The iPad Pro is long overdue for a serious update, but OLED screens aren’t coming until next year, according to a well-informed source. CC-licensed photo by Sergiy Galyonkin on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Oh, now you’re back. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
How Google made the world go viral • The Verge
Ryan Broderick:
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[Anil] Dash is one of the web’s earliest bloggers. In 2004, he won a competition Google held to google-bomb itself with the made-up term “nigritude ultramarine.” Since then, Dash has written extensively over the years on the impact platform optimization has had on the way the internet works. As he sees it, Google’s advertising tools [introduced in 2003-4] gave links a monetary value, killing anything organic on the platform. From that moment forward, Google cared more about the health of its own network than the health of the wider internet.
“At that point it was really clear where the next 20 years were going to go,” he said.
Google Answers closed in 2006. Google Reader shut down in 2013, taking with it the last vestiges of the blogosphere. Search inside of Google Groups has repeatedly broken over the years. Blogger still works, but without Google Reader as a hub for aggregating it, most publishers started making native content on platforms like Facebook and Instagram and, more recently, TikTok.
Discoverability of the open web has suffered. Pinterest has been accused of eating Google Image Search results. And the recent protests over third-party API access at Reddit revealed how popular Google has become as a search engine not for Google’s results but for Reddit content. Google’s place in the hierarchy of Big Tech is slipping enough that some are even admitting that Apple Maps is worth giving another chance, something unthinkable even a few years ago.
On top of it all, OpenAI’s massively successful ChatGPT has dragged Google into a race against Microsoft to build a completely different kind of search, one that uses a chatbot interface supported by generative AI.
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Broderick’s piece has the in-article headline “The end of the Googleverse” – in which he’s trying to argue, at the beginning, that Google Search has lost its centrality and power: “all around us are signs that the era of “peak Google” is ending or, possibly, already over.” But then the article heads off to talk about the history of virality as driven by Google Search. It’s slightly confused: lots of people have called Peak Google, and none been quite right. This doesn’t quite make the case either. Lots of people agree that Google Search doesn’t find the results you want in the way it used to one or two decades ago. But people still use it to the tune of billions of searches per day.
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Apple plans biggest iPad Pro update since 2018 • Ars Technica
Samuel Axon:
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Apple’s iPad Pro is set to get its biggest redesign since 2018, according to a new report. Slated for a launch next year, it will seek to turn around recent years’ slow tablet sales.
The information comes from Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman—as you probably could have guessed by now. Gurman claims to have knowledge of Apple’s plans, stating that the new iPad Pro will have everything from a new chip to a new screen technology, a different design, and a revamped keyboard accessory.
The new chip is obvious—that has been the standard minimum for any new iPad Pro refresh. The current iPad Pro has the M2 chip, and the new one will predictably have the M3 chip. Expect some notable performance gains—not that the M2 was too slow for most people using the iPad Pro already.
Things get a little more interesting beyond the chip upgrade, however. Gurman claims the new iPad Pro will ship with an OLED display, the same tech seen in the excellent screens on iPhones. OLED offers deeper blacks, better contrast, and richer color than the LCD screens currently in Apple’s iPad and MacBook lineups.
Gurman writes that the OLED screens are “crisper and brighter” than LCD screens, which seems odd—crispness is about resolution, which has little to do with the type of screen involved. The iPhone 14 Pro’s OLED screens are substantially brighter than the LCD screens found on most iPads, but the 12.9in iPad Pro’s Mini LED screen is about equally as bright as the OLED on an iPhone 14 Pro.
Apple previously brought Mini LED tech to the largest iPad model, the 12.9in iPad Pro. But even that can’t quite touch a great OLED screen, and it has not been available in any of the smaller tablets Apple sells.
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If anyone has managed to hit the limits of what the M2 chip can do on an iPad Pro, please write in. Editing something gigantic in Final Cut Pro, perhaps? Hard to imagine anything else managing it. But the slow schedule here shows that the iPad isn’t viewed as the most important thing any more; no longer the new hotness. And finally getting OLED – which Samsung and others have been using in tablets for years.
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Brain-computer interface enables woman with severe paralysis to speak through digital avatar • TechXplore
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Researchers at the University of California (UC) San Francisco and UC Berkeley have developed a brain-computer interface (BCI) that has enabled a woman with severe paralysis from a brainstem stroke to speak through a digital avatar.
It is the first time that either speech or facial expressions have been synthesized from brain signals. The system can also decode these signals into text at nearly 80 words per minute, a vast improvement over commercially available technology.
Edward Chang, MD, chair of neurological surgery at UCSF, who has worked on the technology, known as a brain computer interface, or BCI, for more than a decade, hopes this latest research breakthrough, appearing Aug. 23, 2023, in Nature, will lead to an FDA-approved system that enables speech from brain signals in the near future.
“Our goal is to restore a full, embodied way of communicating, which is really the most natural way for us to talk with others,” said Chang, who is a member of the UCSF Weill Institute for Neuroscience and the Jeanne Robertson Distinguished Professor in Psychiatry. “These advancements bring us much closer to making this a real solution for patients.”
Chang’s team previously demonstrated it was possible to decode brain signals into text in a man who had also experienced a brainstem stroke many years earlier. The current study demonstrates something more ambitious: decoding brain signals into the richness of speech, along with the movements that animate a person’s face during conversation.
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Qualcomm’s ‘Holy Grail’: generative AI is coming to phones soon • CNET
David Lumb:
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Generative AI like ChatGPT and Midjourney have dazzled imaginations and disrupted industries, but their debut has mostly been limited to browser windows on desktop computers. Next year, you’ll be able to make use of generative AI on the go once premium phones launch with Qualcomm’s top-tier chips inside.
Phones have used AI for years to touch up photos and improve autocorrect, but generative AI tools could bring the next level of enhancements to the mobile experience. Qualcomm is building generative AI into its next generation of premium chips, which are set to debut at its annual Qualcomm Summit in Hawaii in late October.
Summit attendees will get to experience firsthand what generative AI will bring to phones, but Qualcomm senior vice president of product management Ziad Asghar described to CNET why users should get excited for on-device AI. For one, having access to a user’s data — driving patterns, restaurant searches, photos and more — all in one place will make solutions generated by AI in your phone much more customized and helpful than general responses from cloud-based generative AI.
“I think that’s going to be the holy grail,” Asghar said. “That’s the true promise that makes us really excited about where this technology can go.”
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Er.. you can already download apps to do this for the iPhone, and there are tons of Midjourney and other AI apps on the Google Play store. Nor do I like Asghar’s description of what the on-device AI is going to be used for: “having access to a user’s data” as a starting point.
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Why today’s chatbots are weird, argumentative, and wrong • IEEE Spectrum
Michael Koziol speaks to Janelle Shane, who has been running the AI Weirdness blog for years, and so has the perfect perspective on all this:
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MK: How has AIs’ weirdness changed in the past year?
Janelle Shane: They’ve gotten less weird, more coherent. Instead of being absurd and half-incomprehensible, they’ve become way more fluent and more subtly wrong in ways that are harder to detect. But—they’re a lot more accessible now. People have the chance to experiment with them themselves. So from that standpoint, the weirdness of these models is a lot more evident.
Q: You’ve written that it’s outrageous that chatbots like Google’s Bard and Bing Chat are seen as an alternative to search engines. What’s the problem?
Shane: The problem is how incorrect—and in many cases very subtly incorrect—these answers are, and you may not be able to tell at first, if it’s outside your area of expertise. The problem is the answers do look vaguely correct. But [the chatbots] are making up papers, they’re making up citations or getting facts and dates wrong, but presenting it the same way they present actual search results. I think people can get a false sense of confidence on what is really just probability-based text.
Q: You’ve noted as well that chatbots are often confidently incorrect, and even double down when challenged. What do you think is causing that?
Shane: They’re trained on books and Internet dialogues and Web pages in which humans are generally very confident about their answers. Especially in the earliest releases of these chatbots, before the engineers did some tweaking, you would get chatbots that acted like they were in an Internet argument and doubling down sounding like they’re getting very hyped up and emotional about how correct they are. I think that came straight from imitating humans in Internet arguments during training.
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How fabulous: chatbots’ refusal to be wrong stems from people arguing on the internet.
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New Twitter scam in China: sextortion scammers • Rest of World
Caiwei Chen:
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In May, Wang Zhi’an noticed something odd: Each time he posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, his replies would be flooded with sexual spam within minutes. Once, the Chinese investigative journalist-in-exile made a post discussing X’s new monetization policies. A user named Zizizi963, seemingly an attractive young single woman, replied with a photo of her in lingerie and the words, “When will you come to me and mess up my bed?” Zizizi963 was one of several accounts posting sexual messages in Wang’s replies — they all had blue checkmarks, and were granted greater visibility on the platform.
Wang soon learned that these accounts were sextortion scammers. Posing as young, lonely women, they posted sexually suggestive messages on popular posts and invited users to contact them through the Telegram links in their bios. A Shenzhen-based man in his 20s reached out to Wang anonymously after falling victim himself, according to an audio interview between the two that Wang had shared on his podcast. The scammers persuaded the man to download special video-chat software for “safety reasons,” lured him into a chatroom, recorded footage of him unclothed, and then blackmailed him for money. He ended up transferring 200,000 yuan ($27,500) to the scammers to prevent his photos from being leaked.
Since April, after X introduced a new blue-check policy allowing users to buy verified badges, the platform has seen hundreds of newly verified Chinese sextortion accounts, according to Robin Li, founder of online safety software PureTwitter. They prey on Chinese users, harassing the community’s most prominent voices — often political dissidents and influential opinion leaders.
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It is a little bit difficult to feel that much sympathy for the Shenzhen-based man in his 20s: even in China, don’t they tell you about getting scammed in this sort of way?
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Bitcoin trading volume is at its lowest in more than four years • CNBC
Tanaya Macheel:
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Bitcoin’s trading volume hit its lowest level in almost five years this month as investors keep waiting for reasons to jump back into the market.
An analysis of CryptoQuant data from both spot and derivatives exchanges shows the total volume of bitcoin held on all exchanges fell earlier this month to its lowest level since 2018 and has struggled to rebound.
As of Aug. 26, bitcoin trading volume on all exchanges sat at 129,307 BTC, according to CryptoQuant. Earlier in the month, on Aug. 12, it fell to 112,317 BTC, its lowest level since Nov. 10, 2018. It’s now off the March high of 3.5 million BTC by about 94%.
“Trading volumes decrease in bear markets as retail investors leave,” Julio Moreno, head of research at CryptoQuant, told CNBC. “This happened during 2022 on most exchanges. As we progress further into a bull market, the trading volume may continue to pick up.”
The price of bitcoin is still up 57% for the year and hovering at about $26,100, according to Coin Metrics.
It’s been an excruciatingly quiet summer for bitcoin traders, but seasonality only accounts for so much of it. The US regulatory crackdown on crypto combined with the end of the banking crisis in May (which accounted for much of its year-to-date gains) drove market makers and traders away – and they haven’t had a reason to return.
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When will they ever have a reason to return? The whole web3/NFT grift is dead. The only hope the bitcoin holders have is that some bigger fools will come along and take these expensive sudoku solutions off their hands.
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Hiding behind whale fatality disinformation, Big Oil works to slow offshore wind projects • CleanTechnica
Carolyn Fortuna:
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The US outer continental shelf is an ideal site for wind energy resources on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. With the public increasingly calling for more renewable energy options, offshore wind is an idea whose time has come.
The US Department of Energy (DOE) in late March, 2023 announced the release of its Offshore Wind Energy Strategy, which is intended to help meet President Biden’s goal to deploy 30 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind energy by 2030 and set the nation on a pathway to 110 GW or more by 2050. Deploying 30 GW of offshore wind would provide enough power for 10 million homes, support 77,000 jobs, and spur $12 billion per year in direct private investment.
Offshore wind energy will be critical for reimagining America’s clean energy economy and building it right. Offshore wind is a more cost-effective energy source than oil and gas, and it threatens the future of US fossil fuel dependence. And so Big Oil looks for scapegoats — or, in this case, whale victims.
A dozen dead whales have washed up on New York and New Jersey beaches since December, part of a longer pattern of whale deaths up and down the east coast. The deaths have led some protesters to call for an end to offshore wind development, citing — without evidence — that the sound of the boats and underwater surveying might confuse the whales.
Experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and elsewhere say they see no evidence that undersea sounds emitted during survey work for the construction of wind farms is causing whale deaths.
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There’s a whole lot of offshore wind around the UK, and no sign of increased whale deaths. (I was thinking the other day about whales, which used to be a key source of energy, which then became too expensive, with oil-based replacements taking over. But if we hadn’t had, or hadn’t found, oil? Would we have started breeding blue whales?)
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Climate change is fuelling Antarctic emperor penguin population losses • Sydney Morning Herald
Laura Chung:
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As the world goes through what some scientists believe to be its hottest year on record, emperor penguin populations in the Antarctic are suffering catastrophic losses, with no chicks surviving the spring of 2022 in four of five colonies observed for a new study.
The loss of the chicks coincides with record low sea ice coverage and was predicted as the world warmed, but the collapse in numbers has happened faster and sooner than expected, prompting fears for the future of the animal.
“Emperor penguins have no external threats except climate change and sea ice,” said the study’s lead author, Peter Fretwell, a scientist with the British Antarctic Survey. “They have never been hunted, hardly any contact with humanity. It is purely climate change. You can’t put the ice back. This is a global problem. If we don’t do something we are driving them to the brink of extinction.”
The report, published in Communications Earth and Environment on Friday, examined satellite images in the Bellingshausen Sea in Antarctica between 2018 and 2022 and found that declining sea ice due to climate change resulted in breeding failure last year.
Emperor penguin colonies rely on sea ice between April and January to breed, but any change to their habitat impacts whether chicks develop waterproof feathers, and ultimately survive.
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This is either going to drive some extraordinarily rapid evolution, or – more likely – this is the final act for the emperor penguins.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 