will be deleted from gfycat.com.”

Gfycat rose as a service during a period where, like Imgur, it was easier to use than any native tools provided by content sites like Facebook or Reddit. As CEO and co-founder Richard Rabbat told TechCrunch in 2016, after raising $10m from investors, GIFs were “hard to make, slow to upload, and when you shared them, the quality wasn’t very good.” Gfycat created looped, linked Webm videos that, while compressed, retained an HD quality to them. They were easier to share than actual GIF-format files and offered an API for other sites to tap in.

“I see Gfycat as the ultimate platform for all short-form content, the way that YouTube is the platform for longer videos and Twitter is the platform for text-based news and media discussions,” VC funder Ernestine Fu told TechCrunch in 2016, long before TikTok, YouTube shorts, and Elon Musk’s Twitter ownership came to pass.

Signs of trouble at Gfycat popped up in May when an expired certificate led to cascading downtimes and inaccessibility for up to five days.

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The blocking of Facebook/Meta’s acquisition of Giphy looks more and more like it will just hasten the death of these add-on services. How can they cover their server (and staff) costs, let alone make a profit? Everything’s splintering. And that’s before the launch of Threads, which went live while this post was fermenting. (Yes, I’m there.)
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Paying to use a site that you can’t use anymore • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

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I’ve seen a bunch of debates about Who Will Win The Twitter Wars. The argument against Threads becoming the new Twitter is what tech analyst Faine Greenwood calls “Terrible Uncle Problem”. Greenwood recently skeeted, “Meta ensuring Threads integrates with Facebook and Instagram means your weird older relatives will easily be able to find you there. A lot of people do NOT want that.” It’s certainly possible, but if it’s really going to come down to Threads or Bluesky, my money is on Threads. Though I doubt either will really capture what Twitter was useful for.

I think hardcore Twitter users have rose-colored glasses about the site’s coolness. The reason for its success, if you can argue that it was ever really successful, wasn’t that it was cooler than Facebook. It was because of its proximity to power. The reason it was so popular with activists, extremists, journalists, and shitposters was because what you posted there could actually affect culture. The thing that ties together pretty much everything that’s happened on Twitter since it launched in 2006 was the possibility that those who were not in power (or wanted more) could influence those who were. And I don’t think it’s an accident that a deranged billionaire broke that, nor do I think it’s accident that we’re suddenly being offered smaller, insular platforms or an offshoot of a Meta app as replacements. The folks in charge clearly don’t want that to happen again.

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Maybe a teensy bit into the paranoia, but the first part of the second paragraph there is surely right.
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Deja-you, the recursive construction of self • Vectors of Mind

“Andrew”, writing about how consciousness would have evolved – as a recursive process in the primitive brain:

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To be self-aware, the self must be aware of itself. Its own internal processes take itself as input. This is recursion.

I think of it like this. Imagine a primordial self, unable to perceive itself. Written as a function: self(perceptions). This would have been your own model of your own mind or interests. As input, it would receive all that you perceive. Introspection would necessarily produce recursion; the self would receive itself as input: self(self, perceptions).

From the example of RNNs [recursive neural networks], imagine how this recursion could change our perception and experience of time. It would be a new way to represent this dimension for free, a radical transformation to living in a particular moment.

It is also fruitful to imagine the rocky beginning of this function. Recursive programs are prone to blow up, and this one is running in your head. Take, for example, the most simple f(x) = x+1. If you recursively feed the output as input each time step, that function will grow to infinity. It’s doubtful that the chain of consciousness was initially unbroken or pleasant. It would have begun in fits and bursts, the self rearing up for a moment only to be smothered by its own exponential increase. Neurons can only handle so much excitement. The function would need some sort of control system to stabilize recursion and refrain from hitting biological limits. There must have been more split personalities and inner voices with whom we did not identify. Apart from hallucinations, it also seems likely that exploding recursion could produce other side effects like excruciating headaches. Evolving recursion would have broken a few eggs.

There are reasons to believe that the self is recursive even when we are not peering inward. That is the position of the paper Consciousness as recursive, spatiotemporal self-location and Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop. However, there is much debate on this point.

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I found this post mindblowing (almost literally): the self reflecting on the creation of the self in a self which wasn’t aware of itself. He also wrote a post positing that women gained consciousness before men – a possible source for the Garden of Eden story.
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An Indian politician blamed AI for alleged leaked audio. So we tested it • Rest of World

Nilesh Christopher:

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A political controversy rocked the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu in April when K. Annamalai, state head of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — India’s ruling party — released a controversial audio recording of Palanivel Thiagarajan, a lawmaker from the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) that is currently in power in the state.

In the 26-second low-quality audio tape, Thiagarajan, who was the finance minister of Tamil Nadu at the time, could allegedly be heard accusing his own party members of illegally amassing $3.6 billion. Thiagarajan vehemently denied the veracity of the recording, calling it “fabricated” and “machine-generated.”

“NEVER trust an Audio clip without an attributable source,” Thiagarajan tweeted on April 22. He argued that it’s now easy to fabricate voices, citing a news clip on the infamous AI-generated songs of Drake and The Weeknd.

On April 25, Annamalai released a second clip — 56 seconds long, and with much clearer audio — where Thiagarajan allegedly spoke disparagingly of his own party and praised the BJP. This time, Thiagarajan called it a desperate attempt by a “blackmail gang” to create a political rift within his own party, and said no one had claimed ownership of the source of the clips.

…While experts have rattled off multiple alarming scenarios on how AI can play out in politics, in India, this could be the first high-profile case of the “liar’s dividend” — the ability of the powerful to claim plausible deniability of unflattering footage. Deepfake experts told Rest of World the rise of AI is being used as a ruse to sow information uncertainty in a new political era.

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First clip: maybe fake. Second: real. But it will get harder to tell, of course.
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Generative AI in games will create a copyright crisis • WIRED

Will Bedingfield:

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AI Dungeon, a text-based fantasy simulation that runs on OpenAI’s GPT-3, has been churning out weird tales since May 2019. Reminiscent of early text adventure games like Colossal Cave Adventure, you get to choose from a roster of formulaic settings—fantasy, mystery, apocalyptic, cyberpunk, zombies—before picking a character class and name, and generating a story.

Here was mine: “You are Mr. Magoo, a survivor trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world by scavenging among the ruins of what is left. You have a backpack and a canteen. You haven’t eaten in two days, so you’re desperately searching for food.” So began Magoo’s 300-ish-word tale of woe in which, “driven half-mad” by starvation, he happens upon “a man dressed in white.” (Jesus? Gordon Ramsay?) Offering him a greeting kiss, Magoo is stabbed in the neck.

As lame as this story is, it hints at a knotty copyright issue the games industry is only just beginning to unravel. I’ve created a story using my imagination—but to do that I’ve used an AI helper. So who wrote the tale? And who gets paid for the work?

AI Dungeon was created by Nick Walton, a former researcher at a deep learning lab at Brigham Young University in Utah who is now the CEO of Latitude, a company that bills itself as “the future of AI-generated games.” AI Dungeon is certainly not a mainstream title, though it has still attracted millions of players. As Magoo’s tale shows, the player propels the story with action, dialog, and descriptions; AI Dungeon reacts with text, like a dungeon master—or a kind of fantasy improv.

…Laws in both the US and the UK stipulate that, when it comes to copyright, only humans can claim authorship. So for a game like AI Dungeon, where the platform allows a player to, essentially, “write” a narrative with the help of a chatbot, claims of ownership can get murky: who owns the output? The company that developed the AI, or the user?

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How about: the one who can reliably reproduce it? Which is usually going to be the company.

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Renewable energy is saving Texas from brutal heat • The Washington Post

Catherine Rampell:

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this summer, like last summer, renewables have been the heroes of the story — yet they remain curiously vilified by politicians in the Lone Star State.

In recent years, renewable energy has been ramping up across Texas. The state has rapidly increased solar capacity, for instance, enabling as much as 16,800 megawatts of solar power to be produced on the grid as of the end of May. That’s roughly six times the capacity that existed in 2019 (about 2,600 megawatts), according to data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s grid operator.

This increase — coupled with greater wind and storage development — is what has allowed Texans to beat the heat and keep their electricity bills down.

After all, several thermal-energy plants in the state went offline in recent weeks, as coal, natural gas and nuclear facilities appeared to buckle under extreme temperatures and shrinking maintenance windows. Additional solar and wind generation more than made up the difference. Renewables overall have lately represented roughly 35% to 40% of power generation at peak, compared with about 30% last year.

The result is not only that renewables have enabled Texas residents to keep the lights and air conditioning on during this hellish heat. They probably also saved Texans “billions of dollars” last week alone by keeping prices from spiking, says Doug Lewin, an Austin-based energy consultant and author of the Texas Energy and Power Newsletter.

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And yet, as she points out, the legislators there are trying to introduce bills that’ll stop renewables investment. Insane.
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How human translators are coping with competition from powerful AI • Slow Boring

Timothy B Lee:

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Marc Eybert-Guillon started his career as a translator in 2017. In 2020, he founded From the Void, a firm that helps video game makers localize their games for foreign markets.

“It’s that meme of the guy with the noose around his neck,” Eybert-Guillon told me. The condemned man looks over at the guy standing next to him on the gallows and asks “first time?”

“We’ve been ‘in danger’ of being taken over by AI for 10 years now and it still hasn’t happened,” Eybert-Guillon said. “But we keep getting told that it’s going to happen.”

There are two big reasons AI hasn’t put many human translators out of work. First, human translators still do a better job in specialized fields like law and medicine. Translation errors in these fields can be very expensive, so clients are willing to pay extra for a human-quality translation.

Second, there has been rapid growth in hybrid translation services where a computer produces a first draft and a human translator checks it for errors. These hybrid services tend to be about 40% cheaper than a conventional human translation, and customers have taken advantage of that discount to translate more documents. Translators get paid less per word, but they’re able to translate more words per hour.

But while AI software has not put human translators out of work the way pessimists might have predicted, this isn’t an entirely positive story for translators either.

“I think rates for translators have stayed largely the same for 10 or 12 years,” said Mark Hemming, a translator in the United Kingdom. “I think it is harder to get work now. I think it’s harder to get well-paid work as well.”

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OK, translators might survive, just about, but I don’t see transcription services surviving for long.
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Toyota says solid-state battery breakthrough can halve cost and size • Financial Times

Kana Inagaki:

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Toyota initially said it wanted to start selling hybrid but not electric cars with solid-state batteries before 2025.

But on Tuesday, [president of Toyota’s research and development centre for carbon neutrality, Keiji] Kaita said the company discovered ways to address the durability problems from about three years ago and now had enough confidence to mass-produce solid-state batteries in EVs by 2027 or 2028.

Toyota claimed it had made a “technological breakthrough” to resolve durability issues and “a solution for materials” that would allow an EV powered by a solid-state battery to have a range of 1,200km and charging time of 10 minutes or less.

“All of our members are highly motivated and are working with the intention to definitely launch” the technology by the promised timeline, said Kaita.

By reducing the number of processes required to make battery materials, the cost of solid-state batteries could be lowered to similar or cheaper levels than liquid-based lithium-ion batteries, he added.

For Toyota, which has been slower than rivals to roll out electric vehicles, analysts said solid-state batteries could be a “game-changer” to narrow the gap with Tesla.

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1,200km (750 miles) and charge in 10 minutes? That’s a hell of a proposition.
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California must call Google’s and Facebook’s bluff on news • Los Angeles Times

Brian Merchant is the LA Times’s technology columnist:

»

In June, Canada passed a law that will require major tech platforms such as Google and Facebook to pay a small fee when they host news on their platforms, to compensate the journalistic outlets that produced it. A similar bill recently cleared crucial hurdles in California and now has a serious chance at becoming law too.

In response, Google and Facebook say they will have no choice but to ban news altogether from their services in those markets when and if these laws go into effect.

California and Canada must absolutely not give in to the tech giants’ tantrum. This is a bluff, and not a particularly convincing one. For the sake of the beleaguered news industries in both places (yes, including this media outlet), the Canadian and Californian governments must absolutely call it.

For assurance, we should look to Australia, where a like-minded bill went into law in 2021, even after Google and Facebook made the same exact threats. Facebook did initially restrict access to news, but the ploy lasted barely a week before it backfired wildly, and Facebook agreed to comply, albeit after extracting some concessions.

That bill has already restored tens of millions of dollars in revenue to Australia’s troubled newsrooms, and, while far from perfect, has transformed the media environment dramatically.

…Over the years, the value that news has brought to Google and Facebook (not to mention to Twitter, Reddit and other major social platforms) is staggering. Journalism has bolstered the value proposition of these platforms considerably. Picture, for a minute, a Facebook without legitimate news — where the only posts you encounter aside from baby pics are your uncle’s political screeds and bad memes. It would be a cesspool. And try conjuring a portrait of Google with no media to index. Guess it would still be good for finding recipes and Wikipedia pages.

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I want online news to work as much as anyone. But the argument that Google and Facebook specifically must pay for specific kinds of links on their site, and that they’re not allowed not to carry those links, doesn’t make sense. Just be honest and tax them.

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ITN boss and Labour minister throw weight behind big tech news payments bill • Press Gazette

Bron Maher:

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The chief executive of TV production giant ITN has thrown her weight behind a bill that could force Google and Meta to pay for news in the UK.

Rachel Corp said on Monday that she hoped the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers (DMCC) Bill would create a more “competitive commercial environment” for media companies and impel technology firms to share data and algorithm information.

Executives from the News Media Association and charity the Public Interest News Foundation (PINF) also expressed their support for the bill at a Westminster event convened by the Media All-Party Parliamentary Group and chaired by Press Gazette associate editor William Turvill. Although most panellists spoke warmly about the legislation, there were some reservations – largely focusing on the extent to which the bill centres the interests of the consumer.

Alex Davies-Jones, the shadow minister for tech, gambling, and the digital economy, said in closing remarks that the bill had Labour’s support: “It’s very, very rare to have a piece of legislation which I find hard to criticise.”

She added: “The government here absolutely must not bow down to the pressure from big tech – which we know it’s under, quite frankly. We know that our Prime Minister sees himself as a tech bro, he wants to feed that outward-looking focus, but [the government] cannot bow down to this pressure.”

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Again, great to see media getting more funding, but the logical inconsistencies of a link tax (that’s honestly what it is) only get bigger and bigger.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If things have gone as normal, sightings of UFOs will have peaked in the US on Independence Day. Guess why. CC-licensed photo by maxime raynal on Flickr.

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

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

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

US looks to restrict China’s access to cloud computing to protect advanced technology • WSJ

Yuka Hayashi and John D. McKinnon:

»

The Biden administration is preparing to restrict Chinese companies’ access to US cloud computing services, according to people familiar with the situation, in a move that could further strain relations between the world’s economic superpowers.

The new rule, if adopted, would likely require US cloud service providers such as Amazon.com and Microsoft to seek US government permission before they provide cloud computing services that use advanced artificial intelligence chips to Chinese customers, the people said.

The Biden administration’s move on cloud services comes as China said Monday it would impose export restrictions on metals used in advanced chip manufacturing.

This high-stakes conflict over supply chain access to the world’s most advanced technology is escalating in the days ahead of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s visit to China, a trip the Biden administration hopes will ease tensions. Yellen’s talks in Beijing are expected to touch on macroeconomic conditions in each country, as well as climate change and debt in the developing world.

The US’s proposed cloud restrictions are seen as a means to close a significant loophole. National security analysts have warned that Chinese AI companies might have bypassed the current export controls rules by using cloud services.

These services allow customers to gain powerful computing capabilities without purchasing advanced equipment—including chips—on the control list, such as the A100 chips by American technology company Nvidia.

“If any Chinese company wanted access to Nvidia A100, they could do that from any cloud service provider. That’s totally legal,” said Emily Weinstein, a research fellow at Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

«

Oh, that is quite the loophole, isn’t it. Wonder how they’ll enforce it, though. Proxy hopping from one server to another, using shell companies.. it’s going to be quite the whack-a-mole game. Another little brick in the trade war wall.
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Twitter’s API keeps breaking, even for developers paying $42,000 • Mashable

Matt Binder:

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Twitter’s new API may now cost tens of thousands of dollars per month, but the service being provided to its customers appears to be worse than ever.

That’s the general sentiment among developers who are still part of the once-robust third-party Twitter app ecosystem. According to developers paying Twitter, since the switch over to Elon Musk’s paid API subscription plans, Twitter’s API has experienced frequent issues that make it extremely difficult to run their apps.

Twitter’s API issues have frustrated developers in each of Twitter’s new API access tiers. Those with Basic or Pro plans — paying $100 and $5000 a month for API access, respectively — have experienced unannounced changes to their plans, numerous bugs, and often receive zero customer support. And developers shelling out for Twitter’s Enterprise API Plan, which starts at $42,000 per month, are experiencing sudden outages and disappointing service considering the money they’re paying.

“Everything used to work fine before we started paying half a million per year,” shared one developer in a private Twitter developer group chat shared with Mashable.

«

As John Gruber points out, why – now you know this – would you ever pay for Twitter Blue (or, now, for Tweetdeck)? Amazing how Musk has transformed it from a reliable, low-earning must-use service into an unreliable, lossmaking service that people are keen to abandon.
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CJEU ruling on Meta referral could close the chapter on surveillance capitalism • TechCrunch

Natasha Lomas:

»

A long-anticipated judgement handed down today by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) looks to have comprehensively crushed the social media giant’s ability to keep flouting EU privacy law by denying users a free choice over its tracking and profiling.

The ruling tracks back to a pioneering order by Germany’s antitrust watchdog, the Federal Cartel Office (FCO), which spent years investigating Facebook’s business — making the case that privacy harm should be treated as an exploitative competition abuse too.

In its February 2019 order, the FCO told Facebook (as Meta still was back then) to stop combining data on users across its own suite of social platforms without their consent. Meta sought to block the order in the German courts — eventually sparking the referral on Meta’s so-called “superprofiling” to the CJEU in March 2021.

Now we have the top court’s take and, well, it’s not going to spark any celebrations at Meta HQ, that’s for sure.

The CJEU has not only agreed competition authorities can factor data protection into their antitrust assessments (which sounds wonky but really is vital because joint-working rather than regulatory silos is the path to effective oversight of platform power) — but has signalled that consent is the only appropriate legal basis for the tracking-and-profiling-driven ‘personalized’ content and behavioral advertising that Meta monetizes.

«

It’s deeply complicated. Here’s the CJEU press release. Apple’s ATT (App Tracking Transparency) seems to have essentially done the same thing, without the legal delay, and around the world.
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Financial models on climate risk ‘implausible’, say actuaries • Financial Times

Camilla Hodgson:

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Financial institutions often did not understand the models they were using to predict the economic cost of climate change and were underestimating the risks of temperature rises, research led by a professional body of actuaries shows.

Many of the results emerging from the models were “implausible,” with a serious “disconnect” between climate scientists, economists, the people building the models and the financial institutions using them, a report by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and the University of Exeter finds.

Companies are increasingly required to report on the climate-related risks they face, using mathematical models to estimate how resilient their assets and businesses might be at different levels of warming.

The International Sustainability Standards Board last week launched long-awaited guidance for companies to inform investors about sustainability-related risks, including the climate scenarios chosen in their calculations.

Countries including the UK and Japan have said they plan to integrate these standards into their reporting rules.

Companies will also have to report the full scope of their emissions, including those from their supply chains, from the second year they begin to report under the guidelines due to come into effect in 2024.

…Some models were likely to have “limited use as they do not adequately communicate the level of risk we are likely to face if we fail to decarbonise quickly enough,” the paper released on Tuesday said.

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Revealed: UK plans to drop flagship £11.6bn climate pledge • The Guardian

Helena Horton and Patrick Greenfield:

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The government is drawing up plans to drop the UK’s flagship £11.6bn climate and nature funding pledge, the Guardian can reveal, with the prime minster accused of betraying populations most vulnerable to global heating.

The disclosure provoked fury from former ministers and representatives of vulnerable countries, who accused Rishi Sunak of making false promises.

A leaked briefing note to ministers, given to the Foreign Office and seen by the Guardian, lays out reasons for dropping the UK’s contribution to meeting the global $100bn (£78.6bn) a year commitment to developing countries.

It says: “Our commitment to double our international climate finance to £11.6bn was made in 2019, when we were still at 0.7 [% of GDP spent on international aid] and pre-Covid.” It adds that to meet it by the deadline would be a “huge challenge” because of new pressures, including help for Ukraine being included in the aid budget.

To meet the £11.6bn target by 2026, government officials have calculated that it would have to spend 83% of the Foreign Office’s official development assistance budget on the international climate fund. Civil servants said in the leaked document that this “would squeeze out room for other commitments such as humanitarian and women and girls”.

…The projects funded include building renewable energy, helping create low-pollution transport and protecting forests in sensitive areas around the globe.

Former Foreign Office minister Zac Goldsmith, who resigned last week citing what he termed Sunak’s “apathy” towards the environment, said this would “shred” the UK’s international reputation.

«

Alok Sharma, the Conservative MP who negotiated at the COP summit(s), also expressed disquiet. Astonishing lack of sway they have. Meanwhile the grousers who complain it’s all too expensive get airtime.
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Are extraterrestrials extra patriotic? • The Economist

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According to the National UFO Reporting Centre (NUFORC), an American non-profit organisation that has collected reports of unidentified flying objects since 1974, UFO sightings [in the US] tend to spike on July 4th. Between 1995 and 2018, around 2% of all sightings recorded by NUFORC fell on this date; seven times more than would be expected by chance. What explains this strange phenomenon?

Hollywood may be partly to blame. In the two years before the release of the Will Smith flick, NUFORC recorded an average of seven UFO sightings on July 4th (eight in 1995 and six in 1996). In 1997, a year after aliens burst onto the big screen, there were 74—more than ten times as many. Traditions of the July 4th holiday may also help explain the spike. Independence Day is typically spent outdoors. Heavy alcohol use is not uncommon. Intoxication may cause some to confuse celebratory fireworks with alien aircraft.

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Makes sense to me.
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No, the good economic data isn’t being faked • The New York Times

Paul Krugman:

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During the Obama years there was a large faction of “inflation truthers,” who insisted that deficit spending and monetary expansion must surely be causing runaway inflation, and that if official numbers failed to match that prediction it was only because the government was cooking the books.

With inflation falling rapidly over the past year, we’ve seen some resurgence of inflation trutherism. But the more notable development has been the emergence of what we might call recession truthers — a significant faction that seems frustrated by the Biden economy’s refusal, at least so far, to enter the recession they have repeatedly predicted or insisted is already underway.

Now, there are some sociological differences between the old inflation truthers and the new recession truthers. The former group tended to be old-school reactionaries still pining for a return to the gold standard. The new group is dominated by tech bros, billionaires who imagine themselves focused on the future rather than the golden past, more likely to be crypto cultists than gold bugs. [Essentially the same thing – Overspill Ed]

…You might have expected technology billionaires to be well-informed about the world — someone like Musk could, if he chose, easily maintain a large research department for his personal edification. (The annual budget for the whole Bureau of Labor Statistics is less than $700m.) Yet they are often, in practice, easy marks for grifters and con men.

…So why do we see tech bros indulging in conspiracy theories, often citing random Twitter accounts to justify their views?

The answer, I believe, is that technology billionaires are especially susceptible to the belief that they’re uniquely brilliant, able to instantly master any subject, from Covid to the war in Ukraine. They could afford to hire experts to brief them on world affairs, but that would only work if they were willing to listen when the experts told them things they didn’t want to hear. So what happens instead, all too often, is that they go down the rabbit hole: Their belief in their own genius makes them highly gullible, easy marks for grifters claiming that the experts are all wrong.

«

David Sacks in particular completely demonstrates how correct Krugman is.
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Fake journalist profiles used to launch Bournemouth Observer • Hold The Front Page

David Sharman:

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Fake journalist profiles have been used to launch a new website purporting to cover local news in a UK town, an HTFP investigation has found.

Photos taken from a stock picture archive were used by the Bournemouth Observer, which claims to be a new independent title serving Bournemouth, Poole and Christchurch, to illustrate a series of profiles of its journalists.

The Observer, which also offers a range of advertising opportunities, had initially contacted HTFP about a potential directory listing on our site, but we decided to investigate after Paul Giles, a representative of the title, refused to provide basic details about the backgrounds of the journalists listed or even confirm they were real people.

Some of the Observer’s content has also raised questions about whether AI is being used to produce its copy after police failed to find any record of two incidents reported by the site.

A ‘Meet the Team’ page on the website, which has now been deleted following our enquiries, listed 11 members of staff with photos and biographies, but we cross-referenced the headshots with an online reverse image search tool and discovered that all 11 pictures were stock images.

At least seven of the images originated from the same stock photo archive – istockphoto.com

The biography for David Roberts, described as the Observer’s “esteemed editor” with “a career in journalism that spans decades”, also contained inconsistencies.

It claimed he has been “lending his expertise and leadership to the newspaper for several years”, despite the Observer only being launched last month as an online-only title.

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The site was only registered on 30 May, and “registrant contact details [are] waiting to be checked” by Nominet. Feels like someone who is trying to use ChatGPT to write stories and just made up a ton of journalist name and profiles.
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UK universities draw up guiding principles on generative AI • The Guardian

Sally Weale:

»

While once there was talk of banning software like ChatGPT within education to prevent cheating, the guidance says students should be taught to use AI appropriately in their studies, while also making them aware of the risks of plagiarism, bias and inaccuracy in generative AI.

Staff will also have to be trained so they are equipped to help students, many of whom are already using ChatGPT in their assignments. New ways of assessing students are likely to emerge to reduce the risk of cheating.

…The five guiding principles state that
• universities will support both students and staff to become AI literate;
• staff should be equipped to help students to use generative AI tools appropriately;
• the sector will adapt teaching and assessment to incorporate the “ethical” use of AI and ensure equal access to it
• universities will ensure academic integrity is upheld; and
• [universities will] share best practice as the technology evolves.

«

Good that they’re taking this seriously. And that’s not a bad set of principles.
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Lab-grown meat could feed hundreds of thousands of people, and reduce the need for herds of cows. CC-licensed photo by bnilsenbnilsen on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Chewy, no gristle. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Mark Zuckerberg looks to deliver hit to Elon Musk with upcoming Twitter clone • WSJ

Salvador Rodriguez:

»

Meta Platforms plans to release a microblogging app called Threads, a new product that will hit the market soon after Twitter owner Elon Musk announced new strictures that will limit how many posts users see on that platform.

Social-media veterans and analysts see the planned app as a formidable competitor for Twitter, which has faced falling revenue and other challenges since Musk took over the company in October.

Meta, like other tech giants, has a record of copying features of competitors’ platforms and implementing them into its own services. The company is expected to build the microblogging app off its Instagram user data, a strategic maneuver that may help the app quickly gain users, people familiar with the matter said.

The competition between the two companies comes as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Musk publicly discussed the possibility of physically fighting each other.

Twitter didn’t comment.

Since Musk’s takeover of Twitter in October, many Twitter users have voiced that they want an alternative. Over the past nine months, the company has experienced numerous technical issues, removed thousands of employees, lost users and advertisers, and was criticized for how the service moderates content. Musk last week took steps to limit how many posts users can see on the platform, saying he wanted to combat “extreme levels of data scraping.”

Startups such as Mastodon, Truth Social and Bluesky have gained users but have yet to emerge as a true rival to Twitter.

“I do think a new microblogging leader will emerge to supplant Twitter, but it is far from a foregone conclusion that the winner will be Meta,” said Steve Teixeira, Mozilla chief product officer and a former Twitter and Meta executive. Mozilla has criticized how large tech companies manage social media and has said the industry is “broken.” A lack of user trust might hinder adoption for Meta’s new app, he said.

«

I did see something suggesting this was on the Google Play Store but got pulled. You’d think Zuck would be getting this pushed out the door as fast as possible. Especially because it looks like it gets over the biggest problem with a new social network – how to find your followers from your previous social networks. With Instagram and Facebook as feeders, it has a big advantage.
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China to restrict exports of metals critical to chip production • Bloomberg

Archie Hunter and Alfred Cang:

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China imposed restrictions on exporting two metals that are crucial to parts of the semiconductor, telecommunications and electric-vehicle industries in an escalation of the country’s tit-for-tat trade war on technology with the US and Europe.

Gallium and germanium, along with their chemical compounds, will be subject to export controls meant to protect Chinese national security starting Aug. 1, China’s Ministry of Commerce said in a statement Monday. Exporters for the two metals will need to apply for licenses from the commerce ministry if they want to start or continue to ship them out of the country, and will be required to report details of the overseas buyers and their applications, it said.

China is battling for technological dominance in everything from quantum computing to artificial intelligence and chip manufacturing. The US has taken increasingly aggressive measures to keep China from gaining the upper-hand and has called upon allies in Europe and Asia to do the same, with some success. The export limits are also coming at a time when nations around the world are working to rid their supply chains of dependencies on overseas equipment.

Impact on the tech industry “depends on the stockpile of equipment on hand,” said Roger Entner, an analyst with Recon Analytics LLC. “It’s more of a muscle flexing for the next year or so. If it drags on, prices will go up.”

China is the dominant global producer of both metals that have applications for electric vehicle makers, the defense industry and displays. Gallium and germanium play a role in producing a number of compound semiconductors, which combine multiple elements to improve transmission speed and efficiency. China accounts for about 94% of the world’s gallium production, according to the UK Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre.

Still, the metals aren’t particularly rare or difficult to find, though China’s kept them cheap and they can be relatively high-cost to extract.

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Just the first glimmerings of a serious trade war. The quid pro quo for loosening this will almost surely be access to ASML machines, used for chip lithography, and presently banned from export to China.
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US Army Criminal Investigation Division: security alert on unsolicited smartwatches sent in post • LinkedIn

US Army Criminal Investigation Division (which really is a thing):

»

Attention❗There have been incidents of military personnel receiving D18 Smart watches in the mail. Concerns are the watch can be used as a tool to gain personal information from individuals & cause a significant Info/Operations security threat to the United States Department of Defense and its members.

Action❗If you receive an unsolicited D18 smart watch please contact your unit Security Manager or Counterintelligence.

Do not connect it to your personal Wi-Fi or bring it to work. It is recommended that you do not use the item for any purpose whatsoever.

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The D18 is dirt cheap (£30 or so) and compatible with Android and iOS. This is a legit warning, but what isn’t clear is who was sending the unsolicited watches, or how many, or to who.. pretty much everything. A fascinating little mystery.
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Lab-grown meat just reached a major milestone. Here’s what comes next • MIT Technology Review

Casey Crownhart:

»

One major thing I’ll be watching is how these companies start producing their products at larger scales. Upside’s pilot facility can currently produce around 50,000 lb (22,600 kg) of finished products each year. At full capacity, it will eventually be able to grow to about 400,000 lb (180,000 kg) per year.

That sounds like a lot, but in the grand scheme of food production, it’s pretty tiny. Large commercial meat facilities produce millions of pounds of meat each year—and that’s the sort of scale Upside is targeting for its first commercial facility, said Eric Schulze, VP of global scientific and regulatory affairs at Upside foods, in an email.

Eat Just’s cultured meat subsidiary Good Meat runs two demonstration facilities, one in the US and one in Singapore. Those facilities use large reactors with capacities of 3,500 and 6,000 litres, respectively, said Andrew Noyes, VP of communications at Eat Just. Again, those sound like huge reactors, but the company’s plans for its first commercial operation include 10 250,000-litre reactors, and in total, capacity will be about 30m lb (13.6m kg) each year.

While scaling up processes that have already been demonstrated in labs and pilot facilities will be a major development in the industry moving forward, I’m also fascinated to see what new sorts of products come to market in the next few years. There are over 150 companies in the cultivated meat industry, making everything from beef to tuna to products unlike anything on the market today.

A few potential bottlenecks face companies trying to bring new products to market, including developing cell lines, designing and building bioreactors, and making the meat’s structure, said Jess Krieger, founder and CEO of the cultivated meat company Ohayo Valley, in a panel discussion.

«

Per capita meat consumption in the US: about 99kg (call it 100kg) annually. It’s about the same in the UK, about 66kg in the EU28.

So the Good Meat reactor making 13.6m kg per year would supply 136,000 Americans or Britons; or ~200,0000 people in the EU28. The meat from a cow is about 40% of its live weight; typical cow weight is ~500kg, so 200kg of meat, or two people’s consumption; so this would save at most ~400,000 cows. (It’s more complicated because we eat a mix of meats, but this is a start.)
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Lessons from the catastrophic failure of the metaverse • The Nation

Kate Wagner:

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Last year, some staggering names such as Zaha Hadid Architects, Grimshaw, Farshid Moussavi, and, of course, the Bjarke Ingels Group pledged to create “virtual cities,” virtual “offices,” and equally vague sounding “social spaces” to be funded with cryptocurrency and supplied with art (NFTs). The eagerness to latch onto whatever the newest trend the increasingly desperate and failure-prone tech industry dished out was so palpable that even real-life developers like hotel chain CitizenM and brands like Jose Cuervo got involved and threw what one presumes is a whole lot of actual money at the enterprise. The rush to move into virtual real estate was a full-on frenzy.

In some respects, who could blame these companies and firms? Since the virtual reality service’s launch in 2021, the so-called “successor to the mobile internet” became the recipient of a kind of soaring hype few things are ever blessed with. According to Insider, McKinsey claimed that the Metaverse would bring businesses $5 trillion in value. Citi valued it at no less than $13 trillion.

There was only one problem: The whole thing was bullshit. Far from being worth trillions of dollars, the Metaverse turned out to be worth absolutely bupkus. It’s not even that the platform lagged behind expectations or was slow to become popular. There wasn’t anyone visiting the Metaverse at all.

The sheer scale of the hype inflation came to light in May. In the same article, Insider revealed that Decentraland, arguably the largest and most relevant Metaverse platform, had only 38 active daily users. The Guardian reported that the monetized content ecosystem in Meta’s flagship product Horizon Worlds produced no more than $470 in revenue globally. Thirty-eight active users. Four hundred and seventy dollars. You’re not reading those numbers wrong. To say that the Metaverse is dead is an understatement. It was never alive.

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What sort of bet would you give that a significant proportion of those 38 users are from Decentraland, the company. (Also, following the original trail in the article was fun. From The Nation to Insider to Coindesk, which originally reported it.

Anyway. Let us speak no more of the metaverse.
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Foundation of all known life: Webb Telescope makes first detection of crucial carbon molecule • SciTech Daily

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A team of international scientists has used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to detect a new carbon compound in space for the first time. Known as methyl cation (pronounced cat-eye-on) (CH3+), the molecule is important because it aids the formation of more complex carbon-based molecules. Methyl cation was detected in a young star system, with a protoplanetary disk, known as d203-506, which is located about 1,350 light-years away in the Orion Nebula.

Carbon compounds form the foundations of all known life, and as such are particularly interesting to scientists working to understand both how life developed on Earth, and how it could potentially develop elsewhere in our universe. The study of interstellar organic (carbon-containing) chemistry, which Webb is opening in new ways, is an area of keen fascination to many astronomers.

CH3+ is theorized to be particularly important because it reacts readily with a wide range of other molecules. As a result, it acts like a “train station” where a molecule can remain for a time before going in one of many different directions to react with other molecules. Due to this property, scientists suspect that CH3+ forms a cornerstone of interstellar organic chemistry.

The unique capabilities of Webb made it the ideal observatory to search for this crucial molecule. Webb’s exquisite spatial and spectral resolution, as well as its sensitivity, all contributed to the team’s success. In particular, Webb’s detection of a series of key emission lines from CH3+ cemented the discovery.

“This detection not only validates the incredible sensitivity of Webb but also confirms the postulated central importance of CH3+ in interstellar chemistry,” said Marie-Aline Martin-Drumel of the University of Paris-Saclay in France, a member of the science team.

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This could mean that there are other life forms out there, and crucially they might be able to lend us some money.
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Climate crisis linked to rising domestic violence in south Asia, study finds • The Guardian

Tess McClure and Amrit Dhillon:

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As deadly heatwaves sweep through cities in India, China, the US and Europe amid the climate crisis, new research has found that rising temperatures are associated with a substantial rise in domestic violence against women.

A study published in JAMA Psychiatry on Wednesday found a 1ºC increase in average annual temperature was connected to a rise of more than 6.3% in incidents of physical and sexual domestic violence across three south Asian countries.

The study tracked 194,871 girls and women aged 15-49 from India, Pakistan and Nepal between 2010 and 2018, and their reported experiences of emotional, physical and sexual violence. It compared that data with temperature fluctuations across the same period. India, which already had the highest reported rates of intimate partner violence of the three, also had the biggest increase in abuse: with a 1C rise in heat came an 8% rise in physical violence, and 7.3% rise in sexual violence.

Countries around the world are already in the grip of extreme temperatures and heatwaves. This month, India was reporting temperatures up to 45C (113F) and dozens of heat-related deaths, Mediterranean Europe emerged from a record-breaking April heatwave, Texas entered its third week of deadly heat with temperatures up to 46C, and China urged people in northern cities to stay indoors as temperatures of over 40C broke records.

Michelle Bell, a professor of environmental health at Yale University and a co-author of the study, said that there were “many potential pathways, both physiological and sociological, through which higher temperature could affect risk of violence”. Extreme heat can lead to crop failures, buckle infrastructure, eat into economies, trap people indoors and render them unable to work – all factors that can place families under extreme stress and push up violence rates.

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It’s the ice cream/murder thing: murders rise when ice cream sales rise. Not because ice cream makes people kill other people, but because heat drives people a bit mad.
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Why human societies still use arms, feet, and other body parts to measure things • AAAS

Michael Price:

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Although standardized units are often upheld as superior to informal corporeal measures, people in many societies have continued to use their bodies this way well after standardization has taken root, notes Roope Kaaronen, a cognitive scientist who studies cultural evolution at the University of Helsinki.

To explore how widespread such practices have been in human history, Kaaronen and colleagues pored over ethnographic data from 186 past and present cultures across the world, looking for descriptions of body-based units of measurement in a database called the Human Relations Area Files. This database is the product of an international nonprofit organization that has been collecting and administering ethnographies and anthropological literature since the 1950s.

The team found these systems used in every culture they looked at, particularly in the construction of clothes and technologies. For example, in the early 1900s, the Karelian people, a group indigenous to Northern Europe, traditionally designed skis to be a fathom plus six hand spans long. In the late 1800s the Yup’ik people from the Alaskan coast recorded building kayaks that were 2.5 fathoms long plus a cockpit, which was the length of an arm with a closed fist.

Next, the team looked at a subsample of 99 cultures that, according to a widely used benchmark in anthropology, developed relatively independently of one another. Fathoms, hand spans, and cubits were the most common body-based measurements, each popping up in about 40% of these cultures. Different societies likely developed and incorporated such units because they were especially convenient for tackling important everyday tasks, the authors argue, such as measuring clothes, designing tools and weapons, and building boats and structures. “Think of how you’d measure a rope or a fishing net or a long piece of cloth,” Kaaronen says. “If you measured it with a yardstick, it would be quite cumbersome. But measuring slack items with the fathom is very convenient: Just repeatedly extend your arms and let the rope pass through your hands. So it’s no coincidence that we find the fathom being used for measuring ropes, fishing nets, and cloth around the world.”

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Elon Musk really broke Twitter this time • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel:

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this weekend’s disasters are different. The decision to limit people’s ability to consume content on the platform is the rapid unscheduled disassembly of the never-ending, real-time feed of information that makes Twitter Twitter.

His supporters are confused and, perhaps, starting to feel the cracks of cognitive dissonance. “Surely someone who can figure out how to build spaceships can figure out how to distinguish scrapers from legit users,” Graham—the same one who supported Musk in November—tweeted on Saturday. What reasonable answer could there be for an advertising company to drastically limit the time that potentially hundreds of millions of users can spend on its website? (Maybe this one: On Saturday, outside developers appeared to discover an unfixed bug in Twitter’s web app that was flooding the network’s own servers with self-requests, to the point that the platform couldn’t function—a problem likely compounded by Twitter’s skeleton crew of engineers. When I reached out for clarification, the company auto-responded with an email containing a poop emoji.)

All the money and trolling can’t hide what’s obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention to his Twitter tenure: Elon Musk is bad at this. His incompetence should unravel his image as a visionary, one whose ambitions extend as far as colonizing Mars. This reputation as a genius, more than his billions, is Musk’s real fortune; it masks the impetuousness he demonstrates so frequently on Twitter. But Musk has spent this currency recklessly. Who in their right mind would explore space with a man who can’t keep a website running?

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The rate limit also broke Tweetdeck, which loads tweets from multiple lists, and which is used by professional social media operators. Good job, Elon.
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The Password Game

I’m pretty sure my last corporate password system used these rules. (Don’t use your own password on this, but then again, if your password is anything like this..)
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