The latest models of Tesla’s 3 and Y cars have one tiny problem: in a few cases, the steering gives up, the US NHTSA says. CC-licensed photo by Panagiotis Katoikos on Flickr.

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

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

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

Zero resistance measured in a new LK-99 replication at Southeast University in Nanjing China • NextBigFuture.com

Brian Wang:

»

A team of scientists from the Physics Department of Southeast University, a top university in Nanjing, China, have reported measuring 0 resistance in a sample of LK-99 they synthesized from scratch. Claimed to have synthesized LK-99 and to have measured superconductivity up to a temperature of 110 kelvin. Claimed to have observed an abrupt drop in resistance between ~300K and 220K, aligning with the Korean LKK team’s results. Claimed to have confirmed structural consistency with x-ray diffraction.

From the video:
• They measure 0 resistance at 110K (-163C) using the four-point probe method. 0 resistance at this high of a temperature at ambient pressure is a new discovery in materials science
• They also claim a transition in and out of zero resistance state depending on a strongly applied magnetic field – a classic characteristic of superconductivity
• The sample they synthesized is reported to have much higher purity than the original Korean team of LKK
• They note an interesting and abrupt drop in resistance, by several orders of magnitude, between ~300 and 220K (approx values from the graph). This is currently unexplained, but is in rough agreement with LKK – i.e., LKK may have been measuring this higher-temperature ‘drop’ which was two orders of magnitude
• They retain the claim that this is not absolute conclusive proof of superconductivity, but it is suggestive of very interesting electronic properties in this material.

«

Liquid nitrogen boils at 77K, so this is pretty high temperature behaviour. Still unclear what is possible at room temperature, though.
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This summer is pointing us toward uncharted territory • The New York Times

David Wallace-Wells:

»

On opposite ends of the planet, temperatures recorded in the North Atlantic and sea ice measured near the South Pole, tracked so far from recent trends that you might embarrass yourself simply stating the size of the anomaly — a four sigma event in the temperatures of the North Atlantic, meaning that, given a stable climate and a normal distribution of chance, it should be expected about once every few hundred years and perhaps a six sigma event for Antarctic sea ice, meaning we should expect to see it, at least according to the simplified math, only once every 7.5 million years.

At a certain point, that math just gets silly, telling you perhaps more about the improper way you might have structured the comparison than about the size of the anomaly itself. But you can measure the anomalies in other ways, such as by noting the hot-tub ocean temperatures off the Florida Keys, a year’s worth of rain falling in 36 hours in parts of Beijing or 100-degree temperatures in the mountains of Chile or that there is an Argentina-size gap between this year’s Antarctic sea ice and the typical extent. And the fact that we are seeing these gob-smacking anomalies at all is a sign that the historical framework implied by terms like “seven sigma” and “500-year storm,” imperfect in the best of times, no longer applies to the world we live in now.

The environmental journalist Juliet Eilperin called the ocean temperatures “beyond belief”; The Washington Post reported that they had “baffled scientists.” Contemplating the trajectory of Arctic sea ice, the atmospheric scientist Zack Labe wrote memorably about how often he finds himself answering questions about the state of the science these days by saying, “I don’t know.” And for all the uncertainty, many of those watching the changes unfold have a queasy intuition that we may be entering a new climatic regime — and perhaps inching closer to some quite concerning tipping points.

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I’m afraid I can find no good news on this topic.
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The lose-lose-lose-lose bill C-18 outcome: Meta blocking news links on Facebook and Instagram in Canada • Michael Geist

»

For months, supporters of Bill C-18, the Online News Act, assured the [Canadian] government that Meta and Google were bluffing when they warned that a bill based on mandated payments for links was unworkable and they would comply with it by removing links to news from their platforms. However, what has been readily apparent for months became reality yesterday: Meta is now actively blocking news links and sharing on its Facebook and Instagram platforms. The announcement does not reference Threads, but it would not surprise if news links are ultimately blocked on that platform as well. The company says that the blocking will take several weeks to fully roll out to all users, suggesting that it has learned from the over-blocking mistakes made in Australia and is proceeding more cautiously in Canada. By the end of the month, the world’s largest social media platform will become a news desert in Canada, with links to all news – both Canadian and foreign – blocked on the platform.

It is worth revisiting that it was only a couple of months ago that some industry leaders, lobbyists, and academics were assuring the [Canadian] Senate that the Meta threat was just a bluff.

«

Clearly, not a bluff, and if Google follows suit then Canada is going to essentially roll back to 1997 in how well it’s able to spread news. This bill never looked like a good idea. Apparently the Australian version of this is less onerous, which made Facebook and Google just about accept it there.
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Ponzi scheme E-Creator targeted desperate workers • Rest of World

Kimberly Mutandiro:

»

Dumi, a 26-year-old from Harare’s Mbare township, had been unemployed for about two years this past May when he heard of E-Creator, a company that paid people to write positive reviews on e-commerce platforms like Zalando and Lazada.

The job sounded almost too good to be true: Dumi would have to go through a range of products on E-Creator’s website — items like sling bags or backpacks — and write reviews for 10 of them. This would earn him $4 a day. Dumi, who spoke to Rest of World under a pseudonym, estimated it’d take him less than 20 minutes to complete the task daily.

The only catch was that he would first need to invest $15 from his own pocket. But Dumi said he did so without concern, drawn by the prospect of making money. 

During the first two weeks at this job, E-Creator kept prompting him to invest incremental amounts of $15. By June, he had deposited $112 into the e-wallet on E-Creator, and that’s when things suddenly went downhill.

On June 30, Dumi woke up to find his E-Creator account frozen. He had $250 in his wallet that he could no longer withdraw. Within days, scores of other Zimbabweans had taken to social media to complain about their money being stuck with E-Creator. Local reports alerted the public to a statement posted on E-Creator’s website: The company claimed its director, Zhao Jiaotong, had disappeared. More reports claimed he had run off with over $1m, obtained from scamming people like Dumi.

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Sad but true: Zimbabweans are desperate for work – any kind of work – and this sort of thing drags them in.
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Steering problems place Tesla under NHTSA scrutiny again • The Register

Brandon Vigliarolo:

»

The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened another investigation into steering issues in Tesla vehicles – the second such probe the agency has launched this year.

The NHTSA opened its latest investigation after receiving 12 complaints from 2023 Tesla Model 3 and Y owners complaining of loss of steering control that frequently occurred along with an on-screen message alerting drivers that “power steering assist is reduced or disabled.”

“Five reports indicate an inability to steer the vehicle. Seven additional reports cite loss of power steering resulting in increased effort to control the vehicle,” the NHTSA said in its investigation document.

Along with 12 complaints, the NHTSA said the issue resulted in one accident, which appears to have affected a 2023 Model 3 owner in May. “Car steering felt stuck and slid off the road which resulted in crashing into a tree,” the Model 3 owner reported. “Tesla features did not help stay in the lane or break in an emergency.”

A look through the reports submitted by 2023 Model 3 and Model Y owners indicates repeated issues in which steering wheels on the models would lock up at random, both while driving and at a stop.

«

That all sounds very undesirable. Even if it’s a loss of hydraulics in the power steering system, that would be pretty terrifying if you were going at any speed.
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Nvidia AI image personalization method fits on a floppy disk and takes four minutes to train • Decrypt

Jose Antonio Lanz:

»

In the rapidly evolving landscape of AI art creation tools, Nvidia researchers have introduced an innovative new text-to-image personalization method called Perfusion. But it’s not a million-dollar super heavyweight model like its competitors. With a size of just 100KB and a 4-minute training time, Perfusion allows significant creative flexibility in portraying personalized concepts while maintaining their identity.

Perfusion was presented in a research paper created by Nvidia and the Tel-Aviv University in Israel. Despite its small size, it’s able to outperform tweaking methods used by leading AI art generators like Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion v1.5, the newly released Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL), and MidJourney in terms of efficiency of specific editions.

The main new idea in Perfusion is called “Key-Locking.” This works by connecting new concepts that a user wants to add, like a specific cat or chair, to a more general category during image generation. For example, the cat would be linked to the broader idea of a “feline.”

This helps avoid overfitting, which is when the model gets too narrowly tuned to the exact training examples. Overfitting makes it hard for the AI to generate new creative versions of the concept.

By tying the new cat to the general notion of a feline, the model can portray the cat in many different poses, appearances, and surroundings. But it still retains the essential “catness” that makes it look like the intended cat, not just any random feline.

So in simple terms, Key-Locking lets the AI flexibly portray personalized concepts while keeping their core identity. It’s like giving an artist the following directions: “Draw my cat Tom, while sleeping, playing with yarn, and sniffing flowers.”

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Only question now is where I find a floppy disk to put it on.
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Generative AI services pulled from Apple App Store in China ahead of new regulations • TechCrunch

Rita Liao:

»

Multiple generative AI apps have been removed from Apple’s China App Store, two weeks ahead of the country’s new generative AI regulations that are set to take effect on August 15.

The move came after Chinese developers received notices from Apple informing them of their apps’ removal. In its letter to OpenCat, a native ChatGPT client, Apple cited “content that is illegal in China” as the reason for pulling the app.

In July, China announced a set of measures to regulate generative AI services, including API providers. The rules require AI apps operating in China to obtain an administrative license, which is reflected in Apple’s removal notice.

“As you may know, the government has been tightening regulations associated with deep synthesis technologies (DST) and generative AI services, including ChatGPT. DST must fulfill permitting requirements to operate in China, including securing a license from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT),” Apple said to OpenCat. “Based on our review, your app is associated with ChatGPT, which does not have requisite permits to operate in China.”

The popular tech blogger @foxshuo tweeted screenshots showing supposedly more than 100 AI apps that have been removed from the China App Store. TechCrunch confirmed that several of those apps indeed couldn’t be found in the China App Store.

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Twitter Blue subscribers can now hide their blue checks • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

Twitter Blue, which Elon Musk is currently rebranding to X Blue, now includes the option to hide the notorious blue checkmark. Twitter Blue subscribers recently started noticing the “hide your blue checkmark” option on the web and in mobile apps, offering the ability to hide that they’re paying for Twitter and avoid memes about how “this mf paid for twitter.”

“The checkmark will be hidden on your profile and posts,” notes a Twitter support article. “The checkmark may still appear in some places and some features could still reveal you have an active subscription. Some features may not be available while your checkmark is hidden.”

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You pay so that you can look like all the other people who don’t pay? More and more mad.
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Uber’s business is finally making money after years of losses • WSJ

Preetika Rana:

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Uber Technologies UBER -5.68%decrease; red down pointing triangle posted its first-ever operating profit in the second quarter, a milestone in its long-term efforts to stem losses in its businesses carrying people and delivering food.

The results for the three months through June were driven by solid growth in both of Uber’s core businesses, as the number of rides in the U.S. and Canada surpassed prepandemic levels for the first time and demand for delivery stayed strong despite restaurant reopenings.

The quarter was the first since Uber’s 2009 founding that it reported its underlying operations were profitable. The easy availability of capital for much of the past decade had Uber and others burning tens of billions of dollars in an attempt to gain market share.

From 2016 through the first quarter of this year, Uber has collectively reported close to $30 billion in operating losses, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.

“For most of our history, profitable wasn’t the first thing that came up when you asked someone about Uber,” Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi said on a Tuesday call with analysts. “In fact, many observers over the years boldly claimed that we would never make any money…But we knew they were wrong,” he added.

«

It’s 12 paragraphs before you actually get the numbers:

»

Uber posted a profit of $394m during the second quarter, compared with a loss of $2.60bn a year earlier. That came in better than the $18m loss that analysts polled by FactSet had expected and was driven predominantly by its operating profit, which totaled $326m. Wall Street expects Uber to continue recording an operating profit for the rest of the year.

Uber’s revenue rose 14% to $9.23bn, a slight miss from what analysts had expected. Its gross bookings—or the total value of transactions on its app—grew 16% to $33.60bn, beating expectations.

«

So that’s a 4% profit; an operating profit of 3.5%. It’s going to be a long time before all those sunk losses are paid off.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In Edinburgh, limiting vehicle speeds to 20mph dramatically reduced deaths and injuries. And now the PM wants.. to increase them again? CC-licensed photo by Eli Christman 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. Whoa, horsey. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

A room-temperature superconductor? New developments • Science

Derek Lowe is updating this page:

»

As of this morning, there are (as yet not really verified) reports of replication from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China. At least, a video has been posted showed what could be a sample of LK-99 levitating over a magnet due to the Meissner effect, and in different orientations relative to the magnet itself. That’s important, because a (merely!) paramagnetic material can levitate in a sufficiently strong field (as can diamagnetic materials like water droplets and frogs), but these can come back to a particular orientation like a compass needle.

Superconductors are “perfect diamagnets”, excluding all magnetic fields, and that’s a big difference. The “Meissner effect” that everyone has been hearing about so much is observed when a material first becomes superconductive at the right temperature and expels whatever magnetic fields were penetrating it at the time. All this said, we’re having to take the video on the statements of whoever made/released it, and there are other possible explanations for the it that do not involve room-temperature superconductivity. I will be very happy if this is a real replication, but I’m not taking the day off yet to celebrate just based on this.

And even though I’m usually more of an experimental-results guy than a theory guy, two other new preprints interest me greatly. One is from a team at the Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science, and the other is from Sinéad Griffin at Lawrence Berkeley. Both start from the reported X-ray structural data of LK-99 and look at its predicted behavior via density functional theory (DFT) calculations. And they come to very similar conclusions: it could work.

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He concludes that he’s “guardedly optimistic” at this point.
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Study: insect protein slows weight gain, boosts health status in obese mice • Medical Xpress

Lauren Quinn:

»

A new study in mice from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign suggests replacing traditional protein sources with mealworms in high-fat diets could slow weight gain, improve immune response, reduce inflammation, enhance energy metabolism, and beneficially alter the ratio of good to bad cholesterol.

“In addition to more dietary fiber, nutritionists also recommend eating more high-quality proteins as part of a weight management plan. We knew from an earlier study in roosters that mealworms are a high quality, highly digestible protein source that’s also environmentally sustainable,” said lead study author Kelly Swanson, professor in the Department of Animal Sciences and interim director of the Division of Nutritional Sciences, both in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) at U. of I.

Swanson’s team fed mice a high-fat diet (46% calories from fat) with casein, a protein from dairy, for 12 weeks before switching to the alternative proteins. Another group, the control, consumed a lean diet with casein throughout the experiment. By the time mealworms were introduced, the high-fat diet group was obese and experiencing metabolic syndrome, a cluster of conditions increasing risk of heart attack, stroke, diabetes, and other health problems.

The mice then started eating two types of mealworms in a dried, powdered form similar to flour, substituting either 50% or 100% of the casein in the diet. During and after 8 weeks on the experimental diets, the research team measured body weight, body composition, blood metabolites, and gene expression of the liver and adipose (fat) tissue.

Mealworm protein didn’t cause obese mice to lose weight, but their rate of weight gain slowed relative to mice consuming high-fat diets with casein.

«

It’s the mealworms or Ozempic! Somehow I’m not confident people will go for the mealworms.
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News Corp using AI to produce 3,000 Australian local news stories a week • The Guardian

Amanda Meade:

»

News Corp Australia is producing 3,000 articles a week using generative artificial intelligence, executive chair Michael Miller has revealed.

Miller told the World News Media Congress in Taipei that a team of four staff use the technology to generate thousands of local stories each week on weather, fuel prices and traffic conditions, according to a report in Mediaweek.

The unit, Data Local, is led by News Corp’s data journalism editor Peter Judd and many of the stories carry his byline.

The unit supplements the copy written by reporters for the companies’ 75 “hyperlocal” mastheads across the country including in Penrith, Lismore, Fairfield, Bundaberg and Cairns.

Stories such as “Where to find the cheapest fuel in Penrith” are created using AI but overseen by journalists, according to a spokesperson from News Corp. There is no disclosure on the page that the reports are compiled using AI.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup
The spokesperson confirmed Miller had made the comments at a conference last month and said it would be more accurate to describe the “3,000 articles” as providing service information.

“For example, for some years now we have used automation to update local fuel prices several times daily as well as daily court lists, traffic and weather, death and funeral notices,” the spokesperson said.

“I’d stress that all such information and decisions are overseen by working journalists from the Data Local team.”

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It’s all coming up AI journalism, isn’t it? Aftonbladet yesterday, and now this and the next link which brings it closer to (your British) home.
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Editor’s letter: Nottinghamshire Live launches AI trial • Nottinghamshire Live

Natalie Fahy:

»

At Nottinghamshire Live we always aim to give our readers the best experience. Whether that’s being first with breaking news, or offering you insight and opinion on what’s going on in your neighbourhood, we pride ourselves on being the biggest and most trusted source of news in Nottinghamshire.

We also like to try and take advantage of new developments in our industry when the opportunity presents, and if we think it will be right for us and for readers.

That’s the reason I am writing to you today: to let you know about a new experiment we are running across our site involving Artificial Intelligence tools.

You might see a bullet point summary at the top of some of our longer articles, which we hope will help you get a sense of what you’re about to read and improve the experience for you.

These have been generated using an AI tool, and will always be checked over by a news editor before being added to articles. Any article published with this summary will have a sentence at the bottom to let you know AI has been used too. You can see one of the first ones we tried here.

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My 2p: the summary almost doubles the length of the article. But at least it’s accurate.
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Treating beef like coal would make a big dent in greenhouse-gas emissions

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The impact of food on greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions can slip under the radar. In a survey in Britain last year, the share of respondents saying that “producing plants and meat on farms” was a “significant contributor” to climate change was the lowest among ten listed activities. Yet two papers published this year in Nature Food find that food, especially beef, creates more GHGs than previously thought. Forgoing steaks may be one of the most efficient ways to reduce your carbon footprint.

In 2019 the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that the global food system was responsible for 21-37% of GHG emissions. This March researchers from the European Commission and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Office released a study with a central estimate near the top of this range. It attributed 34% of GHGs produced in 2015 to food.

This elevated share stems in part from accounting choices. The paper assigns the full impact of deforestation to the agriculture that results from it; includes emissions after food is sold (such as from waste and cooking); and counts non-food crops like cotton. But even when the authors excluded embedded emissions from sources like transport and packaging, they still found that agriculture generated 24% of GHGs. According to the World Resources Institute (a research group), cars, trains, ships and planes produce a total of 16%.

Another recent paper, by Xiaoming Xu of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and eight co-authors, allocates this impact among 171 crops and 16 animal products. It finds that animal-based foods account for 57% of agricultural ghgs, versus 29% for food from plants. Beef and cow’s milk alone made up 34%. Combined with the earlier study’s results, this implies that cattle produce 12% of GHG emissions.

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If we are going to eat meat.. chicken?
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TikTok has pushed Chinese propaganda ads to millions across Europe • Forbes

Iain Martin and Emily Baker-White:

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TikTok has served up a flood of ads from Chinese state propaganda outlets to millions of Europeans in recent months, according to a new ad library published by the company on July 20. The promotions range in topic from defenses of Chinese Covid-19 lockdowns to adorable cats playing on the Great Wall of China to efforts to recast the country’s Xinjiang region — where it has persecuted and detained more than one million mostly Muslim Uyghurs — as a spectacular tourist destination.

An analysis of the ad library conducted by Forbes showed that as of Wednesday, July 26, more than 1,000 ads from Chinese state media outlets like People’s Daily and CGTN have run on the platform since October 2022. They have been served to millions of users across Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, and the United Kingdom. The ad library does not yet display data on ads presented to users in the United States, Canada, Australia, and other countries outside of Europe.

Much of the content advertised by China state media on TikTok focused on frequent talking points from its TV, radio and print outlets that tout China’s economy, technology and cultural heritage. References to Xinjiang, where the U.S. government have branded the Chinese government’s campaign of mass repression, imprisonment and “reeducation” as a genocide, appeared in 92 of the 124 adverts promoted by one state media account.

One ad, shown in March, was paid for by China News International and featured a man doing a traditional dance under the caption “Xinjiang is a good place!”

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So we’re worried about the content that TikTok is pushing to us, and we’re worried about the adverts that TikTok is pushing to us. Good job, everyone.
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Twitter threatens to sue Center for Countering Digital Hate over research • The New York Times

Sheera Frenkel and Ryan Mac:

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In a blog post Monday evening, X announced that it had filed a lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate for “actively working to prevent free expression.” The suit was filed in federal court in the Northern District of California.

Twitter’s advertising business has been struggling under the ownership of Mr. Musk, who bought the company last year. US ad revenue for the five weeks from April 1 to the first week of May was $88m, down 59% from a year earlier. Advertisers may have been spooked by Mr. Musk’s changes to the social network, including the removal of rules of what can or can’t be said on the service and more ads featuring online gambling and marijuana products.

In May, Mr. Musk hired Linda Yaccarino, a former top advertising executive for NBCUniversal, to become Twitter’s chief executive.

The letter was at least the third legal threat or action by X Corp. in the last two months. In May, it sent a letter to Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, accusing the tech giant of improperly using its data. This month, it also sent a letter to Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, saying it had copied Twitter’s trade secrets when creating Threads, a new social app.

X also sued Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, a leading corporate law firm, this month over what it said were unjust payments related to Mr. Musk’s $44bn acquisition of Twitter.

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The update here is Twitter actually suing, after exchanging nastygrams over the weekend. Quite the collection of lawsuits it’s collecting there.
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Mitch McConnell’s ‘sandbag’ moment stokes anxiety over US gerontocracy • Financial Times

Lauren Fedor:

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McConnell, who had a lengthy absence from the Senate this year after suffering a fall at an event at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Washington, is far from the US Senate’s oldest member. That title belongs to Dianne Feinstein, the 90-year-old California Democrat. Chuck Grassley, the Republican senior senator from Iowa, is 89.

Feinstein’s age has been a particular cause for consternation after the Democratic lawmaker was absent from Congress for an extended period following a bout of shingles. She has appeared strikingly frail since returning to Capitol Hill and doubts over her cognitive abilities linger.

This week, she looked confused about what to do during a committee hearing, until a Democratic colleague, Patty Murray of Washington, instructed her to “just say ‘aye’”.

Meanwhile, at 80 years old, Biden has set the record for the oldest person elected US president. He will be 86 at the end of his second four-year term if he wins re-election.

Biden’s age and insinuations about his mental acuity have become a regular theme in Republican attacks on the president, especially on social media, even though the party’s frontrunner Donald Trump is just three years younger than the president.

In a Harvard Caps/Harris poll of about 2,000 registered voters this month 68% — including 43% of Democrats — thought Biden was “showing he is too old to be president”, up from 66% in June.

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Does an ageing population deserve ageing politicians? Surely not this old.
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Supermarket plastic bag charge has led to 98% drop in use in England, data shows • The Guardian

Damien Gayle:

»

Environmental campaigners have called on the government to learn from its own successes after official figures showed the use of single-use supermarket plastic bags had fallen 98% since retailers in England began charging for them in 2015.

Annual distribution of plastic carrier bags by seven leading grocery chains plummeted from 7.6bn in 2014 to 133m last year, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said on Monday.

Rebecca Pow, the minister for environmental quality and resilience, said the policy had “helped to stop billions of single-use carrier bags littering our neighbourhoods or heading to landfill”. The government claimed the average person in England now bought just two single-use carrier bags a year from major retailers.

Campaigners welcomed the finding but said the statistic did not account for all types of plastic bag . They also questioned the timing of the announcement, made as experts said plans for 100 new North Sea oil and gas wells, announced the same day by the prime minister would “send a wrecking ball through the UK’s climate commitments”.

A 5p charge for carrier bags was introduced in English supermarkets in 2015. In 2021, the charge was increased to 10p and extended to all businesses. Since then, the number of plastic bags used across all retailers had fallen 35%, from 627m in 2019-20 to 406m in 2022-23, Defra said.

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Interesting to see how things have changed. Back in 2014, Surfers Against Sewage were campaigning for the charge to be introduced, and for exemptions not to be allowed. The problem was they had to persuade the new Secretary of State for the Environment – at the time, a certain Liz Truss. Whatever happened to her, I wonder.
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Slowing city traffic cuts road deaths by a quarter, study shows • NIHR

»

Restricting a city’s speed limits to 20mph can reduce road deaths by almost a quarter, NIHR-funded research finds. [NIHR = National Institute of Health and Care Research]

Accident rates across Edinburgh fell without extra traffic-calming measures and police patrols. Serious injuries fell by a third too, the study showed. Replacing speed limit signs improved road safety and enhanced residents’ quality of life. The speed limit scheme was cost-effective, researchers say.

Before the new restrictions, 45 out of 100 cars in Edinburgh travelled above 25 mph. One year later, the figure had dropped to 31. Average speeds on affected roads also fell.

The number of collisions in one year fell by 40% to 367, and there were 409 fewer casualties – a drop of 39%. Fatalities dropped by 23% and serious injuries fell by 33%.

Experts at Edinburgh University led the study. It is the UK’s most extensive evaluation of 20mph speed limits so far. They worked with local and national traffic authorities to gauge the effectiveness of 20mph restrictions. The City of Edinburgh Council introduced the speed limits scheme in 2016.

The scheme applied to 80% of Edinburgh’s streets aiming to cut accidents. It aimed to encourage more walking and cycling and create more pleasant neighbourhoods. Researchers also assessed a smaller scheme in Belfast. This found reducing traffic speed also helps create better quality environments.

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This was published back in October 2022, but seems relevant as Rishi Sunak appears hell-bent on raising the speed limit to 50 in those locations. The study is here, and covers 2000 to 2018 – so not including the pandemic.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Can AI disrupt the books business? All the signs are… no. But the reasons why are interesting. CC-licensed photo by Martin Hearn on Flickr.

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

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

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

Why generative AI won’t disrupt books • WIRED

Elizabeth Minkel:

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Last month, Justine Moore, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, provided a sort of bookend to Munjal’s “AI-animated books” proposal. “The three largest fanfic sites—[Archive of Our Own], Fanfiction.net, and Wattpad—get 3 billion-plus annual visits in the US alone,” she wrote. “Imagine how much bigger this market could be if you could chat with characters vs. reading static stories?” The thread was likely a reference to Character.ai, a startup that lets users chat with fictional heroes and villains; Andreessen Horowitz led a $150 million funding round for the company in March. The comment also came after the revelation that large language models (LLMs) may have scraped fanfiction writers’ work—which is largely written and shared for free—causing an (understandable) uproar in many fan communities.

Setting aside the fact that fandom role-playing has been a popular practice for decades, Moore’s statements felt like a distillation of tech’s tortured relationship with narrative prose. There are many kinds of fanfiction—including an entire subgenre in which “you” are a character in the story. But those are still stories, sentences deliberately written and arranged in a way that lets you lose yourself in an authored narrative. “Imagine having such a fundamental misunderstanding of the appeal of reading fanfiction—let alone reading fiction more broadly,” I wrote in response to her thread. What’s so wrong with people enjoying reading plain old words on a page?

…One reason books haven’t been particularly disruptable might be that many of the people looking to “fix” things couldn’t actually articulate what was broken—whether through their failure to see the real problems facing the industry (namely, Amazon’s stranglehold), or their insistence that books are not particularly enjoyable as a medium. “It’s that arrogance, to come into a community you know nothing about, that you might have studied as you study for an MBA, and think that you can revolutionize anything,” says writer and longtime book-industry observer Maris Kreizman. “There were so many false problems that tech guys created that we didn’t actually have.”

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So classic: (figurative) tech bros thinking they know why people like something better than the people who like it do.
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Twitter accused of bullying anti-hate campaigners • BBC News

Chris Vallance:

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Since Mr Musk took over Twitter, the platform has been accused – including by former employees – of not doing enough to counter hate-speech and misinformation. Conversely, in December Mr Musk tweeted that hate speech was down by a third.

On Sunday the platform reinstated Kanye West after an almost eight-month ban for a series of offensive tweets – one of which appeared to show a symbol combining a swastika and the Star of David.

In the letter to the CCDH [Center for Countering Digital Hate], X Corp lawyer Alex Spiro rejected the campaign group’s allegations that Twitter “fails to act on 99%” of hateful messages from accounts with Twitter Blue subscriptions.

Mr Spiro criticised the organisation’s methodology, writing that “the article is little more than a series of inflammatory, misleading, and unsupported claims based on a cursory review of random tweets.”

He also alleged that CCDH was supported by funding from “X Corp’s commercial competitors, as well as government entities and their affiliates”.

The letter accused the organisation of attempting to drive away advertisers and said X Corp was considering legal action. The company has lost lost almost half of its advertising revenue since his $44bn (£33.6bn) takeover, Mr Musk revealed in July.

In its reply CCDH’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan said the allegations in the “ridiculous letter” had no basis in fact but were “a disturbing effort to intimidate those who have the courage to advocate against incitement, hate speech and harmful content online”.

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Musk’s rather bizarre “free speech for me but not for thee” principles aside, it might be hard for the CCDH to prove its case; accessing the API for the full feed would be incredibly expensive. It’s working on a sample.
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More than 50m Americans under alert as heatwave persists • The Guardian

Erum Salam:

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Over 50 million Americans remain under a heat advisory in one of the hottest summers ever recorded, and a heatwave continues to affect vast parts of the country. Nasa recently confirmed June was the hottest June ever.

The hot and dry weather in the south-west of the US has set off a wave of wildfires. California and Nevada are currently battling a major fire that is uncontrolled. Another out-of-control fire that originated in Washington state has spread into Canada, forcing residents in the town of Osoyoos, British Columbia, to evacuate.

Sunday marked the 31st consecutive day where temperatures reached at least 110F (43.3C) in Phoenix, Arizona. The city’s previous record was 18 days in June 1974.

Doctors in the region reported a rise in first-, second-, and third-degree contact-burn cases, some fatal, amid extreme heat conditions. The reports of severe burn incidents came from hospitals in Arizona and Nevada, where deaths from heat-related conditions have surged.

In Texas, San Antonio hit an all-time high of 117F in June.

Bodies of water around the world are experiencing a phenomenon known as “marine heatwave”, when waters warm to unprecedented levels. A sharp rise in temperatures has been seen in the Caribbean Basin, the Atlantic, and the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the already fragile ecosystems of marine life, particularly coral reefs. The conditions cause coral to bleach, and in many cases, die.

Andrew Baker, director of the Coral Reef Futures Lab at the University of Miami told the Washington Post: “This is definitely the worst bleaching event Florida has ever seen.”

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Radical ways to fix the Earth: are they magic bullets or just band-aids? • The Guardian

Robin McKie:

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“The problem is that climate change itself is already one huge experiment on our planet,” said Prof David Reiner of Cambridge University. “Now we are trying to combat that experiment with other experiments. That will have unknown consequences.

“On the other hand, I take solace from the fact that many more scientific minds are now turning to these problems, that more research is being started, and that a lot more public and private funding is going into ways of tackling global warming so there is room, in the long run, for some optimism.”

However, it is the second form of geoengineering – solar radiation modification (SRM) – that causes most unease. Among the proposed SRM projects are schemes that would scatter the upper atmosphere with tiny reflective particles, such as sulphate aerosols, which could then reflect sunlight back into space. Alternatively, this could be done by placing huge mirrors into orbit around Earth.

The problem is that such schemes would still allow carbon dioxide to build up in the planet’s atmosphere. The world might cool a little as sunlight was diminished, but how this would affect weather patterns is not clear. Carbon dioxide would still have to be removed some time in the future. More and more carbon dioxide would dissolve in the sea and ocean acidification would continue to intensify, triggering even more damage to coral reefs and other marine ecosystems.

Dismissing SRM technology, Prof Joeri Rogelj of Imperial College, London, called it “irresponsible, dangerous and a threat to the manageability” of our survival, saying: “It is not a solution but an extremely dangerous band-aid that covers up the global warming problem without healing it, creating a false and unwarranted sense of climate safety while the core of the problem continues to fester.”

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This probably means that tons of venture capital money is going to go into SRM projects, and Elon Musk will launch one.
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The fall of Stack Overflow, explained • Devmoh

Priyam:

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There are four reasons that explain the slow decline of Stack Overflow.

1. The Google Analytics Change: The first reason is actually the quickest reason. Stack Overflow hasn’t actually lost 50% of its traffic, its more like 35%. In May 2022, Google Analytics changed how a cookie was stored due to privacy laws, leading to a reported 15% loss in traffic. The link above has an update clearing this up.

2. Stack Overflow is hostile to its users: For a place to ask questions, Stack Overflow is surprisingly one of the most toxic and hostile forums on the internet, but in a passive-aggressive way. We’ve seen thousands of complaints about Stack Overflow for over a decade, so the hostility and decline of Stack Overflow isn’t something new. 

There are hundreds of Reddit posts about Stack Overflow’s hostility. People have been talking about the “Decline of Stack Overflow” for almost a decade now. But it seems to have finally stuck.

This was from 14 YEARS ago! 2009! The site its linking too doesn’t even exist anymore.
Often, if you try to ask a question on Stack Overflow, it’ll get marked as a duplicate with a link to a question that is absolutely not a duplicate. Or the duplicate will be to a question that was never answered. 

Other times, valid questions will get downvoted. If you try to answer, you get downvoted. If you try to post a comment.. wait, you can’t! Because you don’t have enough karma.

For a community that is so gate-kept through imaginary Internet points, there is an incredible amount of disrespect on the forums not through just voting, but also through people commenting, such as people passive-aggressively calling you dumb.

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Other reasons: Google’s ranking Stack Overflow lower; and yes, AI is having an effect on it. Since November, traffic has fallen a lot.
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Facebook to unmask anonymous Dutch user accused of repeated defamatory posts • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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Starting today, Facebook users may feel a little less safe posting anonymously. The Court of the Hague in The Netherlands ruled that Meta Ireland must unmask an anonymous user accused of defaming the claimant, a male Facebook user who allegedly manipulated and made secret recordings of women he dated.

The anonymous Facebook user posted the allegedly defamatory statements in at least two private Facebook groups dedicated to discussing dating experiences. The claimant could not gain access but was shown screenshots from the groups, one with about 2,600 members and one with around 61,000 members. The claimant argued that his reputation had suffered from the repeated postings that included photos of the man and alleged screenshots of his texts.

The claimant tried to get Meta to remove the posts, but Meta responded with an email saying that it would not do so because “it is not clear to us that the content you reported is unlawful as defamation.”

At that point, Meta suggested that the man contact the anonymous user directly to resolve the matter, triggering the lawsuit against Meta. Initially, the claimant asked the court to order Meta to delete the posts, identify the anonymous user, and flag any posts in other private Facebook groups that could defame the claimant.

While arguing the case, Meta had defended the anonymous user’s right to freedom of expression, but the court decided that the claimant—whose name is redacted in court documents—deserved an opportunity to challenge the allegedly defamatory statements.

Partly for that reason, the court ordered Meta to provide “basic subscriber information” on the anonymous user, including their username, as well as any names, email addresses, or phone numbers associated with their Facebook account.

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Generative AI and the future of work in America • McKinsey

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• By 2030, activities that account for up to 30% of hours currently worked across the US economy could be automated—a trend accelerated by generative AI. However, we see generative AI enhancing the way STEM, creative, and business and legal professionals work rather than eliminating a significant number of jobs outright. Automation’s biggest effects are likely to hit other job categories. Office support, customer service, and food service employment could continue to decline.

• Federal investment to address climate and infrastructure, as well as structural shifts, will also alter labor demand. The net-zero transition will shift employment away from oil, gas, and automotive manufacturing and into green industries for a modest net gain in employment. Infrastructure projects will increase demand in construction, which is already short almost 400,000 workers today. We also see increased demand for healthcare workers as the population ages, plus gains in transportation services due to e-commerce.

• An additional 12 million occupational transitions may be needed by 2030. As people leave shrinking occupations, the economy could reweight toward higher-wage jobs. Workers in lower-wage jobs are up to 14 times more likely to need to change occupations than those in highest-wage positions, and most will need additional skills to do so successfully. Women are 1.5 times [ie 50%? – Overspill Ed.] more likely to need to move into new occupations than men.

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There’s a graphic, a fair way further down, showing how much McKinsey thinks is going to be done by generative AI across multiple sectors. The biggest (forecast) changes are in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), education and workforce training, and creative and arts management.
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War in Ukraine spurs revolution in drone warfare using AI • The Washington Post

John Hudson and Kostiantyn Khudov:

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Ukraine, which is known for agriculture and other heavy industry, is not an obvious setting for drone innovation. The exigencies of war, however, have turned the country into a kind of super lab of invention, attracting investment from vaunted business luminaries including former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt. More than 200 Ukrainian companies involved in drone production are now working hand-in-glove with military units on the front lines to tweak and augment drones to improve their ability to kill and spy on the enemy.

“This is a 24/7 technology race,” Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said in an interview at his office in Kyiv, the capital. “The challenge is that every product in every category must be changed daily to gain an advantage.”

Fedorov, 32, is in charge of Ukraine’s “Army of Drones” program, an effort to maximize Kyiv’s use of reconnaissance and attack drones to offset Russia’s big advantage in air and artillery power.

The program has assisted private companies in training more than 10,000 drone operators in the past year, with the goal of training an additional 10,000 over the next six months.

Russia’s air force is estimated to be 10 times larger than Ukraine’s, but Kyiv has kept much of it grounded after shooting down several fighter jets in the opening days of the conflict. Drones have allowed Ukraine to surveil and hit sensitive targets far behind enemy lines while improving the accuracy of its conventional artillery.

Drones have far less firepower than fighter jets, however, which is why Kyiv has requested F-16s and other big-ticket items such as ATACMS (shorthand for Army Tactical Missile System) long-range missile systems. In the meantime, cultivating a domestic drone industry is a top priority.

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Threads has to change user habits to compete with Twitter • Quartz

Scott Nover:

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Joseph Bayer, an assistant professor at Ohio State University’s school of communication, says that Twitter and Instagram are culturally very different spaces, but also not necessarily overlapping networks. Instagram is more centered around shopping, influencers, and visuals, while Twitter is centered more around news, sports, and its Black community. “It depends how much overlap people have in their Twitter and Instagram,” he said. “These are very different networks.”

Bayer wasn’t surprised that I keep forgetting about Threads. In order to switch fully from Twitter to Threads, I would need to reap social rewards from Threads. And he’s noticed that engagement on the app—such as likes, reposts, and replies—still seem paltry as compared to Twitter.

But he also said that I’m not just talking about building a new habit with Threads, but also ditching an old one with Twitter. “Even if you remove some of the rewards—which, for many people, it’s become much more of a mixture of positive, negative, and neutral rewards—you’re still driven to that because you have hard-wired that automatic behavior,” Bayer said. “There are certain cues you’ve developed, whether it’s boredom or anxiety or just fear of missing out on some new idea or informational lens that triggers you automatically without any deliberation.”

There’s one other big reason that Maddox, on the other hand, thinks users might be struggling with when they use Threads: app fatigue, which happens when users get tired from using too many apps—and too many new apps.

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App fatigue is definitely a thing. Plus the huge overlap in content, which makes you wonder why you’re on this app rather than that one. When social media was new, there was a lot less content to pick from; it was a new and expanding frontier. Not any more.
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Who paid for a mysterious spy tool? The FBI, an FBI inquiry found • The New York Times

Mark Mazzetti, Ronen Bergman and Adam Goldman:

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When The New York Times reported in April that a contractor had purchased and deployed a spying tool made by NSO, the contentious Israeli hacking firm, for use by the US government, White House officials said they were unaware of the contract and put the FBI in charge of figuring out who might have been using the technology.

After an investigation, the FBI uncovered at least part of the answer: it was the FBI.

The deal for the surveillance tool between the contractor, Riva Networks, and NSO was completed in November 2021. Only days before, the Biden administration had put NSO on a Commerce Department blacklist, which effectively banned US firms from doing business with the company. For years, NSO’s spyware had been abused by governments around the world.

This particular tool, known as Landmark, allowed government officials to track people in Mexico without their knowledge or consent.

The FBI now says that it used the tool unwittingly and that Riva Networks misled the bureau. Once the agency discovered in late April that Riva had used the spying tool on its behalf, Christopher Wray, the FBI director, terminated the contract, according to US officials.

But many questions remain. Why did the FBI hire this contractor — which the bureau had previously authorized to purchase a different NSO tool under a cover name — for sensitive information-gathering operations outside the United States? And why was there apparently so little oversight?

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Left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. A bit amazing that the ban didn’t percolate through, though. (Thanks G for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified