Women runners are setting new records at longer distances, with the marathon the latest to go. What’s behind their newfound success? (It’s not drugs.) CC-licensed photo by Marco Verch Professional Photographer on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 10 links for you. On your marks, gone. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Threads: charles_arthur. Observations and links welcome.

What will replace smartphones? Experts reveal the unsettling reality • Inverse

Marc Saltzman:

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The near future is even more impressive. Humane’s AI Pin, for example, is a small device you can attach to your shirt or jacket, and it works as a nonphysical smartphone by projecting calls, messages, and info from apps onto a surface (like your hand). As covered by Inverse, this “clothing-based wearable” houses a microphone for hearing your requests, speakers for relaying info (like a smart speaker), and cameras to scan surroundings (in one demo, a chocolate bar is held up to the device and the AI reads its contents and caloric information).

Powered by artificial intelligence, this screenless solution will also have location data and contextual awareness, so you can ask it to tell you the weather or give you directions to walk to the closest Dunkin’ Donuts.

That’s Humane’s grand vision to make everyone more present with reality again, according to the company. “For the human-technology relationship to actually evolve beyond screens, we need something radically different,” said Imran Chaudhri, Humane’s chairman and president, during a TED Talk introducing the “screenless, seamless, sensing” wearable device.

The AI Pin hasn’t launched yet, and nobody outside of the company has used it, so it’s impossible to say whether the wearable is a smartphone replacement or not. It is the most hyped phone alternative, though, simply because Humane’s ranks consist of so many ex-Apple veterans who designed iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, and Macs.

Similarly, Alexa-powered glasses called Echo Frames can be activated with its wake word and serve as a personal assistant on the go — but they also require a nearby smartphone to do the heavy lifting, via a Bluetooth connection.

…“I don’t think it’ll be a one-size-fits-all scenario but likely a combination of ambient computing, where things around us and a combination of wearables and other devices around us, with or without screens, as well as putting something on our face,” says [Creative Strategies president, Carolina] Milanesi, with a laugh.

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I don’t think Humane will get any takeup. Ambient computing, sure (already here); smart glasses, surely. When is a different question.
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India’s weather influencers are faster than official channels • Rest of World

Raksha Kumar:

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One reason for the weather influencers’ success is their hyperlocal approach. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) publishes its weather predictions for entire districts, across a radius of hundreds of kilometres, while people are seeking “data that is zoomed in,” Kirthiga Murugesan, a crop-weather modelling enthusiast and a PhD student at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, told Rest of World.

Umashankar Das is a scientist at the IMD’s branch in the eastern city of Bhubaneswar. He told Rest of World the state does not have the manpower or resources to do the kind of localized work that weather influencers do, contributing to their popularity among the public. “If IMD gives out data that contradicts the predictions of the local weather predictor, they tend to believe the local person,” Das said.

Murugesan is testing a weather model that collects data every four kilometers in the Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu. She shares it with local farmers on a WhatsApp group daily and alerts them to changes in the weather patterns. “If a farmer puts fertilizer in his crop and it rains, it is a waste of his money,” said Murugesan, whose father is a sugarcane and rice farmer in Tamil Nadu’s Thanjavur district.

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“Weather influencers” (not people who influence the weather, but who other people think are worth listening to) are a thing now.
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Computer science is no longer the safe major • The Atlantic

Kelli María Korducki:

»

computer-science degrees, and certainly not English, have long been sold to college students as among the safest paths toward 21st-century job security. Coding jobs are plentiful across industries, and the pay is good—even after the tech layoffs of the past year. The average starting salary for someone with a computer-science degree is significantly higher than that of a mid-career English graduate, according to the Federal Reserve; at Google, an entry-level software engineer reportedly makes $184,000, and that doesn’t include the free meals, massages, and other perks.

Perhaps nothing has defined higher education over the past two decades more than the rise of computer science and STEM. Since 2016, enrollment in undergraduate computer-science programs has increased nearly 49 percent. Meanwhile, humanities enrollments across the United States have withered at a clip—in some cases, shrinking entire departments to nonexistence.

But that was before the age of generative AI. ChatGPT and other chatbots can do more than compose full essays in an instant; they can also write lines of code in any number of programming languages. You can’t just type make me a video game into ChatGPT and get something that’s playable on the other end, but many programmers have now developed rudimentary smartphone apps coded by AI. In the ultimate irony, software engineers helped create AI, and now they are the American workers who think it will have the biggest impact on their livelihoods, according to a new survey from Pew Research Center. So much for learning to code.

ChatGPT cannot yet write a better essay than a human author can, nor can it code better than a garden-variety developer, but something has changed even in the 10 months since its introduction.

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The question isn’t “will AI take over programming?” (it won’t) but “will average pay rates go down, and if so, how far?”
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Facebook let Indian pressure, and its profits, stop removal of violent content • The Washington Post

Joseph Menn and Gerry Shih:

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Nearly three years ago, Facebook’s propaganda hunters uncovered a vast social media influence operation that used hundreds of fake accounts to praise the Indian army’s crackdown in the restive border region of Kashmir and accuse Kashmiri journalists of separatism and sedition.

What they found next was explosive: the network was operated by the Indian army’s Chinar Corps, a storied unit garrisoned in the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley, the heart of Indian Kashmir and one of the most militarized regions in the world.

But when the US-based supervisor of Facebook’s Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB) unit told colleagues in India that the unit wanted to delete the network’s pages, executives in the New Delhi office pushed back. They warned against antagonizing the government of a sovereign nation over actions in territory it controls. They said they needed to consult local lawyers. They worried they could be imprisoned for treason.

Those objections staved off action for a full year while the Indian army unit continued to spread disinformation that put Kashmiri journalists in danger. The deadlock was resolved only when top Facebook executives intervened and ordered the fake accounts deleted.

“It was open-and-shut” that the Chinar Corps had violated Facebook’s rules against using fictional personas to surreptitiously promote a narrative, said an employee who worked on the Kashmir project. “That was the moment that almost broke CIB and almost made a bunch of us quit.”

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On the plus side, the execs in the US did the right thing: some years of getting it wrong have finally sunk in. But clearly, people in-country are still scared of ramifications.
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Why Linda Yaccarino took on the wildest job in Silicon Valley • Financial Times

Hannah Murphy:

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Musk, according to multiple former and current staffers, runs X from his iPhone. To break through, do not send him attachments or documents or spreadsheets. Put everything inside the body of the email. Find a way to make a simple graph fit inside the text box. Take screenshots and embed them. This is what survivors at X have learnt.

For many of the self-selecting group who signed up to the mandatory pledge to adhere to his “hardcore” working culture, going the distance at X has essentially meant adjusting to the working practices of one man. For Yaccarino, the calculation will be a similar one. “The smart thing for her to do is let Elon be Elon and work with it,” says a person with knowledge of their working relationship. “That’s the trade off of getting the CEO role she’s always wanted.”

Early on, Musk brought in a team of executives and staffers from elsewhere in his business empire, including Tesla and The Boring Company, to help steady the ship. Formally, they were dubbed the “transition team”. Informally, they were known as the “goons”, according to ex-staffers. Holdovers found Musk has no tolerance for people who make nonsensical statements in order to sound smart. If you do not know something, admit it, they were told by longtime Musk employees. (Then, tell him you will get back to him on the matter in a reasonable number of hours.) They discovered he cares about working with people who are directly responsible for tasks. (Middle managers were among the first laid off when Musk took the reins.)

Unwavering loyalty is a given. Musk is intensely paranoid about the risk of “saboteurs”, disenchanted employees who might deliberately harm the company. Suril Kantaria, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who headed finance as part of the transition team, reporting directly to Musk, says the billionaire has a “unique ability” to “create extreme urgency” that gets his team focused. “Wartime at any company is hard, but under Elon it’s next-level intense.”

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It’s a long piece principally about Yaccarino, but with little bits like this. She seems surprised, Murphy says, that anyone would ask about what it’s like to work with Musk. Kinda sorta related: “NFL issues statement in response to placement of its ads on white nationalist Twitter/X pages“.
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X can’t get story straight on election disinformation team • The Register

Brandon Vigliarolo:

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It’s only been a day since rumours began swirling that X, formerly Twitter, had disabled features allowing users to report election misinformation, and the confusion hasn’t been cleared up by duelling statements from platform owner Elon Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino.

Responding to researcher claims that X had eliminated the ability to report posts for election misinformation – or disinformation of any kind, based on this reporter’s look at the current post reporting options on X – Musk said yesterday that he had axed the entire team.

“Oh you mean the ‘Election Integrity’ Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone,” Musk posted on X. His statement goes beyond claims from unnamed Twitter insiders who told The Information that half the election integrity team, including its chief, had been chopped.

X CEO Yaccarino had an entirely different take when speaking at Vox’s Code Conference yesterday. Asked why X had cut the team, Yaccarino said it hadn’t. “It’s an issue we take very seriously,” Yaccarino reportedly said.

“And contrary to the comments that were made, there is a robust and growing team at X that is wrapping their arms around election integrity,” she added. Note that Yaccarino didn’t indicate whether it’s the same team that exists now.

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It’s just bonkers. I wouldn’t trust Yaccarino to have any idea, though I suspect the final clause is right: the election integrity team has been axed, and the task dumped on someone else’s desk.
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‘When I saw her time, I pinched myself!’ – why women’s running records are being smashed • The Guardian

Kate Carter:

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Manufacturers have thrown money at their R&D departments to catch up. The latest salvo was fired on Sunday when [Tigist] Assefa set her [women’s marathon world] record while wearing a pair of Adizero Adios Pro Evo 1s, Adidas’s lightest shoe yet, a limited number of which were available through a special draw this week at £400. They last just one marathon.

Environmental implications aside, for the running purist, the existence of supershoes has devalued the pursuit of records. While technology may always advance, they say, such is this step-change that it renders new times entirely meaningless.

But shoes are not the only new tech. There is also wave light technology – small flashing lights placed into the side of athletics tracks that can be set to a specific pace. It means that athletes gunning for a track record know they are on target, lap after grinding lap. Some complain that human pacers are better, others that any pacing at all is “against the spirit of the sport”.

“Technology across so many sports gets better as time passes,” says a former top British marathon runner, Richard Nerurkar. “And that’s what happened in athletics. We just have to accept that, and celebrate the achievements of these athletes, who are now able to run even faster because of technology.”

But to put performances (and times) purely down to shoes is to do athletes a disservice. You can’t just put on these shoes and become a world-beater. Elite runners train hard, month after month, year after year to reach new heights. And in fact, height may be the relevant word when it comes to east African dominance of the sport: most Ethiopians and Kenyans live and train at high altitude, where the lack of oxygen in the air forces the body to increase its red blood cell count. It means that when they return to sea level, they usually find performance is improved for a short period. That’s why elite athletes from around the world go to high-altitude training camps when preparing for big races.

But why are so many women’s records being broken now?

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The answer seems to be: more participation, especially by younger runners, attracted by the growing prizemoney. But technology is certainly playing a part too.
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Solar and wind farms can easily power the UK by 2050, scientists say • The Times

Adam Vaughan:

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Wind and solar power could comfortably supply all the UK’s energy needs by the middle of the century, according to a University of Oxford team.

The researchers calculated that the two renewable technologies could power the nation even after making a conservative estimate that accounted for the amount of land and sea available, energy storage needs, economics and a high future demand for energy.

The analysis found that the UK has enough wind and solar resources to generate 2,896 terawatt hours a year by 2050, or almost ten times today’s electricity needs.

The vast majority, 73%, would come from offshore wind farms, followed by utility-scale solar in fields at 19%. The Solar Energy Industries Association defines a solar project as utility-scale if it generates greater than 1 megawatt of solar energy.

Onshore wind farms, which the government this month promised to unblock in England by changing planning barriers, would supply about 7%.

Solar on rooftops would provide less than 1%, because it was assumed the technology would be largely confined to the south of Britain and only for south-facing rooftops.

The paper by the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment said wind and solar had been underestimated in Great Britain, and “predominant narratives that renewables are too expensive or impractical are wildly out of date”.

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Speaking of which…

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True cost of Net Zero for every household in Britain revealed amid PM’s green slowdown • The Sun

Ryan Sabey:

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Households face a net zero bill of £6,070 every year until 2050 despite Rishi Sunak’s green slowdown, it was claimed last night.

A study reveals the price tag could be more than triple official estimates and hit £4.5 trillion — 12 times the cost of Covid.

Report author Ewen Stewart says the public is “left in the dark” over the true cost which could plunge the UK into a financial meltdown.

The economist warned: “The UK’s approach is legally enforcing with little regard to the wider economic and societal impacts.”

The report by the Civitas think tank claims that the independent Climate Change Committee has vastly under- estimated costings.

It says the realistic cost of power generation, which includes doubling electricity output, will be £883bn plus £639bn in financing costs.

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This is included as an example of how absolute nonsense can get written up. The report’s author made a stunning mistake: he took the cost of installing a single wind turbine (around £1.3m per megawatt) and then three lines later said that was the cost per HOUR of the electricity it generates. Given that a turbine will have a lifespan of about 20 years, and there are 8,760 hours in a year, you can imagine that this overestimates the cost of wind by A LOT.

Yet I can’t find any news articles rebutting the Civitas report. Perhaps nobody thought it worth bothering with. But it got mentions in The Sun (widely read) and The Times (read, arguably, by decision makers). If junk like this poisons the discourse, we have a problem. Even worse: Stewart was warned by Simon Evans, an energy and environment journalist, that he had it wrong before publication. Evans’s Twitter thread on the whole farrago is worth reading. (Available here on a single page without requiring Twitter login.)

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UK go-ahead for North Sea oil and gas field angers environmental groups • The Guardian

Mark Sweney and Matthew Taylor:

»

Simon Francis, the coordinator of the End Fuel Poverty Coalition, said: “Hidden in the small print of the deal is that this project can only go ahead thanks to a massive tax break the government is giving to international oil and gas giant Equinor.

“Households struggling with their energy bills will be shocked that the new energy secretary has chosen to hand a multibillion-pound tax break to this Norwegian firm … Figures show that more North Sea production will only give us an extra year of domestic gas, which will be charged to struggling households at global market prices.”

Claire Coutinho, the secretary of state for energy security and net zero, said the UK needed to “be pragmatic”, with oil and gas forecast to still be needed for a quarter of the country’s energy needs in 2050.

“We will not play politics with our energy security,” she posted on X. “The choice we face is this: do we shut down our own oil and gas leaving us reliant on foreign regimes? Do we lose 200,000 jobs across the UK? Do we import fuel with much higher carbon footprints instead? And lose billions in tax revenue?

“We are a world leader at reducing carbon emissions but as much as we will be ambitious, we must be pragmatic.”

«

Francis’s comment about the tax break refers to a story from April about the project:

»

Equinor, the state-owned Norwegian company behind Rosebank, could receive an estimated £3.75bn of tax breaks and tax-funded incentives towards the estimated £4.1bn cost of the development, owing to loopholes in the government’s windfall tax on North Sea fossil fuels, according to estimates from the campaign group Uplift. About 80% of the fossil fuels produced by Rosebank are likely to be exploited, and the development could turn into a net loss of £100m to the UK taxpayer. [Emphasis added – Overspill Ed.]

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In Cuba, getting an iPhone or other Apple product repaired is quite the challenge. But there are those who rise to it. CC-licensed photo by Pedro Szekely on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Eh, it’ll wipe off. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Amazon faces antitrust lawsuit from FTC, US states • The Washington Post

Cat Zakrzewski, Will Oremus and Trisha Thadani:

»

The Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys general filed a sweeping antitrust lawsuit against Amazon on Tuesday alleging that the company abused its powers to squeeze merchants and thwart rivals — resulting in higher prices and lower-quality goods for the tens of millions of American households who regularly shop at the company’s online superstore.

Merchants who rely on Amazon to stay in business are forced to pay a range of fees that trickle down to consumers, the FTC argues in the suit. “Pay-to-play advertisements” clog its store and “[degrade] the services” it provides customers, the regulators allege.

The long-awaited lawsuit, filed in Western District of Washington court, marks a historic political test of one of the world’s most influential companies — as well as the regulators who have promised for years to rein in its allegedly monopolistic practices.

FTC Chair Lina Khan’s meteoric rise to the helm of the antitrust enforcement agency has been closely tied to the e-commerce company. She gained national attention while still a law school student for a paper titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” arguing the e-commerce giant evades scrutiny because of the relatively narrow way the courts have interpreted antitrust law. Her paper has been at the center of a broader political movement that argues monopoly law should be more creatively and aggressively enforced, extending beyond the prices consumers pay.

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There’s 172 pages of the lawsuit. (Enjoy!) Ben Thompson has an analysis (free to read) of the lawsuit, which to me boils down to “it’s going to be hard to prove antitrust via monopoly on this”.
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An old master? No, it’s an image AI just knocked up … and it can’t be copyrighted • The Guardian

Edward Helmore:

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The use of AI in art is facing a setback after a ruling that an award-winning image could not be copyrighted because it was not made sufficiently by humans.

The decision, delivered by the US copyright office review board, found that Théâtre d’Opéra Spatial, an AI-generated image that won first place at the 2022 Colorado state fair annual art competition, was not eligible because copyright protection “excludes works produced by non-humans”.

Artist Jason Allen claimed his use of the online AI-platform Midjourney allowed him to claim authorship of the image because he “entered a series of prompts, adjusted the scene, selected portions to focus on, and dictated the tone of the image”. But the board ruled that “if all of a work’s ‘traditional elements of authorship’ were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship, and the Office will not register it”.

Allen told the Pueblo Chieftain local newspaper that he “wanted to make a statement using artificial intelligence artwork. I feel like I accomplished that, and I’m not going to apologise for it.”

The decision comes as writers, actors, musicians and photographers claim AI is threatening their jobs, and follows a similar ruling last month in a US federal court that an image created by an AI computer system owned by Stephen Thaler could not be copyrighted because human beings are an “essential part of a valid copyright claim”.

US courts are now routinely referring to human authorship requirements under copyright law, noting, in a case called Urantia Found. v. Kristen Maaherra that “it is not creations of divine beings that the copyright laws were intended to protect.”

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How fascinating that AI systems are, in the eyes of the court, “divine beings”. For those worried about AI taking over the world, that might be enough to put the fear of.. gods into them.
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Microsoft is going nuclear to power its AI ambitions • The Verge

Justine Calma:

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Data centres already use a hell of a lot of electricity, which could thwart the company’s climate goals unless it can find clean sources of energy. Energy-hungry AI makes that an even bigger challenge for the company to overcome. AI dominated Microsoft’s Surface event last week.

Nuclear energy doesn’t create greenhouse gas emissions. Even so, it could also open up a whole new can of worms when it comes to handling radioactive waste and building up a uranium supply chain. The role nuclear energy ought to play in combatting climate change is still hotly debated, but Microsoft co-founder, Bill Gates, has long been a big fan of the technology.

Based on the new job listing, it looks like Microsoft is betting on advanced nuclear reactors to be the answer. The job posting says it’s hiring someone to “lead project initiatives for all aspects of nuclear energy infrastructure for global growth.”

Microsoft is specifically looking for someone who can roll out a plan for small modular reactors (SMR). All the hype around nuclear these days is around these next-generation reactors. Unlike their older, much larger predecessors, these modular reactors are supposed to be easier and cheaper to build. For comparison, the last large nuclear reactor to be built in the US finally came on line this summer roughly $17bn over budget after seven years of delays.

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Would be nice if Microsoft were to prove SMRs’ feasibility.
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The first foldable PC era is unfolding • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

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Lenovo launched the first foldable laptop in 2020, but the first real era of foldable PCs is only starting to unfold now. Today, LG became the latest OEM to announce a foldable-screen laptop, right after HP announced its first attempt, the Spectre Foldable PC, earlier this month.

LG only announced the Gram Fold in South Korea thus far. LG didn’t immediately respond when I asked if it has plans to release the machine in the US.

A Google translation of LG’s Korean announcement said the laptop is 9.4-mm (0.37in) thick when unfolded and used like a 17in tablet. Alternatively, the OLED PC can be folded in half to use like an approximately 12.2in laptop. In the latter form, a virtual keyboard can appear on the bottom screen, and you can dock a Bluetooth keyboard to the bottom screen or pair a keyboard with the system wirelessly. The screen has 1920×2560 pixels for a pixel density of 188.2 pixels per inch.

One draw of foldable PCs is supposed to be portability. The Gram Fold weighs 2.76lb (1.25kg), which is even lighter than LG’s latest Gram clamshell laptop (2.9lb, 1.32kg).

LG said the Gram Fold will release on October 4 for 4.99m won (about $3,726).

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I really don’t get the point. The screen being foldable is.. no different from a standard laptop, surely. The product and in-use shots in the picture don’t change my opinion. Foldables, both in phones and in laptops, seem a distraction: done because they can be, not because they’re more useful.
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Hydrogen cars are dead as projects are scrapped and refueling prices go through the roof • autoevolution

Cristian Agatie:

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Although battery-electric vehicles have proved they are the best to replace ICE vehicles, many people still expect a miracle fuel to save the combustion engine. For many, this miracle fuel is hydrogen, a gas that promises to burn with zero carbon emissions. Hydrogen is also the most abundant element on Earth, so it looked like the perfect solution for decarbonization. Well, things didn’t pan out the way hydrogen proponents have imagined.

Hydrogen vehicles are still an exotic appearance due to their sky-high prices, whereas hydrogen proved a nightmare to produce, transport, and store. This is why hydrogen refueling stations are confined to small areas, like California in the US, and clean fuel prices are too high to make sense economically. Still, this didn’t prevent car companies like Toyota from pouring billions into hydrogen vehicle development. Today, most hydrogen FCEV vehicles in California are Toyota Mirai, which is owed chiefly to Toyota heavily subsidizing the hydrogen refueling costs.

Shell, the biggest oil company in the world and one significant supplier of hydrogen fuel for both heavy-duty and passenger vehicles, started a year ago to close its car-focused hydrogen filling stations across the globe. The move culminated in August when Shell announced closing all its car-focused filling stations in California while only keeping three heavy-duty stations. These stations were located in San Francisco (two), Sacramento, Berkeley, and Citrus Heights.

Shell went a step further and scrapped plans to build 48 new hydrogen filling stations in California for which it had been awarded a $41m grant. No money has changed hands yet, and the oil giant formally rejected the funding in July, citing “political and economic uncertainty.” At this stage, Shell has no plans to build and operate additional light-duty vehicle fueling stations in California. Considering that Shell closed all its hydrogen stations in the UK last year, we can safely assume the trend is here to stay.

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Won’t be long before plans to replace natural gas with hydrogen are scrapped too. Been tried, doesn’t work. The oil companies like it because they can crack oil to make hydrogen. It’s a bad idea.
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Cuba’s underground Apple technicians are thriving • Rest of World

Lidia Hernández-Tapia:

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Even though prohibition limiting the exportation, re-exportation, sale, and supply of Apple products to Cuba was eased in 2015, getting a hold of, operating, and maintaining them can still be a challenge. This is in part because basic replacement parts are difficult to import, since they cannot be purchased directly from Apple. It’s not just hardware, either: Downloading apps or software updates is tricky because Cuban IP addresses are blocked. And setting up a new Apple ID with two-factor verification requires a phone number from outside Cuba.

García Padrón is part of an exclusive circle of Apple enthusiasts who are defying Cuba’s constraints to create profitable repair businesses. In little more than a decade, these Cuban Apple technicians have evolved from casual tinkerers to a small yet thriving community of celebrity repairers, respected by locals and foreigners alike.

The absence of official Apple stores and product resellers in Cuba has fostered a community-driven ecosystem that relies on unofficial suppliers and a transnational network of individuals who can travel abroad to buy hardware replacement parts. Technicians told Rest of World there are only a handful of Apple repair shops in Cuba, mostly clustered in Havana; it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact number as there are no official statistics.

Orlando Gutiérrez is one Cuban trailblazer who opened Meca Móvil, his own iPhone repair shop in Havana’s Vedado neighborhood. Finding an Android repairperson, he told Rest of World, is easy enough. “You might even find a few on a single block,” he said. “But a Mac technician is the holy grail.”

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Fabulous story. ROW really is excellent at finding novel angles on what could otherwise be tired stories.
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BT begins big switchover ahead of analog phone sunset • The Register

Dan Robinson:

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BT has revealed details on its UK-wide rollout schedule as it switches over from analog phone lines to a digital voice service to hit the deadline of retiring the analog service by the end of 2025.

The former state-owned telecoms giant, which still operates the bulk of Britain’s telco infrastructure, has previously flagged up plans to switch from the old analog phone lines to internet-based voice calls operating over a fiber network.

BT said that pilots of the switchover in Salisbury (Wiltshire) and Mildenhall (Suffolk) were successful, and it is now beginning the next phase in the rollout of its new home phone service, “Digital Voice,” on a region-by-region basis.

This kicked off with the East Midlands in July, then Yorkshire and the Humber region in August and Northern Ireland in September. The future schedule will cover London and the North West of England this autumn, followed by the South East, West Midlands, East Anglia and Wales in spring 2024. Scotland, the North East and South West of England will be switched during the summer of 2024.

…While many people these days use mobile phones rather than a landline for calls, there have been concerns voiced about those who still rely on one, such as more elderly citizens or those with a healthcare pendant that can be used to call for help in an emergency. In the latter case, a power cut could mean the phone service is unavailable.

BT said it won’t be “proactively switching” – an amazing piece of terminology – anyone with a healthcare pendant, those who only use a landline or have no mobile signal, or customers that have disclosed additional needs, where the company is aware of this situation.

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I bet this will be the source of a fair bit of NIMBYism when it happens. I wonder if it will be an election issue at all.
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The plot of all objects in the universe • Kottke

Jason Kottke:

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You just have to admire a chart that casually purports to show every single thing in the Universe in one simple 2D plot. The chart in question is from a piece in the most recent issue of the American Journal of Physics with the understated title of “All objects and some questions“.

»

In Fig. 2, we plot all the composite objects in the Universe: protons, atoms, life forms, asteroids, moons, planets, stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters, giant voids, and the Universe itself. Humans are represented by a mass of 70 kg and a radius of 50 cm (we assume sphericity), while whales are represented by a mass of 10^5 kg and a radius of 7 m.

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The “sub-Planckian unknown” and “forbidden by gravity” sections of the chart makes the “quantum uncertainty” section seem downright normal — the paper collectively calls these “unphysical regions”. Lovely turns of phrase all.

But what does it all mean? My physics is too rusty to say, but I thought one of the authors’ conjectures was particularly intriguing: “Our plot of all objects also seems to suggest that the Universe is a black hole.” Huh, cool.

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The paper is indeed interesting, but it’s the plot (shown at the Kottke post or the paper) which is most fascinating: there are spaces of “quantum uncertainty” which intersects with “forbidden by gravity” (the latter where something can’t be so small and also have more than a certain mass; black holes lie at its boundary). Essentially it’s a physics paper saying “here be dragons” – well, instantons.
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Cory Doctorow: Silicon Valley is now a world of ‘lumbering behemoths’ • Fast Company

Wilfred Chan interviews Cory Doctorow, whose new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation has just come out:

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Fast Company: You were once more of a techno-optimist. But you argue in your new book that decades of trying to turn Big Tech into “better tech” have been a failure, and it’s time to cut the tech companies down to size. Was there a turning point when you realized the industry needed systemic change? 

Cory Doctorow: It was more of a process than a turning point. 

There used to be a time when the tech sector could be described as a bunch of “fast companies,” right? They would use the interoperability that’s latent in all digital technology and they would specifically target whatever pain points the incumbent had introduced. If incumbents were making money by showing you ads, they made an ad blocker. If incumbents were making money by charging gigantic margins on hard drives, they made cheaper hard drives.

Over time, we went from an internet where tech companies more or less had their users’ backs, to an internet where tech companies are colluding to take as big a bite as possible out of those users. We do not have fast companies anymore; we have lumbering behemoths. If you’ve started a fast company, it’s probably just a fake startup that you’re hoping to get acqui-hired by one of the big giants, which is something that used to be illegal.

As these companies grew more concentrated, they were able to collude and convince courts and regulators and lawmakers that it was time to get rid of the kind of interoperability, the reverse engineering that had been a feature of technology since the very beginning, and move into a new era in which no one was allowed to do anything to a tech platform that their shareholders wouldn’t appreciate. And that the government should step in to use the state’s courts to punish anyone who disagrees. That’s how we got to the world that we’re in today.

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In a nutshell.
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San Francisco techies are living in small pods for $700/month • SF Standard

Joshua Bote:

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The average rent for a one-bedroom San Francisco apartment is $3,040 a month, according to Zillow. Staying in a $700-per-month pod, therefore, is a way to live in San Francisco on the cheap, [Chicago native Christian] Lewis said, without being locked into a pricey yearlong lease. It’s also, he contends, better than an Airbnb—Lewis says he booked “a dump” of a short-term rental on the platform and found it uninhabitable. (He also would rather not live in a shared apartment with roommates.)

The Mint Plaza pod space evokes a co-op, or a much, much more cramped version of those micro-apartments that have popped up throughout the Bay Area. Comparisons to the Hong Kong-style “coffin homes” are not entirely inaccurate. But in Lewis’ words, it’s a form of “minimalist living” for young, unattached people coming in and out of San Francisco. And Wi-Fi and utilities are included.

“For $700, you have workspaces and an office and a place to sleep, so that’s pretty great,” he said. “It’s downtown.”

Back to the pods: They’re each 4 feet high, 3½ feet wide, and long enough to fit a twin-size mattress. It’s comfortable enough for Lewis, who is 5 foot 9. (Lewis jokes that I should report that he’s an inch taller so that he can boast about it on the dating apps. I do not oblige.)

Lewis advises that I take my sneakers off before he takes me to observe the sleeping pods.

You don’t want to disturb anyone who could be asleep, he explains, as we inch toward the stacks of pods on Thursday afternoon. Each is sheathed with a black curtain as the main mode of privacy. There are about 20 of them, stacked in twos like bunks.

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Similar things in Tokyo, I think, though without the potential upside of getting into an AI startup in SF.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Thylacines, or Tasmanian tigers, went extinct decades ago – but now their RNA has been sequenced, in a first. CC-licensed photo by State Library of New South Wales on Flickr.

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

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

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

ChatGPT can now see, hear, and speak • OpenAI

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We are beginning to roll out new voice and image capabilities in ChatGPT. They offer a new, more intuitive type of interface by allowing you to have a voice conversation or show ChatGPT what you’re talking about.

Voice and image give you more ways to use ChatGPT in your life. Snap a picture of a landmark while traveling and have a live conversation about what’s interesting about it. When you’re home, snap pictures of your fridge and pantry to figure out what’s for dinner (and ask follow up questions for a step by step recipe). After dinner, help your child with a math problem by taking a photo, circling the problem set, and having it share hints with both of you.

We’re rolling out voice and images in ChatGPT to Plus and Enterprise users over the next two weeks. Voice is coming on iOS and Android (opt-in in your settings) and images will be available on all platforms.

You can now use voice to engage in a back-and-forth conversation with your assistant. Speak with it on the go, request a bedtime story for your family, or settle a dinner table debate.

…The new voice technology—capable of crafting realistic synthetic voices from just a few seconds of real speech—opens doors to many creative and accessibility-focused applications. However, these capabilities also present new risks, such as the potential for malicious actors to impersonate public figures or commit fraud.

This is why we are using this technology to power a specific use case—voice chat. Voice chat was created with voice actors we have directly worked with. We’re also collaborating in a similar way with others.

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Faintly concerning. Also I wouldn’t trust ChatGPT to settle a dinner table debate. It would just be an invitation to lower ourselves deeper into the ocean of misinformation.
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Erotica, Atwood, and ‘For Dummies’: the books behind Meta’s generative AI • The Atlantic

Alex Reisner:

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Books play a crucial role in the training of generative-AI systems. Their long, thematically consistent paragraphs provide information about how to construct long, thematically consistent paragraphs—something that’s essential to creating the illusion of intelligence. Consequently, tech companies use huge data sets of books, typically without permission, purchase, or licensing. (Lawyers for Meta argued in a recent court filing that neither outputs from the company’s generative AI nor the model itself are “substantially similar” to existing books.)

In its training process, a generative-AI system essentially builds a giant map of English words—the distance between two words correlates with how often they appear near each other in the training text. The final system, known as a large language model, will produce more plausible responses for subjects that appear more often in its training text. (For further details on this process, you can read about transformer architecture, the innovation that precipitated the boom in large language models such as LLaMA and ChatGPT.) A system trained primarily on the Western canon, for example, will produce poor answers to questions about Eastern literature. This is just one reason it’s important to understand the training data used by these models, and why it’s troubling that there is generally so little transparency.

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You can find out whether a book you wrote (🙋‍♂️) or someone you know wrote is in the database. It’s hungry for fiction and non-fiction. The point about long paragraphs being useful for creating the illusion of intelligence is very apt.
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Meta pays £149m to break London office lease • Financial Times

Joshua Oliver and Cristina Criddle:

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Meta has paid £149m to break its lease on a major London development near Regent’s Park as hybrid working prompts big tech groups to pull back on office space.

British Land, which owns the building at 1 Triton Square, on Tuesday flagged a short-term hit to earnings as it will now have to find a new tenant for the eight-storey building in a challenging London office market.

“It is a staggering amount of money. In my 20 years, I can’t think of a tenant paying [so much] to give back space they don’t occupy,” said Matthew Saperia, analyst at Peel Hunt.

The news is the latest sign of Big Tech’s determination to reduce costs by cutting office space as more staff work from home. The contraction has hit cities such as San Francisco that rely heavily on tech companies. Office tenants and European markets including Dublin and London have not been spared.

Colm Lauder, real estate analyst at Goodbody, estimated Meta was now proposing to sublet or surrender close to 1m sq ft of office space in Europe, mostly in London and Dublin.

…Meta never moved into 1 Triton Square but let the space in 2021 following a major refurbishment. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has embarked on dramatic cuts to the company of tens of thousands of staff, he has also committed to shrinking its office space, with hybrid workers asked to share desks.

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Macron launches ‘ecological plan’ to end France’s use of fossil fuels by 2030 • The Guardian

Kim Willsher:

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Emmanuel Macron has unveiled a national “ecological plan” to reduce France’s greenhouse gas emissions by 55% and end the use of fossil fuels by 2030.

Speaking after a special ministerial council at the Elysée, the French president said an extra €10bn (£8.7bn) would be put towards the 50-point programme, which he described as “ecology à la Française”.

The plan was aimed at addressing the climate crisis while ensuring that France remained competitive in agriculture and industry, said Macron.

It was essential, he said, that “France reduces our dependence on so-called fossil fuels, coal, petrol and gas, which we don’t produce any more but on which we depend”. The aim, he added, was to reduce this dependence from 60% to 40% by 2030.

“The priority that we have set is that by January 2027 we will have totally ended the use of coal for our electricity production,” he said.

Other measures in the plan include the acceleration of electric car production, with brakes on gas boilers, though the president stopped short of a total ban. It also includes new projects for offshore windfarms, the opening of several electric battery factories in northern France, a map to establish where natural resources can be found in France, including hydrogen gas and essential elements for lithium batteries, and €700m state investment in the regional train network.

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Quite the contrast with Snooze Button” Sunak, who thinks pausing something doesn’t mean it will take any longer to do.
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Amazon Prime Video content to start including ads next year • BBC News

Lora Jones:

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Amazon is set to introduce adverts to its Prime Video streaming service in 2024 as it seeks to put more cash into creating TV shows and films.

UK Prime customers, along with those in the US, Germany and Canada, will see ads early next year unless they subscribe for an “ad-free” option at an additional cost. In a statement, Amazon said Prime Video still offered “very compelling value”. It follows similar moves by rivals including Disney+ and Netflix.

Amazon said that the ads would be introduced across France, Italy, Spain, Mexico and Australia later in 2024. It will roll out the “ad-free” subscription tier for an extra $2.99 (£2.44) per month for Prime subscribers in the United States. Pricing for other countries will be announced at a later date, Amazon said.

At the moment, a Prime subscription, which includes free one-day delivery on goods as well as access to its streaming service, costs £8.99 per month, or £95 a year, in the UK.

“To continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time, starting in 2024, Prime Video shows and movies will include limited advertisements in the UK,” Amazon said.

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Feels like a bait-and-switch, doesn’t it. The BBC TV licence, which provides access to multiple ad-free TV channels and also to a big news website and multiple radio channels (though the latter two don’t require a licence) feels like comparatively good value at £159 annually, fixed for some time.
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In-depth Q&A: Can ‘carbon offsets’ help to tackle climate change? • Carbon Brief

Josh Gabbatiss, Daisy Dunne, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Orla Dwyer, Molly Lempriere, Yanine Quiroz, Ayesha Tandon, Dr Giuliana Viglione, Joe Goodman, Tom Pearson, and Tom Prater:

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According to Carbon Brief analysis of data from the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, just 3% of offsets on the four largest voluntary offset registries involve removing CO2 – all from tree-planting projects.

Many available offsets have been labelled “junk” or “hot air” because they result from carbon-market design flaws and do not represent real emissions reductions.
The ideas and experiments with carbon offsets and trading trace back at least half a century, as outlined in the timeline of the 60-year history of carbon offsets.

Over the years, offset projects have been dogged by allegations of land conflicts, human rights abuses, hampering conservation and furthering coal use and pollution.

They have been decried as a “false solution” by activists. Negotiations over new carbon markets under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement have seen a sustained outcry for not delivering mitigation at scale, threatening Indigenous rights and “carbon colonialism”.

Meanwhile, companies claiming carbon neutrality using voluntary offsets have been increasingly called out and restrained from making “greenwashing” claims. (See: Why is there a risk of greenwashing with carbon offsets?)

The central problem of carbon offsetting is summarised by Robert Mendelsohn, a forest policy and economics professor at Yale School of the Environment. Reflecting on the achievements of carbon offsets, he tells Carbon Brief: “They have not changed behaviour and so they have not led to any reduction of carbon in the atmosphere…They have achieved zero mitigation.”

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There’s a whole week-long look at the reality of carbon offsets. Worth a bookmark.
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Google antitrust trial spills details on deals with Apple, Samsung • WSJ

Miles Kruppa:

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Apple began licensing Google’s search engine for the 2003 release of its Safari web browser. Google in 2005 offered Apple a portion of advertising revenue if it made the search engine the default choice on desktop computers.

Two years later, Apple asked Google for an amendment to the contract that would allow it to present users with several options for the default search engine, according to an email presented by the Justice Department. Apple approached Yahoo about participating in the setup.

In response, Google told Apple: “No default—no revenue share,” according to an internal email chain that included former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brin. Apple dropped the idea and hasn’t raised it again, said DOJ lead trial attorney Kenneth Dintzer.

A Google spokesman pointed to a previous statement saying the company competes for default placement so that users can easily access its services, and Apple has said it picks Google because it is the best search engine. Apple declined to comment.

…In 2021, Google analyzed the potential hit if Apple switched to another default search-engine provider, according to an internal email presented in court, calling it a “Code Red” scenario.

Google also tussled with Samsung about changes the smartphone company had made to its mobile web browser. The design tweaks made it easier for users to switch default search engines, according to testimony from Antonio Rangel, a behavioral economics professor called by the DOJ.

Google protested, telling Samsung it had violated their agreement, and the phone maker rolled back the change, Rangel said. Samsung didn’t respond to requests for comment.

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Of course, the level of Google’s concern about Apple defecting is easy to evaluate: it’s measured in the billions of dollars that it pays Apple every year to be the Safari default.
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The world’s biggest crypto firm is melting down • WSJ via MSN

Patricia Kowsmann, Caitlin Ostroff and Angus Berwick:

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After FTX crashed, the world of crypto seemed to belong to the largest exchange, Binance. Less than a year later, Binance is the one in distress.

Under threat of enforcement actions by US agencies, Binance’s empire is quaking. Over the past three months, more than a dozen senior executives have left, and the exchange has laid off at least 1,500 employees this year to cut costs and prepare for a decline in business. And while Binance still looms large in crypto, its dominance is dwindling. 

Binance now handles about half of all trades where cryptocurrencies are directly bought and sold, down from about 70% at the start of the year, according to data provider Kaiko.

What happens to Binance will have immense implications for the crypto industry because the exchange is so big. Industry players and watchers say other exchanges would fill the void if Binance were to collapse. But in the short term, liquidity in the market could evaporate, driving the price of tokens sharply down.

One institutional trader told The Wall Street Journal that his company has conducted fire drills to withdraw its assets from Binance quickly in the event of a meltdown. 

Yi He, Binance’s co-founder and chief marketing officer, vowed to overcome the troubles in a message to Binance staff last month.

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I’d have thought that the biggest firm in crypto was Tether, which basically keeps the whole shenanigans afloat. The problem for all these crypto firms will be the extent to which they’re wrapped up with extremely shady, prone-to-violence people when everything starts going south.
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Tasmanian tiger RNA is first to be recovered from an extinct animal • Nature

Miryan Naddaf:

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For the first time, researchers have sequenced RNA from an extinct animal species — the Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus).

Using muscle and skin samples from a 132-year-old museum specimen, scientists isolated millions of RNA sequences. This genetic material provides information about the animal’s genes and the proteins that were made in its cells and tissues. The findings, published in Genome Research1, offer hope that RNA locked up in the world’s museum collections could provide new insights into long-dead species.

Being able to look at RNA in particular “opens up a whole new potential source of information”, says Oliver Smith, a geneticist at the medical-diagnostics company Micropathology in Coventry, UK. “As opposed to looking at what a genome is, we can look at what the genome does.”

…Obtaining RNA from historical samples is challenging because unlike DNA — which is highly stable and has been extracted from extinct species that lived more than one million years ago — RNA rapidly breaks down into smaller fragments. “Outside of living cells, it’s believed to be degraded or destroyed in minutes,” says study co-author Marc Friedländer, a geneticist at Stockholm University.

The team developed a protocol specifically for extracting ancient RNA from tissue samples, adapting standard methods that are used on fresher samples. Nevertheless, “it was surprising that we found these authentic RNA sequences in this mummified Tasmanian tiger”, says Friedländer.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The really important update on the iPhone 15 Pro is just above its volume buttons. CC-licensed photo by Ged Carroll 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. Lights, camera, sorted. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The end of privacy is a Taylor Swift fan TikTok account armed with facial recognition tech • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

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A viral TikTok account is doxing ordinary and otherwise anonymous people on the internet using off-the-shelf facial recognition technology, creating content and growing a following by taking advantage of a fundamental new truth: privacy is now essentially dead in public spaces.

The 90,000 follower-strong account typically picks targets who appeared in other viral videos, or people suggested to the account in the comments. Many of the account’s videos show the process: screenshotting the video of the target, cropping images of the face, running those photos through facial recognition software, and then revealing the person’s full name, social media profile, and sometimes employer to millions of people who have liked the videos. There’s an entire branch of content on TikTok in which creators show off their OSINT doxing skills—OSINT being open source intelligence, or information that is openly available online. But the vast majority of them do it with the explicit consent of the target. This account is doing the same, without the consent of the people they choose to dox. As a bizarre aside, the account appears to be run by a Taylor Swift fan, with many of the doxing videos including Swift’s music, and including videos of people at the Eras Tour.

404 Media is not naming the account because TikTok has decided to not remove it from the platform. TikTok told me the account does not violate its policies; one social media policy expert I spoke to said TikTok should reevaluate that position.

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Related: I reviewed Kashmir Hill’s new book about Clearview AI, which also solved this challenge a few years ago and began selling it to US police departments – really cheaply.

It seems the cat is very much out of the bag on facial recognition for the masses.
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The Action Button is the most significant new iPhone feature in years • The Verge

Dan Seifert:

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Apple showcased the Action Button in its announcement of the iPhone 15 Pro, and it was highlighted in many reviews that followed (including our own). But it wasn’t until users got their hands on the iPhone 15 Pro late last week that the Action Button’s potential was fully realised.

By default, the button acts as a direct replacement for the old mute switch: you use it to change the ringer settings on your phone. In the iPhone’s Settings app, you can change it to do a handful of other things, like turning on the flashlight, launching the camera, or toggling Do Not Disturb. But the real power of the Action Button is unlocked when you pair it with Apple’s programmable Shortcuts app. From there, you can do just about anything you might imagine on your phone in a quicker, more convenient way.

The Settings app will suggest some simple shortcuts to bind to the Action Button, but things get a lot more interesting when you tap into custom shortcuts. You can program the Action Button to display a menu of other shortcuts that you can then run from a tap on the screen. You can make it do different things depending on your location, time of day, or even device orientation. The limit is really your imagination — and your tolerance for programming in the Shortcuts app, which can be frustrating and tedious. (Fortunately, I have some tips for this below.)

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Initially seems, as he says, like a very minimal thing: oh, a button that you can program. But it opens up a huge range of possibilities, and shows how we really are carrying around little computers. Yes, Samsung has had a programmable side button for a while, but it doesn’t have the power of Shortcuts to expand what it can do: it opens the camera, or an app, or its Bixby assistant.
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The bizarre cottage industry of YouTube obituary pirates • WIRED

Kate Knibbs:

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People who lose somebody, whether it’s a dearly cherished family member or a long-lost acquaintance, must now navigate a slimy cottage industry of profiteers trying to hijack their attention. Instead of finding important funeral details or where to write a remembrance or send flowers, they are confronted by a flood of low-budget videos crudely summarizing the death notices of the person they’ve lost.

Obituary pirating, where people scrape and republish obituaries from funeral homes and websites like Legacy.com, has been an ethically dubious business for years. Piracy websites are often skilled enough at search engine optimization to rise to the top of search results, and they use the resulting traffic to charge a premium for digital ads that appear next to text lifted wholesale from funeral homes, local newspapers, and other authorized obituary publishers. Occasionally, these pirate sites go a step further, manipulating bereaved people into buying sympathy gifts like candles or flowers and pocketing the money.

The flood of YouTube obituary videos is a janky update on this practice. Some of these channels upload dozens of death notice summaries every hour, abandoning any pretense of looking like an official source of information in an effort to churn out as many videos as they can.

Although text-based obituary pirating has been a scourge on the industry for years, these videos are a more recent phenomenon. “This is a new one for me,” says Jessica Koth, director of public relations for the National Funeral Directors Association. “These videos are not sanctioned or authorized by the funeral home or family of the person who died. I would imagine they would be quite upsetting to the families involved.”

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There’s essentially nothing that isn’t seen as somehow monetisable through ads on YouTube.
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The Musk algorithm • Hey.com

David Heinemeier Hansson:

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The part of the business book [as he views the Musk biography] I’ve enjoyed the most is the countless illustrations of how Musk applies his “algorithm”. A methodology for shipping everything from electric cars to Mars rockets to flamethrowers to humanoid robots. Quoted in full:

1. Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from “the legal department” or “the safety department.” You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb.
2. Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn’t delete enough.
3. Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exist.
4. Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted.
5. Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out.

…You can absolutely learn from people you wouldn’t want to be. Extracting wisdom from Musk’s success does not oblige you to become his disciple or his mirror.

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Reasonable point, but there’s a lot of competition to apply that algorithm, and so it’s the ones who take it to the absolute beyond-reasonable-total-jerk who take the prize. Though plenty do the same and don’t take the prize.
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Nissan to go all-electric by 2030 despite petrol ban delay • BBC News

Simon Jack:

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Nissan will accelerate plans towards electrification by committing that all vehicles sold in Europe will be electric by 2030.

The announcement comes despite the UK postponing its 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars to 2035. Nissan’s boss said the firm’s move was “the right thing to do”.

Car trade body the SMMT has voiced concerns that the postponement of the ban would see consumers delay the switch to electric vehicles.

Nissan will also introduce new battery technology by the end of the decade that it said will reduce both the charging time and cost of electric vehicles (EVs).

“Nissan will make the switch to full electric by 2030 in Europe. We believe it is the right thing to do for our business, our customers and for the planet,” said Nissan’s chief executive Makoto Uchida. In an interview with the BBC, Mr Uchida said the company was aiming to bring down the cost of electric vehicles for customers, so that they were no more expensive than petrol and diesel cars.

“It may take a bit of time, but we are looking at the next few years,” he said.

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Nissan is aiming for price parity with ICEs by 2030. What’s significant about this story is that Nissan chose the BBC’s Business Editor to tell it to: essentially, a rebuff to Rishi Sunak putting back the deadline last week, and encouraging the EU to move it forward.

Nissan is also probably a bit peeved with the UK government: it has an EV battery manufacturing plant in the UK, and is putting £1bn (plus £100m from, um, the UK government) into expanding its carmaking facility.
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Guidance on AI detection, and why we’re disabling Turnitin’s AI detector • Vanderbilt University

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In April of this year, Turnitin released an update to their product that reviewed submitted papers and presented their determination of how much of a paper was written by AI. As we outlined at that time, many people had important concerns and questions about this new tool, namely how the product exactly works and how reliable the results would be. After several months of using and testing this tool, meeting with Turnitin and other AI leaders, and talking to other universities who also have access, Vanderbilt has decided to disable Turnitin’s AI detection tool for the foreseeable future. This decision was not made lightly and was made in pursuit of the best interests of our students and faculty. 

When Turnitin launched its AI-detection tool, there were many concerns that we had. This feature was enabled for Turnitin customers with less than 24-hour advance notice, no option at the time to disable the feature, and, most importantly, no insight into how it works. At the time of launch, Turnitin claimed that its detection tool had a 1% false positive rate (Chechitelli, 2023). To put that into context, Vanderbilt submitted 75,000 papers to Turnitin in 2022. If this AI detection tool was available then, around 750 student papers could have been incorrectly labeled as having some of it written by AI.

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That’s a pretty bad false positive rate in terms of sheer numbers. Nice of them to let students know. (Turnitin is still used to test against alleged plagiarism on other work by students.)
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Covid helped China secure the DNA of millions, spurring arms race fears • Washington Post

Joby Warrick and Cate Brown:

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The Fire-Eye [portable lab developed by China] excelled not only at cracking the genetic code for viruses, but also for humans, with machines that can decipher genetic instructions contained within the cells of every person on Earth, according to its Chinese inventors. [I think that means “sequence human genomes” – Overspill Ed.] In late 2021, with the pandemic still raging, Serbian officials announced they were working with a Chinese company to convert the lab into a permanent facility with plans to harvest and curate the entire genomes, or genetics blueprints, of Serbian citizens.

Serbia’s scientists were thrilled, and the country’s prime minister, Ana Brnabic, praised China for giving the Balkan country the “most advanced institute for precision medicine and genetics in the region.” Yet now, China’s Fire-Eye labs — scores of which were donated or sold to foreign countries during the pandemic — are attracting the attention of Western intelligence agencies amid growing unease about China’s intentions. Some analysts perceive China’s largesse as part of a global attempt to tap into new sources of highly valuable human DNA data in countries around the world.

That collection effort, underway for more than a decade, has included the acquisition of U.S. genetics companies as well as sophisticated hacking operations, U.S. and Western intelligence officials say. But more recently, it received an unexpected boost from the coronavirus pandemic, which created opportunities for Chinese companies and institutes to distribute gene-sequencing machines and build partnerships for genetic research in places where Beijing previously had little or no access, the officials said.

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Hard to tell how much this is paranoia and how much is justified. It’s a deeply researched story, though again: how much is joining dots that are just dots?
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AlphaFold touted as next big thing for drug discovery — but is it? • Nature

Carrie Arnold:

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Last month, the biotechnology firm Recursion, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, announced that it had calculated how 36 billion potential drug compounds could bind to more than 15,000 human proteins whose structures were predicted by AlphaFold. To pull off the massive computation, Recursion used its own AI tool, MatchMaker, that ‘matched’ binding pockets on the predicted structures with suitably shaped small molecules, or ligands, from a database called Enamine Real Space.

“Lots of people have predicted how molecules would bind with proteins,” says Chris Gibson, Recursion’s co-founder and chief executive, “but this many predictions is pretty unprecedented”.

But not everyone is as bullish about AlphaFold revolutionizing drug discovery — at least, not yet. In a paper published in eLife the day before Recursion’s announcement, a team of scientists at Stanford University in California showed that AlphaFold’s prowess at predicting protein structures doesn’t yet translate into solid leads for ligand binding.

“Models like AlphaFold are really good with [protein] structures, but we need to put some thought into how we’re going to use them for drug discovery,” says Masha Karelina, a biophysicist at Stanford and co-author of the paper.

Others who spoke to Nature agree that this type of effort offers impressive amounts of data, but they aren’t yet sure about its quality. Biotech announcements such as the one from Recursion aren’t typically accompanied by validation data — confirmation from laboratory experiments that a model has accurately predicted binding.

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(Ligand: “an ion or molecule with a functional group that binds to a central metal atom to form a coordination complex”.)
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3 iOS 0-days, a cellular network compromise, and HTTP used to infect an iPhone • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

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Apple has patched a potent chain of iOS zero-days that were used to infect the iPhone of an Egyptian presidential candidate with sophisticated spyware developed by a commercial exploit seller, Google and researchers from Citizen Lab said Friday.

The previously unknown vulnerabilities, which Apple patched on Thursday, were exploited in clickless attacks, meaning they didn’t require a target to take any steps other than to visit a website that used the HTTP protocol rather than the safer HTTPS alternative. A packet inspection device sitting on a cellular network in Egypt kept an eye out for connections from the phone of the targeted candidate and, when spotted, redirected it to a site that delivered the exploit chain, according to Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto’s Munk School.

Citizen Lab said the attack was made possible by participation from the Egyptian government, spyware known as Predator sold by a company known as Cytrox, and hardware sold by Egypt-based Sandvine. The campaign targeted Ahmed Eltantawy, a former member of the Egyptian Parliament who announced he was running for president in March. Citizen Lab said the recent attacks were at least the third time Eltantawy’s iPhone has been attacked. One of them, in 2021, was successful and also installed Predator.

“The use of mercenary spyware to target a senior member of a country’s democratic opposition after they had announced their intention to run for president is a clear interference in free and fair elections and violates the rights to freedom of expression, assembly, and privacy,” Citizen Lab researchers Bill Marczak, John Scott-Railton, Daniel Roethlisberger, Bahr Abdul Razzak, Siena Anstis, and Ron Deibert wrote in a 4,200-word report. “It also directly contradicts how mercenary spyware firms publicly justify their sales.”

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Amazing how this thing we’re assured by the vendors doesn’t happen keeps happening.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Could genetically engineered bacteria make tooth decay (and brushing?) a thing of the past? CC-licensed photo by makelessnoise 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. Smile! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

About — Lantern Bioworks

»

Lantern Bioworks is a biotech startup dedicated to developing effective oral probiotics as a means of preventing dental caries. By harnessing the power of beneficial bacteria, we believe that it is possible to fully eradicate cavities worldwide.

«

This is pretty mindblowing, as prospects go: it says a strain of Streptococcus mutans (S.mutans) – which lives around the teeth and converts sugar into acid which then eats into tooth enamel and causes cavities – has been created by genetic engineering which instead produces ethanol.

And this was back in 1985. Clinical trials in the 2000s led to no ill effects – the company claims. The idea isn’t new: it’s been written about multiple times (here in 2016, here in 2002 – with the latter describing trying it out himself and a medical colleague, but that “wives and children” were not then infected by it 14 years later.

The problem is, this doesn’t have a valid patent: it ran out. Plus there’s the question of whether the bacteria might colonise other parts of the body. Plus we’d be ever so slightly intoxicated all the time.

Well, maybe it’s not all bad. (Thanks Adewale for the link.)
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The workers at the frontlines of the AI revolution • Rest of World

Andrew Deck:

»

Since the blockbuster launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, future-of-work pontificators, AI ethicists, and Silicon Valley developers have been fiercely debating how generative AI will impact the way we work. Some six months later, one global labor force is at the frontline of the generative AI revolution: offshore outsourced workers.

These include workers hired per commission or on a contractual basis, such as freelance copywriters, artists, and software developers, as well as more formal offshore workforces like customer service agents. As generative AI tools present a new model for cost cutting, pressure is quickly mounting for these outsourced workers to adapt or risk losing work.

Rest of World spoke to outsourced workers across different industries and regions, including call center operators in Manila, programmers in Lahore, and designers in Cairo. Many said they are already seeing generative AI change the demand for their work and the stability of their income. But while some brace for layoffs or diminishing commissions, others have embraced generative AI tools in an effort to keep ahead of the curve. If generative AI represents a tectonic shift in the way we work, offshore outsourced workers are at the fault lines.

«

Typically clever choice of topic, and amazing in revealing how far ChatGPT use has spread: Lagos, Guadalajara, the Philippines, Shenzhen.
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The invisible problem • Scott Jenson

Jenson works at Google:

»

Whenever I explain my research at Google into mobile text editing, I’m usually met with blank stares or a slightly hostile “Everyone can edit text on their phones, right? What’s the problem?”

Text editing on mobile isn’t ok. It’s actually much worse than you think, an invisible problem no one appreciates. I wrote this post so you can understand why it’s so important. But as it’s a rather nuanced issue, I may lose you. To help, I’ve sprinkled lots of headers throughout so if you get bored, just skip ahead.

TL;DR: Android and iOS share a common problem: they copied desktop text editing conventions, but without a menu bar or mouse. This forced them to overload the tap gesture with a wide range of actions: placing the cursor, moving it, selecting text, and invoking a pop-up menu. This results in an overly complicated and ambiguous mess-o-taps, leading to a variety of user errors.

It’s less of a problem if you only do short bursts of text in social media or messaging apps. But doing anything more complicated like an email gets tedious. However, in my user study on text editing, I was surprised to find that everyone had significant problems and rather severe workarounds for editing text.

«

The appalling thing about reading this is that it makes you realise how bad things are. Even worse, Jenson has the (or a) solution – but doesn’t think anyone would take it up.
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Pixel 8 camera features “leak” with manual controls and face-changing AI • 9to5 Google

Ben Schoon:

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The focus of Google’s Pixel phones has always been on the camera, and it seems there’s a lot of new stuff coming with the Pixel 8 series, as a new leaked ad reveals manual camera controls, new features, and a whole bunch of AI in the pipeline.

A leaked video posted to 91Mobiles by the reliable leaker Kamila Wojciechowska offers a pretty detailed breakdown of all of the new camera features coming to Google Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, including some returning favorites like Night Sight, Astrophotography, and Super Res Zoom.

What’s new this year, though, is actually quite a bit.

That starts with “Video Boost,” which Google says will use AI to create a “smoother view” as well as bringing Night Sight’s effects to video, as we had previously reported was coming. The video also gives us a first look at “Audio Eraser” – another feature that popped up previously – with a quick example of removing city noise from the background of a video of a cello player.

Perhaps the most wild use of AI in the video, though, is a Google Photos feature on Pixel 8 where the app will literally be able to change people’s faces in a shot to create the shot you want – the Michael Scott treatment, if you will. There’s no explanation on how this works, but it seems like it uses multiple, similar shots to create one final product. Again, it looks absolutely wild.

«

Google certainly doesn’t like surprising people; it’s been giving out the details of the upcoming Pixels for weeks. Now there’s video showing the face-replacement AI (turning that frown upside down!), and we can now definitely say that you’ll no longer even be able to trust photos taken straight off a camera.
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Rishi Sunak scraps home energy efficiency taskforce • BBC News

Ione Wells:

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A taskforce to speed up home insulation and boiler upgrades has been disbanded, the BBC can reveal.

The group – which included the chair of the National Infrastructure Commission Sir John Armitt and other leading experts – was only launched in March. But it appears to be a casualty of Rishi Sunak’s decision to scrap energy efficiency regulations for landlords in an overhaul of green policies.

Members were informed in a letter, seen by the BBC, that it was being wound up. Energy efficiency minister Lord Callanan told the group its work would be “streamlined” into ongoing government activity.

A spokesperson for the Energy Security and Net Zero department said: “We would like to thank the Energy Efficiency Taskforce for its work in supporting our ambition to reduce total UK energy demand by 15% from 2021 levels by 2030.

“We have invested £6.6bn in energy efficiency upgrades this Parliament and will continue to support families in making their homes more efficient, helping them to cut bills while also achieving net zero in a pragmatic, proportionate and realistic way.”

But former Conservative MP Laura Sandys, who sat on the taskforce, said she was “disappointed” by the decision to disband it and “confused” about the government’s intentions on the cost of living. In a post on X, formerly Twitter, she said energy efficiency must be the “first priority to reduce citizens’ costs” and “improve energy security”.

«

Just incredible. Data in 2020 found 12m homes in the UK with a “D” or worse rating, out of nearly 24m “occupied residential dwellings”. The £37bn spent on subsidising energy bills last year could have been better targeted at improving the worst homes.
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Spotify code suggests HiFi tier is coming with lossless audio for $20 / month • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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Spotify’s long-awaited HiFi tier could finally be getting closer to launch. Code within the Spotify app reveals new details about the “Supremium” tier, which could feature 24-bit lossless audio, the ability to create playlists with AI, and more, as spotted by u/Hypixely on Reddit.

Spotify first announced the more expensive HiFi tier in February 2021, but the feature has been stuck in limbo since then. The last we heard about the tier was in June of this year when a Bloomberg report found Spotify had rebranded the HiFi tier as “Supremium.” The Redditor’s findings corroborate this claim, as they say Spotify now refers to the audio as lossless with “no lag and delays.”

Additionally, the Redditor found that the Supremium tier could feature 30 hours of audiobook listening each month, along with the ability to sort your library by mood, activity, and genre.

The app’s code also mentions advanced mixing tools, allowing you to customize the order of playlists by beats per minute, enable smooth transitions between songs, and filter songs in a playlist by mood or genre. There’s even a “soundcheck” feature that lets you “learn more about your

«

The audiobooks might be attractive to some people, but the price hike – compared to the $11/month it presently costs (expect $ to translate directly to £ and €) – is pretty substantial for lossless audio, which makes a difference basically nobody can hear without the world’s most expensive studio speakers.
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OpenAI and ChatGPT Lawsuit List • Originality.AI

Jonathan Gilham:

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We looked at all lawsuits occurring against OpenAI and listed them below. In addition to the relevant detail we had a lawyer provide some commentary. This list will remain updated as an easy-to-reference location for any lawsuits against OpenAI ordered by date (oldest to newest).

«

Currently standing at five. I wonder if OpenAI has a sign in its HQ with “– DAYS SINCE A LAWSUIT WAS FILED AGAINST US”.
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Warning: update your iPhone 15 to iOS 17.0.2 before transferring data from another iPhone • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

»

If you are unboxing an iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro, or iPhone 15 Pro Max today, make sure to update the device to iOS 17.0.2 before transferring data to the device from another iPhone, or else you might encounter issues.

iOS 17.0.2 is only available for the iPhone 15 lineup. Apple says the update fixes an issue that may prevent transferring data directly from another iPhone during the device setup process, so installing it is very important. The update should appear during the setup process, or it can be installed via the Settings app under General → Software Update if you proceeded to set up the device as new and transfer data later.

If you already attempted to transfer data from another iPhone before updating to iOS 17.0.2, and your iPhone 15 is now stuck showing an Apple logo, Apple has shared a new support document with steps on how to restore the iPhone:

1. Connect your new iPhone to a computer with a cable
2. Press and quickly release the volume up button. Press and quickly release the volume down button. Then, press and hold the side button
3. Continue to hold while the Apple logo appears and don’t let go until an image of a computer and cable appears
4. On your computer, locate your new iPhone in the Finder or in iTunes
5. Choose Restore when you see the option to Restore or Update.

«

Happily I missed the delivery of my new iPhone last week so didn’t get caught by this. Somewhat embarrassing for Apple, though.
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Craptacular is more like it • Daring Fireball

John Gruber did a detailed takedown of the WSJ article that I linked to last week:

»

We can’t know that Qualcomm is behind this, but we do know that Qualcomm threw shade at Apple’s modem efforts with a press release about a renewed deal between the companies the day before the iPhone announcement event. How better to follow that up than a new story painting a picture of technical ineptitude and managerial chaos inside Apple’s modem team, set to appear the day before the iPhones 15 hit customers’ hands? This narrative especially suits Qualcomm if they’re concerned about their own engineering talent defecting.

«

I’m slightly annoyed at myself for not having picked up the inconsistencies in the WSJ story that Gruber points out. There are plenty, mostly around timing and lead times and sources. Evidently, Apple hasn’t managed to make its own modem – yet. But is everything a shambles? Anyhow, this story will not make the already frosty relationship between Apple and Qualcomm any warmer. It may even spur Apple’s team on.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Would you be astonished to hear that NFTs are worthless now? Did you think they were worthful before? CC-licensed photo by Marco Verch 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 at about 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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

Inside Apple’s spectacular failure to build a key part for its new iPhones • WSJ

Aaron Tilley and Yang Jie:

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Apple had planned to have its modem chip ready to use in the new iPhone models. But tests late last year found the chip was too slow and prone to overheating. Its circuit board was so big it would take up half an iPhone, making it unusable.

…[Apple chip chief Johny] Srouji flew to Munich to greet Apple’s newly acquired Intel wireless employees in December 2019. He told a gathering that the modem-chip project would be a game changer for Apple, the next step in the company’s evolution, said people who watched the meeting. He said the chip would distinguish Apple devices, as Apple’s processors had done.

As Apple filled the project’s ranks with Intel engineers and others hired from Qualcomm, company executives set a goal to have the modem chip ready for fall 2023. It soon became apparent to many of the wireless experts on the project that meeting the goal was impossible.

Apple found that employing the brute force of thousands of engineers, a strategy successful for designing the computer brain of its smartphones and laptops, wasn’t enough to quickly produce a superior modem chip.

Modem chips are trickier to make than processing chips because they must work seamlessly with 5G wireless networks, as well as the 2G, 3G and 4G networks used in countries around the world, each with its own technological quirks. Apple microprocessors run software programs designed solely for its iPhones and laptops. 

Apple executives who didn’t have experience with wireless chips set tight timelines that weren’t realistic, former project engineers said. Teams had to build prototype versions of the chips and certify they would work with the many wireless carriers worldwide, a time-consuming job.

Executives better understood the challenge after Apple tested its prototypes late last year. The results weren’t good, according to people familiar with the tests. The chips were essentially three years behind Qualcomm’s best modem chip. Using them threatened to make iPhone wireless speeds slower than its competitors.

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(The link should be free to read.)
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Nearly 500 brands exited smartphone market during 2017-2023 • Counterpoint Research

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At its peak in 2017, the global smartphone market saw more than 700 brands fiercely competing and contributing to the total annual sales of over 1.5 billion units. Fast forward to 2023 and the number of active brands (that have recorded sell-through volumes) is down by a third to almost 250, according to Counterpoint’s Global Handset Model Sales Tracker, which has been tracking sales of these brands across more than 70 key countries.

A maturing user base, improving device quality, longer replacement cycles and a growing refurbished secondary market, along with economic headwinds, supply-chain bottlenecks, major technological transitions such as 4G to 5G, and the growing scale and concentration of power in a handful of brands, have gradually whittled down the number of active brands and their volumes over the years.

It has become difficult to remain profitable and feasible in this maturing marketplace. For example, major local smartphone brands, known as “local kings”, like Micromax, Intex and Karbonn in India; InnJoo and Xtouch in the Middle East and Africa; Meizu, Meitu, Gionee and Coolpad in China; Kyocera and NEC in Japan; and LG in South Korea, have exited over the last five years.

Strikingly, the decline in the number of active brands is almost entirely coming from local brands. The number of global brands has remained consistent at over 30. Most local brands operate in regions that have fragmented markets across wide geographies, like Asia-Pacific, Latin America and Middle East and Africa. Such brands focus on customers looking for affordable devices.

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Combination of the pandemic, followed by component shortages, followed by the “macroeconomic climate”. Surely overdue, but still dramatic – and shows that the smartphone is well into its maturity.
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Why TikTok is banned in some African countries • Rest of World

Damilare Dosunmu:

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TikTok is getting caught in political and moral disputes across several African nations.

In August, Senegal and Somalia banned the app, with calls to do the same in Kenya and Uganda. While local governments and petitioners have cited security risks and morality as reasons to take action against TikTok, lawyers and activists told Rest of World via text and social media messages that the Chinese app is falling prey to politically motivated decisions.

“It seems it’s a political decision shrouded in a morality cloak,” said Mohamed Mubarak, a Somali policy analyst. “The government is unhappy about the political parody of the president and [prime minister] and is using ‘human rights’ as a justification.” In its official announcement of the ban on August 20, the Somali government said its decision was based on the damage the app had caused to the country’s social morals and cultural values.

In an emailed statement to Rest of World, TikTok said it’s engaging with local governments and key stakeholders to arrive at a resolution that ensures it continues operations in Africa. “At TikTok, we have over 40,000 talented safety professionals dedicated to keeping TikTok safe,” the email read. “TikTok is for users aged 13 and above. One of our most important commitments is supporting the safety and well-being of teens, and we recognise this work is never finished.”

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DuckDuckGo CEO says it takes ‘too many steps’ to switch from Google • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Todd Shields:

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Founded in 2008, DuckDuckGo currently has about a 2.5% share of the market for search in the US, said CEO Gabriel Weinberg, and conducts about 100 million searches a day globally. In comparison, Google conducts several billion searches daily.

Weinberg said about 30% to 40% of DuckDuckGo’s users have a “strong preference” for privacy and that most of the company’s users switch over from Google.” The company considers Google to be “far and away” its biggest competitor.

“Switching is way harder than it needs to be,” Chief Executive Officer Gabriel Weinberg said in federal court on Thursday. “There’s just too many steps.”

Weinberg testified Thursday in the government’s antitrust trial against Google’s parent, Alphabet Inc. The Department of Justice claims Google pays more than $10 billion a year to tech rivals, smartphone makers and wireless providers to be the preselected option, or default, on PCs and mobile phones.

By illegally maintaining this monopoly, the government alleges, Google has kept rival search engines such as Microsoft Corp.’s Bing and DuckDuckGo from gaining the scale needed to compete. Google says it has won its market share, which the government has pegged at almost 90%, because it has the best search engine.

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I’ve met Weinberg a couple of times – he’s a nice guy, making a useful search engine (I’ve used DDG for more than a decade). He says it takes 15 or more clicks to change the default search on Android; it should be one. Google said it’s four on iOS.
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Searching for a breakup • Medium

Scott Galloway:

»

what was the last innovative Google product? Restructuring the brand’s architecture under Alphabet? Earnings growth has, mostly, been a function of finding new ways to extract profits from its monopoly: Google search results have become a billboard for Google-sponsored results interspersed with content harvested from other sites and links to Google’s own services.

In 2020, The Markup found that Google-associated results (ads for or links to the company’s other services) constituted over 60% of the first screen of an average Google search result. And in 1 of 5 searches, the entire first screen is Google results. This is the meat of its business: search ads generate 57% of the company’s revenue.

Despite turning search results into a carousel of ads and Google services, Google has racked up 90% market share in search queries — 95% on mobile. How? As Microsoft once did, it leverages its control over the most popular mobile operating system (Android) and spends unprecedented sums on deals assuring it is the default search engine on computers and phones — more than $10bn per year. Google says it’s the leader because it has the best product, but if that’s so … why pay $10bn a year to be the default?

«

It’s slightly post-hoc to say “it leverages its control over the most popular mobile operating system” – Android’s success wasn’t a foregone conclusion in 2010, for example, when Nokia and Windows Phone were still alive. (Though, strategically, Eric Schmidt – on Apple’s board – had tied up the search deal on the first iPhone.)

But the final question – if you’re so great, why do you have to pay people so much to tell you that you’re great? – is the important one, and is coming under the spotlight in the US antitrust trial.
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March 2023: a gadget recession • Inside Orchard

Neil Cybart, on his site for observations about the wider tech market, writing back in March (before the Vision Pro was unveiled, but was suspected):

»

While economic and competitive pressures are genuine, there is another factor unfolding in the gadget space that can’t be ignored. Beginning at the tail end of the pandemic, various tech YouTubers began to speak up about a marked slowdown in views and engagement. Things felt off in the tech vertical, and the pandemic didn’t seem to fully explain the situation.

In retrospect, the changes may be the byproduct of something akin to a settling out process in the gadget space. We aren’t quite ready to jump into the face wearables era. Apple is expected to unveil their move into the space in a few months with a launch later in the year. Meanwhile, the smartphone and tablet space has been unfolding along ecosystem grounds. The iPhone business has been a replacement business for years with the majority of sales going to existing iPhone users upgrading their device.

Taking a step back to look at broader industry trends, a gadget recession likely won’t be met with a wave of M&A. Instead, it is far more likely management teams will reassess their commitment to hardware in the first place. News of Microsoft and Google getting out of hardware altogether would not surprise me. There comes a point when years of investment dollars and managerial/talent resources just become too hard to justify when there is little to nothing to show for such efforts. The rationale that these companies gave for being in hardware in the first place has never been strong either.

«

Since then Microsoft’s hardware chief has jumped ship (to Amazon, whose hardware chief departed). There’s a definite feeling that the hardware space has been wrung absolutely dry.
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Microsoft’s Surface Go 4 gets a much-needed performance boost • The Verge

Jess Weatherbed:

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Microsoft has announced the Surface Go 4 — the latest version of its affordable 2-in-1 laptop series — at its Surface device launch event today. The new Go 4 features some minor performance upgrades over its predecessor, but it won’t be sold to consumers — the company says it’s specifically targeted at businesses and frontline workers.

…But the overall design being near-identical to its predecessor doesn’t particularly bode well for the Surface Go 4. In our review of the Surface Go 3, The Verge lambasted the convertible device for its flimsy build quality, poor battery life, and being too expensive for what you’re actually getting.

A quick hands-on test of the Surface Go 4 confirmed our suspicions. Performance was slow when running through some everyday tasks like web browsing and took embarrassingly long to switch between display orientations. Still, Microsoft is claiming that performance on the Windows 11 Pro version of the Surface Go 4 should be 80% faster than its predecessor.

«

Businesses only? One could imagine that this is a sign of Microsoft retreating from the wider market, perhaps.
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The social media panic-mongers have pivoted to AI • The Daily Beast

Louis Anslow:

»

Over a hundred influential leaders in media, government, philanthropy, and business gathered in New York City to hear [Tristan] Harris and his Center for Humane Technology co-founder, Aza Raskan, make a presentation which opened with a comparison of AI to nuclear weapons. This analogy was designed to evoke fear, leaving no room for nuanced discussions of risk and benefit (nuclear technology is also a critical tool for carbon free energy, for example.) This notion was seemingly borrowed from Yuval Noah Harari, whose quote, “What nukes are to the physical world… AI is to everything else,” was also featured later in the presentation.

It was the kind of rhetoric worthy of people the neuroscientist Darshana Narayanan has labeled “science populists”—a group she defined as “gifted storytellers who weave sensationalist yarns around scientific ‘facts’ in simple, emotionally persuasive language.” Narayana’s piece focused on Harari, but could have just as easily been about Harris.

Harris and Raskan’s presentation fit this description throughout and, thankfully, at least two veteran journalists in the audience saw through it. Steven Levy, editor in chief of Wired magazine, wrote a scathing article in March 2023 titled, “How to Start an AI Panic,” laying into their populist, sensationalist rhetoric—and comparing it to the Reefer Madness tone of [Netflix film] The Social Dilemma.

In a post-presentation interview with Harris, veteran tech reporter Kara Swisher asked about the claim that “50% of AI researchers predict a 10% chance of extinction,” noting that the statistics were drawn from “a non-peer reviewed survey, a single question one, with around 150 responses.”

Harris retorted: “Don’t trust one survey.”

«

Anslow makes a valid point: for some people, mongering fear about The New Hotness become a way of life, and when The New Hotness cools down, their options are to cool down with it, or find a New New Hotness to get bothered about. He isn’t sparing over who he points to either.
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NFT crash: 95% of the market is now worthless, study finds • Business Insider

Phil Rosen:

»

Are NFTs dead? 

A recent study looking at the price of thousands of collections seems to suggest the answer is “yes.” 

A report by dappGambl based on data provided by NFT Scan and CoinMarketCap indicated that 95% of non-fungible tokens were effectively worthless. Out of 73,257 NFT collections, 69,795 of them had a market cap of zero ether.

By their estimates, almost 23 million people hold these worthless assets.

“This daunting reality should serve as a sobering check on the euphoria that has often surrounded the NFT space,” the researchers said. “Amid stories of digital art pieces selling for millions and overnight success stories, it is easy to overlook the fact that the market is fraught with pitfalls and potential losses.”

NFTs are digital representations of art or collectibles tied to a blockchain, typically ethereum, and each one has a unique signature that cannot be duplicated. In 2021 and 2022, the NFT market saw a huge bull run, at one point leading to $2.8bn in monthly trading volume. [That’s $2.8bn of Monopoly money, not real money – Overspill Ed.]

During that time, popular collections such as Bored Apes and CryptoPunks were selling for millions of dollars, and celebrities such as Stephen Curry and Snoop Dogg participated in the hype. The boom coincided with cryptocurrency’s peak when bitcoin was trading close to $70,000. On Wednesday, the price of the crypto hovered just above $27,000.

But as dappGambl’s study suggests, that’s all come crashing down. 79% of all NFT collections currently remain unsold, and the surplus of supply over demand has created a buyer’s market that isn’t doing anything to revive enthusiasm.

«

Hard to choose between “shocked, I tell you, shocked” and “Oh no! Anyway…” But: 23 million people were that credulous? Well done internet for finding the world’s dimmest people.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A lawsuit has been filed by the author of Game Of Thrones – and others – against OpenAI, claiming copyright infringement. CC-licensed photo by vagueonthehow on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Didn’t humans write the final season? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Data analysis reveals surprisingly high number of Wordle cheaters • Discover Magazine

»

The Times has since introduced some interesting analytics to help users understand the game, explore tactics and to see how they fare compared to other players and against the newspaper’s in-house Wordle computer, called Wordlebot.

Now James Dilger, from Stony Brook University in New York, says that this analytics page reveals far more data than is actually displayed. His analysis of this data over several months reveals a range of insights into the game, including the inescapable conclusion that up to 10,000 players cheat outrageously. “It happens consistently every day!” says Dilger, in his light-hearted paper.

His conclusions come via a fortuitous discovery. Every day, Wordlebot displays the dozen or so most popular words that players use for their first guess, plus some selected other words, such as the ranking of an individual’s first guess.

Dilger imagined that analyzing this data over time might reveal some interesting insights, so he copied and pasted it into an Excel spreadsheet. To his surprise, he ended up with the data for the top fifty most popular word guesses, most of which are never displayed on the webpage.

He collected this data between 3 May and 31 August 2023 and then analysed the trends that emerged. The results clearly show that many players cheat. The game has an internal vocabulary of 2315 words (five years’ worth) from which the correct answer is chosen. The chances that one of these is a first guess are 1/2315 or 0.043% at best. The actual probability is smaller because most users will not know the precise contents of this list.

And yet Dilger’s data shows that the percentage of players who guess correctly on their first try never drops below 0.2%, equivalent to 4000 players. “Some days it’s as high as 0.5% (10,000 players),” he complains. Dilger is strident in his conclusion. “What shall we call these people?” he asks. “Hmmm, “cheaters” comes to mind, so that’s what I call ‘em!”

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I don’t doubt that he’s right, though like him I don’t see what first-word cheaters get out of it. Is it the ones who play in family groups and want bragging rights?
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John Grisham, George R.R. Martin and more authors sue OpenAI for copyright infringement • AP News

Hillel Italie:

»

John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and George R.R. Martin are among 17 authors suing OpenAI for “systematic theft on a mass scale,” the latest in a wave of legal action by writers concerned that artificial intelligence programs are using their copyrighted works without permission.

In papers filed Tuesday in federal court in New York, the authors alleged “flagrant and harmful infringements of plaintiffs’ registered copyrights” and called the ChatGPT program a “massive commercial enterprise” that is reliant upon “systematic theft on a mass scale.”

The suit was organized by the Authors Guild and also includes David Baldacci, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen and Elin Hilderbrand among others.

“It is imperative that we stop this theft in its tracks or we will destroy our incredible literary culture, which feeds many other creative industries in the U.S.,” Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger said in a statement. “Great books are generally written by those who spend their careers and, indeed, their lives, learning and perfecting their crafts. To preserve our literature, authors must have the ability to control if and how their works are used by generative AI.”

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Hasn’t GRRM got a few books to finish? Also, where does he think OpenAI has been reading his content? Or is the complaint that it read the scripts of the first few series of Game Of Thrones and that’s his stuff?

Anyway, read on…
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Why George R.R. Martins’s lawsuit against generative AI will cost authors even if they win • Arkavian

Arkavian is a company that developed open source software for making deepfake pictures:

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what happens if Martin does win the lawsuit? Well, it’s not going to turn out the way he hoped. Sure, he will get awarded some money for damages. And probably, LLMs won’t be able to legally train on datasets with his book — in the US, anyway. But other countries — Japan, for instance — don’t see training data as a violation of copyright. So LLMs can legally train on datasets in Japan or another country, even if they contain Martin’s book – completely negating the effect of the lawsuit since they could just train in other countries with more relaxed laws. 

If this lawsuit makes US copyright law stricter against AI, all it would do is make companies hesitant to develop and innovate in their products. Limits on datasets could put a halt to innovations in the technology and put the US on the back foot for AI development and use. Restrictions on AI could translate into restrictions on how websites like Amazon use AI to recommend books to its customers — and authors don’t want that.

The best-case scenario for all authors would be for this lawsuit to get thrown out. There’s just no good way to restrict AI development via copyright that won’t harm authors, publishers, and their ability to sell through new channels in the US. And any restrictions on AI will harm not only AI companies, but authors everywhere. 

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The gruesome story of how Neuralink’s monkeys actually died • WIRED

Dhruv Mehrotra and Dell Cameron:

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Fresh allegations of potential securities fraud have been leveled at Elon Musk over statements he recently made regarding the deaths of primates used for research at Neuralink, his biotech startup. Letters sent this afternoon to top officials at the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by a medical ethics group call on the agency to investigate Musk’s claims that monkeys who died during trials at the company were terminally ill and did not die as a result of Neuralink implants. They claim, based on veterinary records, that complications with the implant procedures led to their deaths.

Musk first acknowledged the deaths of the macaques on September 10 in a reply to a user on his social networking app X (formerly Twitter). He denied that any of the deaths were “a result of a Neuralink implant,” and said Neuralink’s researchers had taken care to select subjects who were already “close to death.” Relatedly, in a presentation last fall, Musk claimed that Neuralink’s animal testing was never “exploratory,” but conducted instead to confirm fully formed scientific hypotheses. “We are extremely careful,” he said.

Public records reviewed by WIRED, and interviews conducted with a former Neuralink employee and a current researcher at the University of California, Davis primate center, paint a wholly different picture of Neuralink’s animal research.

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This is indeed gruesome reading. And of course Musk doesn’t care about the collateral damage on the path to his perhaps-impossible dream.
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Amazon’s all-new Alexa voice assistant is coming soon, powered by a new Alexa LLM • The Verge

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy,:

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Amazon’s Alexa is about to come out of its shell, and what emerges could be very interesting. At its fall hardware event Wednesday, the company revealed an all-new Alexa voice assistant powered by its new Alexa large language model. According to Dave Limp, Amazon’s current SVP of devices and services, this new Alexa can understand conversational phrases and respond appropriately, interpret context more effectively, and complete multiple requests from one command. 

Voice assistants need a shake-up. A general lack of innovation and barely imperceptible improvements around comprehension have turned them into basic tools instead of the exciting technological advancements we hoped for when they broke onto the scene over a decade ago.

Generative AI has looked like their best shot at survival for a while. But while these digital assistants have always had an element of AI, they’ve lacked the complex processing abilities and more human-like interactions generative AI is capable of. This is a big moment for the smart home, as it could take home automation to the next level, moving it from a remote control experience to a home that’s, well, actually smart. 

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Chatty rooms! What an idea. Though this was inevitable; the only question was whether it would be Google or Amazon (or maybe Microsoft, but its announcement is Thursday) that would do this first.
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UK net zero policies: what has Sunak scrapped and what do changes mean? • The Guardian

Helena Horton:

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Rishi Sunak has announced a watering-down of the UK’s net zero policies, though claims he still wishes to meet the legally binding 2050 target. The prime minister said this was to save money for families, declaring: “If we continue down this path, we risk losing the consent of the British people and the resulting backlash will not just be against specific policies, but against the wider mission itself.”

But what has he scrapped? Will it actually save the people of the UK any money? And what will it mean for the climate crisis? The Guardian has looked into each policy and what the change means.

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Nothing good. What’s astonishing is that there’s so much obvious evidence of why these moves are bad. And yet the Tories have the audacity to trumpet that they’re “ending the ban on onshore wind” – a ban which they put in place in 2015.
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Gaia Vince says: we need to prepare for mass climate migration • Prospect

Philippa Nuttall:

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“Playground politics,” sighs Gaia Vince. The science journalist and author of Nomad Century is outraged—but unsurprised—by the UK government’s “stop the boats” campaign. When we speak, the Bibby Stockholm barge is being filled with asylum seekers, despite questions about its suitability, and Number 10 is apparently considering flying those it doesn’t want in the country to Ascension Island, if its Rwanda policy fails. Meanwhile, Lee Anderson, deputy chair of the Conservative party, has suggested asylum seekers refusing to be housed on the barge “fuck off back to France”. Vince, whose book advocates a pragmatic, organised and compassionate response to climate migration, is not short of adjectives to describe these methods. They are “unbelievable”, “depressing” and “unsustainable”, she says in only the first minute of our conversation.   

Published last summer and about to appear in paperback, Nomad Century argues that climate change will make large swathes of the planet uninhabitable, and that the only proper response is “a planned and deliberate migration of a kind humanity has never before undertaken.” The alternative, Vince writes, is “calamitous chaos” with “enormous loss of life, or terrible wars and misery, as the wealthy erect barriers against the poorest.”

…In any case, she says, migration is happening “whether we like it or not. We can either deal with it in a sensible way or close our eyes and do nothing.” Ignorance, she suggests, is the UK government’s current choice—instead of proper policies, it is “responding in a way that drives division and maybe gets applause from a small pool of worshippers.” Since ideas such as flying people to Ascension Island are “ridiculous”, Vince wonders whether the government’s long-term plan might be similarly unthinkable. “Is that all 17-year-olds are conscripted into armies to fight these people on the borders?”

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Ironically – or perhaps not – the latter scenario is the setup for The Wall, a book by John Lanchester.
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Google DeepMind AI tool assesses DNA mutations for harm potential • The Guardian

Ian Sample:

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Scientists at Google DeepMind have built an artificial intelligence program that can predict whether millions of genetic mutations are either harmless or likely to cause disease, in an effort to speed up research and the diagnosis of rare disorders.

The program makes predictions about so-called missense mutations, where a single letter is misspelt in the DNA code. Such mutations are often harmless but they can disrupt how proteins work and cause diseases from cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anaemia to cancer and problems with brain development.

The researchers used AlphaMissense to assess all 71m single-letter mutations that could affect human proteins. When they set the program’s precision to 90%, it predicted that 57% of missense mutations were probably harmless and 32% were probably harmful. It was uncertain about the impact of the rest.

Based on the findings, the scientists have released a free online catalogue of the predictions to help geneticists and clinicians who are either studying how mutations drive diseases or diagnosing patients who have rare disorders.

A typical person has about 9,000 missense mutations throughout their genome. Of more than 4m seen in humans, only 2% have been classified as either benign or pathogenic. Doctors already have computer programs to predict which mutations may drive disease but because the predictions are inaccurate, they can only provide supporting evidence for making a diagnosis.

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There’s a DeepMind blogpost. I find this very encouraging: a really sensible use of AI to evaporate the difficult part of the problem and leave the relevant bits behind.
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How to navigate Apple’s shift from Lightning to USB-C • The New York Times

Brian X Chen:

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The problem with USB-C cables is that while they usually look the same, the cheaper, low-quality cords offer no such protection for your device. They may have the correct oval connector, but inside, they lack chips to protect your phone.

So if you need a USB-C cable, don’t grab any cheap wire, like the $5 ones you’ll see at a gas station kiosk. Invest in a durable cable from a reputable company. Brands like Anker, Belkin and Amazon Basics are well known for their high-quality power cables that cost roughly $9 to $30, according to John Bumstead, the owner of RDKL Inc., a repair shop that refurbishes MacBooks. Buy the cables from trusted retailers or directly from the brands themselves — and avoid purchasing used wires on sites like eBay.

Be careful what you plug into.

Many USB-C cables lack chips to restrict the current powering your phone. So if you plug it into a source that charges at a higher voltage than your phone accepts, you could electrocute your phone, Ms. Jones said.

The lesson here is to be careful about what you plug your cord into. Those USB ports embedded into airplane back seats, hotel room walls or car consoles are a big no-no because it’s unclear what their charging rates are. It’s safest to plug your USB-C cable only into a high-quality charging brick that protects your phone. Wirecutter, our sister publication, recommends USB-C power bricks from Anker, RAVPower and Spigen that do a good job replenishing your phone quickly without damaging it.
There’s always wireless.

For iPhone owners who aren’t planning on upgrading right away but need new chargers, the most cost-effective alternative to buying another Lightning cable is to go wireless. The E.U. mandate applies only to wires that plug directly into devices — not wireless charging devices that replenish your phone via magnetic induction, such as Apple’s puck-shaped MagSafe

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But those USB ports embedded into airplane back seats are all USB-A, surely? Those aren’t going to fry your phone. For the rest, though, yup: USB-C needs colour coding, doesn’t it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The French ski resort of La Sambuy is now just a resort, after warming winters killed its pistes. CC-licensed photo by dmytrok 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. Piste off. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Self-publishers must declare if content sold on Amazon’s site is AI-generated • The Guardian

Ella Creamer:

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Amazon has introduced new rules and guidance for Kindle books generated by artificial intelligence tools, including the requirement that authors inform it when content is AI-generated.

The company announced the new rules on its Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) forum on Wednesday. It said in a statement: “Beginning today, when you publish a new title or make edits to and republish an existing title through KDP, you will be asked whether your content is AI-generated.” KDP allows authors to self-publish their books and put them up for sale on Amazon’s site.

Amazon also added a new section to its content guidelines focused on AI, which now includes definitions of “AI-generated” and “AI-assisted” content and states that sellers are not required to disclose when content is AI-assisted.

AI-generated content is defined by the company as “text, images or translations created by an AI-based tool”, even if substantial edits are made afterwards. AI-assisted content is classified as that created by authors and sellers themselves but where AI tools are used to “edit, refine, error-check, or otherwise improve”.

The guidelines also state that AI-based tools can be used to “brainstorm and generate ideas” without disclosure, as long as the text or images were ultimately created by the human author.

The new rules come weeks after the site removed suspected AI-generated books that imitated the work of real authors. In August, the author Jane Friedman complained that several books, which she believed were created by AI tools, were falsely listed as being written by her. The books were subsequently removed by Amazon.

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This is a great solution, because everybody always tells the truth when they’ve used AI to write a book, and Amazon has an AI detection system that is absolutely perfect in distinguishing AI-written content from human-generated stuff.
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French ski resort closes permanently because there’s not enough snow • CNN

Maya Szaniecki:

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La Sambuy, a town which runs a family skiing destination near Mont Blanc in the French Alps, has decided to dismantle its ski lifts because global warming has shrunk its ski season to just a few weeks, meaning it’s no longer profitable to keep them open.

“Before, we used to have snow practically from the first of December up until the 30th of March,” La Sambuy’s mayor, Jacques Dalex, told CNN. Last winter, however, there was only “four weeks of snow, and even then, not much snow,” he added. That meant “very quickly, stones and rocks appeared on the piste.”

Able to open for fewer than five weeks during January and February, Dalex said the resort was looking at an annual operating loss of roughly €500,000 ($530,000). Keeping the lifts going alone costs €80,000 per year.

La Sambuy isn’t a huge resort, with just three lifts and a handful of pistes reaching up to a top height of 1,850 meters (about 6,070 feet).

…La Sambuy is not the only French ski resort facing a meltdown. Last year, Saint-Firmin, another small Alpine ski destination, opted to remove its ski lift after seeing its winter season dwindle from months to weeks, a situation also blamed on climate change.

Mountain Wilderness, a French environmental group, says it has dismantled 22 ski lifts in France since 2001, and estimates that there are still 106 abandoned ski lifts across 59 sites in the country.

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Twitter is still throttling competitors’ links; check for yourself • The Markup

Jon Keegan, Dan Phiffer and Joel Eastwood:

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Twitter continues to slow traffic to competing sites nearly a month after it partially pulled back from such throttling, a Markup analysis has found.

Users of the social platform, now officially known as X, are made to wait on average about two and a half seconds after clicking on links to Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, and Substack, the analysis found. That’s more than 60 times longer than the average wait for links to other sites.

While not included in our full tests, the delay appears to also include links to the new Threads platform, which like Facebook and Instagram is owned by Meta.

…Slowing traffic to websites can harm the companies that run the sites and the people who use them. Even a 2.5-second delay after clicking a link can feel extremely slow to users, potentially discouraging them from waiting around for content to load. A 2017 Google study found that the probability of a user “bouncing,” or abandoning a site, increased 32% when page load times increased to three seconds from one second.

Substack co-founders Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Seth wrote that they hope X reverses its decision to impose a delay on Substack links. “Writers cannot build sustainable businesses if their connection to their audience depends on unreliable platforms that have proven they are willing to make changes that are hostile to the people who use them,” they said in an email.  Meta and Bluesky did not respond to a request for comment. 

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Elon Musk suggests he will charge all X/Twitter users a fee • Variety

Todd Spangler:

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Elon Musk may flip the switch to make X — the social network formerly known as Twitter — an entirely subscription-based platform.

Musk brought up the idea of charging all users of X/Twitter during a wide-ranging conversation focused on AI that featured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday. “We’re moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system,” Musk told Netanyahu, claiming that “it’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots.” His comments were initially reported by Bloomberg’s Dave Lee.

Musk didn’t mention timing of his plan to charge X/Twitter users, nor did he say exactly how much it would cost other than to say a monthly fee of “a few dollars or something” would deter the creation of bot accounts. According to Musk, X has 550 million monthly active users, who share 100 million-200 million posts daily on the social network.

Musk has previously mulled the idea of putting Twitter entirely behind a paywall in internal conversations, according to industry news site Platformer. Musk, who also is CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has said X/Twitter ad sales have plunged 50% since he bought the company. “We’re still negative cash flow, due to ~50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load,” Musk posted on July 15.

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OK, so I did use another part of this (evidently wide-ranging, and bizarre) conversation yesterday, but of course this is the bit that really focuses one’s attention. In passing: the photograph of Musk makes him look as though he’s made of wax and he’s under an infrared lamp. Meanwhile, Bluesky saw record signups after Musk’s announcement.

I’ll write at length about the potential efficacy of this idea on the Social Warming Substack on Friday.
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U.S. COVID levels approach pandemic’s 2020 peak • Fortune Well

Erin Prater:

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US COVID infections are hovering near levels of the pandemic’s first peak in 2020, and approaching the Delta peak of late 2021, according to wastewater surveillance and modeling by forecasters.

It’s yet another sign that while the official pandemic state may be over, the days of COVID are far from it.

Viral wastewater levels are not far behind all of the pandemic’s 2020 peaks except for one—the initial peak of March 2020, which they’ve already surpassed. And they lag just slightly levels seen during the deadly Delta peak of late 2021, according to Biobot Analytics, which monitors such data for the federal government.

A forecast issued this week by Jay Weiland, a leading COVID modeler, came to the same conclusions. On Thursday, Weiland estimated that 650,000 Americans are becoming infected daily, with 1 in 51 Americans currently infected with COVID. 

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I wonder about the forecasting here. Testing wasn’t as widespread in early 2020, so levels could have been higher then. And also: the difference is that huge tracts of the population is vaccinated now. The story says that hospitalisations and deaths are rising, but carefully avoids giving any numbers to compare that data with 2020.
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Why we procrastinate when we have long deadlines • Harvard Business Review

Meng Zhu:

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“Can you get that to me by the end of the day?” isn’t a request many employees like to hear. But for many people, having shorter deadlines instead of longer ones — “Do you think you can do that by the end of the week?” — might actually help them complete a task and see their work as being less difficult.

In a recent study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, my colleagues Rajesh Bagchi and Stefan Hock and I demonstrate that longer deadlines can lead workers to think an assignment is harder than it actually is, which causes them to commit more resources to the work. This, in turn, increases how much they procrastinate and their likelihood of quitting. This is true even when the deadline length is incidental, such as when a venue or guest isn’t available for an extended period of time.

In our research we asked volunteers at a local community center to answer a short survey about retirement planning. We set two incidental deadlines. In one group, the online survey could be accessed throughout the next seven days, but the other group had 14 days. Results showed that participants who faced the longer deadline wrote longer responses to the survey and spent more time on it. But there was a catch: Those same participants were more likely to procrastinate and were less likely to complete the assignment than their time-constrained counterparts.

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They could have just asked some journalists, who would have told them that given a day to write 1,000 words, they will do very little until they have around two hours left, and then break into a sprint.
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How a Ring camera can attract burglars (I learnt the hard way) • The Times

Louise Eccles:

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Professor Claire Nee, founder of the University of Portsmouth’s International Centre for Research in Forensic Psychology, has interviewed hundreds of convicted burglars. She would not install a Ring doorbell or an alarm.

“The majority of burglars just put a balaclava on because they’re aware of video footage,” she said. “Alarms often actually attract burglars to houses. They are a wealth cue — it means there is going to be something worth stealing.

“Neighbours tend not to respond to alarms unless they go for ages and, even with monitored alarms [which call to police], you’re lucky if anyone arrives within 15 minutes. Most burglaries are over in eight to ten minutes.”

The best deterrents are secure window locks, indoor lights on a timer, external lights on a timer or sensor and double door locks or deadlocks, according to research published in 2019 by criminology professors at UCL and Nottingham Trent and Loughborough universities. They found that alarms increased the burglary risk because they suggested there were valuables and gave “a false sense of protection that makes such households ‘careless’.”

Nee suggests looking for places where people could get in by jumping gates or breaking weak window locks. “A burglar will much prefer to go to the rear of the house if they can,” she said. “That doesn’t mean they won’t go through the front door, because we are absolutely terrible at leaving our bags and car keys really near the front door.”

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iOS 17 release: everything you need to know about Apple’s big updates • The Guardian

Samuel Gibbs:

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Announced at the company’s developer conference in June, iOS 17, iPadOS 17 and watchOS 10 add a much-improved keyboard with autocorrect that will let you swear, new standby modes, contact posters, greater customisation and the biggest reworking of the Apple Watch’s interface since launch.

Here’s what you need to know about the updates.

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More and more there’s less and less to take much notice of; though Stage Manager seems to be tacking iPadOS more towards the full desktop metaphor, and the Apple Watch has changed what the buttons do: less swiping, more pressing.
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Why is Apple’s second-generation UWB chip exciting? • Estimote Blog

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Another potential future application of the lower power UWB [ultra-wideband] chip [in the new iPhone and Apple Watch] might involve a technique named Downlink TDoA. This stands for “time difference of arrival,” a new standard championed by the FiRa organization. It lets UWB-enabled phones passively receive signals from UWB beacons or anchors.

Imagine your car in a tunnel where GPS is unavailable. UWB beacons in the tunnel transmit radio signals to your phone. Your phone captures these signals, and using the time difference of their arrival, it can calculate the exact position of the car inside the tunnel. With Downlink TDoA, beacons don’t collect any data from to the phone. The precise location is determined solely by the UWB chip on the phone. This approach is seen as safer and more privacy-centric than traditional real-time location systems (RTLS). As a result, it’s often referred to as Untracked Indoor Positioning.

This innovative, privacy-centric way of determining indoor positioning could also be applied in airports, malls, museums, and more. It could effectively deliver what the iBeacon promised years ago, but with inch-perfect accuracy and superior security.

To make such experiences possible, a low-power UWB processor like the second-gen chip is essential. The phone would need to constantly detect UWB signals from nearby beacons, and it’s crucial that this happens efficiently.

There’s also speculation that the UWB chip may eventually interact with Apple’s new smart glasses. This makes a lot of sense. Currently, Vision Pro determines its spatial orientation in a room using computer vision and image processing. Using the UWB chip and radio signals for this purpose would use order of magnitude less power. Preserving power could allow Apple to design more compact and lighter smart glasses in the future.

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I always think that sentences beginning “Imagine your car…” or “There’s also speculation…” aren’t the most reliable guides to what’s going to happen, but the Vision Pro point might come through.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Light pollution is now so pervasive that astronomers have coined a word for wanting the darkness back: “noctalgia”. CC-licensed photo by Nikk 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. Gotta wear shades. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

How to tell if your AI is conscious • The New York Times

Oliver Whang:

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The fuzziness of consciousness, its imprecision, has made its study anathema in the natural sciences. At least until recently, the project was largely left to philosophers, who often were only marginally better than others at clarifying their object of study. Hod Lipson, a roboticist at Columbia University, said that some people in his field referred to consciousness as “the C-word.” Grace Lindsay, a neuroscientist at New York University, said, “There was this idea that you can’t study consciousness until you have tenure.”

Nonetheless, a few weeks ago, a group of philosophers, neuroscientists and computer scientists, Dr. Lindsay among them, proposed a rubric with which to determine whether an AI system like ChatGPT could be considered conscious. The report, which surveys what Dr. Lindsay calls the “brand-new” science of consciousness, pulls together elements from a half-dozen nascent empirical theories and proposes a list of measurable qualities that might suggest the presence of some presence in a machine.

For instance, recurrent processing theory focuses on the differences between conscious perception (for example, actively studying an apple in front of you) and unconscious perception (such as your sense of an apple flying toward your face). Neuroscientists have argued that we unconsciously perceive things when electrical signals are passed from the nerves in our eyes to the primary visual cortex and then to deeper parts of the brain, like a baton being handed off from one cluster of nerves to another. These perceptions seem to become conscious when the baton is passed back, from the deeper parts of the brain to the primary visual cortex, creating a loop of activity.

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It’s a subtle discussion, though there seems to be a nod towards recursion as the definition (or causation, or essence) of consciousness, as previously discussed here.
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Antarctic sea-ice at ‘mind-blowing’ low alarms experts • BBC News

Georgina Rannard, Becky Dale and Erwan Rivault:

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The sea-ice surrounding Antarctica is well below any previous recorded winter level, satellite data shows, a worrying new benchmark for a region that once seemed resistant to global warming.

“It’s so far outside anything we’ve seen, it’s almost mind-blowing,” says Walter Meier, who monitors sea-ice with the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

An unstable Antarctica could have far-reaching consequences, polar experts warn. Antarctica’s huge ice expanse regulates the planet’s temperature, as the white surface reflects the Sun’s energy back into the atmosphere and also cools the water beneath and near it. Without its ice cooling the planet, Antarctica could transform from Earth’s refrigerator to a radiator, experts say.

The ice that floats on the Antarctic Ocean’s surface now measures less than 17 million sq km – that is 1.5 million sq km of sea-ice less than the September average, and well below previous winter record lows. That’s an area of missing ice about five times the size of the British Isles.

Dr Meier is not optimistic that the sea-ice will recover to a significant degree. Scientists are still trying to identify all the factors that led to this year’s low sea-ice – but studying trends in Antarctica has historically been challenging.

In a year when several global heat and ocean temperature records have broken, some scientists insist the low sea-ice is the measure to pay attention to.

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Still haven’t come across any good news about the climate itself.
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Call of Duty Warzone: does UK esports scene need more live events? • BBC News

Shaun Dacosta:

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The World Series of Warzone (WSOW) held its global final in London over the weekend, and it came at an interesting time for the UK esports scene.

Earlier this month, the Call of Duty League team London Royal Ravens announced it was moving to the United States – leaving Britain without a dedicated team. But if you watched the WSOW final, based on the battle royale offshoot of the first-person shooter, you would think the UK esports scene was doing pretty well.

It drew a crowd of about 3,000 people, competitors from across the world and huge numbers tuned in to watch the event online.

BBC Newsbeat spoke to Call of Duty esports bosses Daniel Tsay and Rob Belk about their decision to hold the event in London. Product manager Rob said previous experience told them the crowd’s “hype and energy” would be “off the charts”.

“People are going to be cheering, people are going to be standing up.”

And general manager Daniel said one of the top requests from the Call of Duty community has been for a UK event. “So when the team were thinking ‘where can we go?’ London came fairly organically to the top of the list,” he said.

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$100,000 prize, livestream had 100,000 people logged on. That’s a little ahead of the number watching the UK winning a place in the Davis Cup tennis quarterfinals, a global competition, which hit about 85,000 at its peak.
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Musk and Netanyahu blame “armies of bots” for spreading antisemitism on X • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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The livestreamed event started with a one-on-one between Musk and Netanyahu that attracted more than 735,000 views. While much of the one-on-one focused on AI—which Musk claimed was “potentially the biggest civilizational threat” and Netanyahu called “a blessing and a curse”—the men also discussed their views on antisemitism and how Musk deals with hate speech on X.

“I know your commitment to free speech,” Netanyahu said about 20 minutes into the talk. “But I also know your opposition to antisemitism. You’ve spoken about it. You’ve tweeted about it. And all I could say is, I hope you find within the confines of the First Amendment the ability to stop not only antisemitism, or roll it back as best you can, but any collective hatred of people.”

Musk said that he was “sort of against attacking any group” but that defending free speech “does at times mean that there’s someone you don’t like who’s saying something you don’t like.” However, “that doesn’t mean, some sort of negativity should be pushed upon people,” Musk said, noting that X couldn’t afford to let the platform become “unpleasant,” because it would lose users. He said that’s why his platform works to de-amplify hate speech when it’s detected—”because we think probably that’s not what people want to hear.”

“Obviously, I’m against antisemitism,” Musk said. “I’m against anti-really anything that promotes hate and conflict.”

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*me: stares into camera, blinks very slowly*
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The loss of dark skies is so painful, astronomers coined a new term for it • Space

Paul Sutter:

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What good are night-adapted senses in nocturnal species if the night sky isn’t much darker than the daytime sky? Researchers have identified several species whose circadian rhythms are getting thrown off, making them vulnerable to predation (or, the reverse: the inability to effectively locate prey).

Given the harmful effects of light pollution, a pair of astronomers has coined a new term to help focus efforts to combat it. Their term, as reported in a brief paper in the preprint database arXiv and a letter to the journal Science, is “noctalgia.” In general, it means “sky grief,” and it captures the collective pain we are experiencing as we continue to lose access to the night sky.

Thankfully, there is a way to tackle noctalgia, just as there are ways to combat climate change. On the ground, efforts have sprung up across the globe to create dark-sky reserves, where surrounding communities pledge not to encroach with further expansions of light pollution. Still, those are usually in extremely remote and inaccessible regions of the globe, so other efforts have focused on working with community and business leaders to install night-friendly lighting, such as devices that turn off automatically or point only at the ground (or are simply not used at all).

Tackling satellite-based pollution is another matter, as that will require international cooperation and pressure on companies like SpaceX to be better stewards of the skies they are filling with equipment.

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Neat word.
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US argues Google wants too much information kept secret in antitrust trial • Reuters

Diane Bartz:

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The US Justice Department on Monday objected to removing the public from the court during some discussions of how Google prices online advertising, one of the issues at the heart of the antitrust trial under way in Washington.

The government is seeking to show that Alphabet’s Google broke antitrust law to maintain its dominance in online search. The search dominance led to fast-increasing advertising revenues that made Google a $1 trillion company.

David Dahlquist, speaking for the government, pointed to a document that was redacted that had a short back and forth about Google’s pricing for search advertising.

Dahlquist then argued to Judge Amit Mehta, who will decide the case, that information like the tidbit in the document should not be redacted. “This satisfies public interest because it’s at the core of the DOJ case against Google,” he said.

Speaking for Google, John Schmidtlein urged that all discussions of pricing be in a closed session, which means the public and reporters must leave the courtroom.

It is not unusual in merger trials for information like market share and business and pricing strategies to be redacted.

And sometimes the redactions are broader since, essentially, the companies want the information hidden and the government lawyers fighting the merger are working flat out to win rather than worrying about over-sealing, said Katherine Van Dyck, an experienced litigator and senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project.

“Litigation is a pretty grueling process,” she said.

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Offset market hit by fresh allegations of false CO2 claims • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Natasha White:

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A popular category of carbon offsets held by a number of major publicly traded companies is significantly more prone to greenwashing than previously feared, according to a new investigation of the financial instruments.

The conclusion is based on work done by a team of 14 researchers in association with the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. The study looked at so-called REDD+ credits, which represent roughly a quarter of carbon offsets issued globally.

“Many of the researchers have been studying carbon-offset quality for many years, and even we were surprised,” Barbara Haya, director at the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project and the lead researcher behind the report, said in an interview. “We found problems under every stone we turned.”

The findings may have serious implications for companies that have based their climate statements on the offsets probed in the study. That list includes Shell Plc, Eni SpA and Delta Air Lines Inc., according to an analysis of public data by Carbon Market Watch, a nonprofit that commissioned the Berkeley research.

The study also has ramifications for the traders of offsets, according to Gilles Dufrasne, global carbon markets lead at Carbon Market Watch.

Traders and companies that end up buying offsets need to “do some work to figure out which ones are worth something and which ones are worth nothing,” Dufrasne said. “Most credits probably don’t represent any climate benefit.”

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Which is why I mentioned last week that Apple ought to look closely at its carbon offset programs. They’re a classic form of greenwashing.
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What’s lost when the New York Times sports section goes away • The Washington Post

Barry Svrluga:

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Forget print vs. online for a minute, because that war has been over for a long time. The stories and the analysis, the commentary and the accountability journalism — broadly holding the powers that be responsible for how they treated people, narrowly holding teams responsible for the moves they made — were all housed in one place.

Which is not to say the Times won’t still make an impact in sports journalism. The Athletic, the subscription-based website the Times bought for $550m that it will use to replace its sports content, has many capable and talented reporters and editors, and it has produced good work. It’s just hard to imagine, going forward, that it will have 400 of them. And if the reporters go away, so does their ability to dissect the moves of specific franchises for the fans who care so deeply about them. Pro teams have been in the business of generating their own content for more than a decade now, and some of it — behind-the-scenes videos in particular — can be moving. But it’s not critical — ever. That’s a loss.

…There are still great sports writing and sportswriters out there. Where it and they are found is changing. ESPN no longer has a magazine. Sports Illustrated is no longer owned by a journalism company. The New York Times is closing its sports section. The craft is undergoing an overhaul, produced by nontraditional outlets seeking different audiences.

Maybe that’s just fine, a natural and necessary evolution. But I can’t help but think that something is being lost — something has been lost — in all of this. The idea that sports are a valuable and vital part of culture, worthy of being packaged with international and national news, alongside coverage of the theater and art and style. The idea that deep reporting and elegant writing can elevate the understanding of sports, that the stories a publication’s best writers produce can enhance the experience of watching a competition, not just reproduce what everyone saw.

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There were four hundred people on the NYT’s sports section? Jeepers. I much preferred the writing in Sports Illustrated, back in the day: well-researched articles written with a languid style well removed from the raw Weetabix of the NYT’s style.
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Windows and Surface chief Panos Panay is leaving Microsoft • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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Panay’s departure from Microsoft is somewhat abrupt. Just last month, Panay mentioned he was excited to appear at Microsoft’s special event that’s set to take place on Thursday, September 21st, where the company is poised to reveal the latest additions to its Surface lineup and “AI innovation.” However, Microsoft spokesperson Frank Shaw tells The Verge Panay will not appear at this week’s event.

Panay first joined Microsoft in 2004 as a group program manager. After overseeing the company’s Surface line and other key products, Panay became the company’s chief product officer in 2018, where he led the development of Windows 11. In 2021, Panay was promoted to executive vice president as part of the top leadership team that directly advises Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

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Apparently Panay is heading directly to Amazon to head its hardware division. The Surface line never quite made the impact that Microsoft wanted for it; the idea that it would transform the Windows laptop and tablet market by being a north star for product manufacture to all the PC and tablet OEMs didn’t materialise. Expect the Surface line to be quietly deprecated after this.
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Tying a chatbot to a self-driving car’s system means it can explain what it’s doing to operators. CC-licensed photo by zombieite 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 was about the one social network nobody’s been able to build.

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

Google to pay California $93m over location-tracking claims • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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Google has agreed to pay $93m to the state of California to settle claims it tracked the location of users without their knowledge. Under the terms of the proposed agreement, Google must also provide more information about the location data it collects on users.

The settlement follows a “multi-year” investigation by California’s Department of Justice, which found that Google deceived users into thinking they weren’t getting tracked when they actually were. According to the complaint, Google continued to collect and store location data on users even when they disabled the “Location History” setting within its apps and services, allowing the company to use this information for targeted advertising.

Google has since addressed the issues outlined in the complaint, with company spokesperson José Castañeda telling The Verge the allegations are “based on outdated product policies we changed years ago.” California now requires Google to disclose that the location data they collect on users might be used for ad personalization, provide more transparency about location tracking, as well as offer detailed information about the data it collects on its website.

“Our investigation revealed that Google was telling its users one thing — that it would no longer track their location once they opted out — but doing the opposite and continuing to track its users’ movements for its own commercial gain,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta says in a statement.

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So far Google has paid out $570m to settle similar cases in 42 states. This case covers 2014 to 2018, a period when it was making operating income of around $20bn per quarter.
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Slack is basically Facebook now • The Atlantic

Ian Bogost:

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Slack embraces both the light and dark sides of social-media life. A work-chat self now feels distinct from a work self, let alone a whole self. As on social media, the urge to weigh in, react, inveigh—in short, to post—has taken over, whether or not actual work is being facilitated in the process. As on social media, extreme positions proliferate on Slack, with workplace posts reading more like takes than like office talk. Even my Atlantic colleagues’ reactions to Slack’s rebrand seem profoundly overstated, shared because the software and the moment conspired to make them share-worthy.

Slack’s new redesign, with its fresh prods to engage, makes the software feel even more like social media. The interface has always seemed hell-bent on getting you back into the program, even if you’d prefer to do the actual work that your job demands. An icon flags unread posts in brightly colored circles. Channel names are bold until you scroll up and down to clear them. Why pick up the phone when you can do an audio “huddle” inside of a DM? Almost all software wants you to look at it, but Slack, a supposed productivity tool meant to help knowledge workers recover from their email, demands more fixation than email ever did.

So there is a refreshing honesty in the Slack update that my colleagues are lamenting. It admits that work is secondary. Making deals, managing employees, designing products, executing marketing—all of those activities are surely worthwhile pursuits for knowledge workers. But as with all of the great enterprise software that preceded it, one now gets those things done in spite of Slack rather than by means of it. Most important, for the workers using Slack, is using Slack.

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I used Slack briefly at The Guardian. Stopped using Slack quite quickly because of its amazing potential for being the time equivalent of a black hole.
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What do view counts mean on X, Tiktok, and Netflix? • NY Mag’s Intelligencer

John Herrman:

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The internet promised, among other things, absolute audience surveillance, full measurability, and perfect knowledge of who was watching what, when, and for how long. What it delivered, instead, was metric tons of metric bullshit. Endowed with new powers of self-measurement, media companies, advertising firms, and online platforms have turned metrics into something approaching misinformation.

They’re suspicious, context-free numbers, produced in private, selectively shared to tell just the right stories: 264 million peripheral “views” for an X video, on a platform whose owner is simultaneously talking about “unregretted user-minutes;” three billion “family daily active people” making some sort of contact with four distinct but overlapping social-media platforms owned by Meta; 83 million people “watching” a streaming movie by allowing it to play for at least two minutes, or yet another Netflix show “surpassing the billion-hour mark in viewing time.”

In the abstract, metrics are powerful not just for what they convey — power, authority, popularity — but because they imply measurement by some sort of agreed-upon standard. In reality, online, they tend to supply math problems: vexing equations with missing variables and euphemistic names. There are numbers everywhere, and they mean nothing.

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Apple puts top Apple Silicon exec in charge of Apple Watch blood glucose monitoring project • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

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Apple’s efforts to bring glucose-monitoring features to the Apple Watch are housed under the company’s Exploratory Design Group team. The project was led by engineering executive Bill Athas until 2022, when he unexpectedly passed away.

Today’s report [by Bloomberg] explains that the team was “overseen on an ad-hoc basis” by former Athas deputies in the months following his passing. Those people reported directly to Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware technologies.

Now, Apple has enlisted Tim Millet to oversee the team working on Apple’s noninvasive blood sugar monitoring technology. Millet has been at Apple for 19 years and has been “one of Srouji’s top two lieutenants for a decade.”

…Apple’s work on noninvasive blood sugar monitoring dates back to 2011 and is viewed as a “moonshot-style project,” with the idea originating during the Steve Jobs era. In February, it was reported that Apple had hit multiple “major milestones” in its work on this technology.

The company’s end goal is to bring this functionality to the Apple Watch, though it’s still years away from that becoming a reality.

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Both Microsoft and then Google put a fair bit of effort into creating glucose-measuring contact lenses; Google abandoned it in November 2018. Apple just still keeps going, despite never having said it is doing it.
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Battle of the ages: how America’s gerontocracy is a challenge for democracy • Financial Times

Eva Xiao:

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[90-year-old California senator Dianne] Feinstein, the oldest member of the chamber, took an extended leave of absence this year following a bout of shingles. As a result, it made it difficult for Democrats, who have a razor-thin majority in the Senate, to push through appointees and legislation. Though Feinstein will step down in 2024, she has resisted calls to retire earlier amid long-running concerns over her memory.

Worries over his health have also plagued Joe Biden, the oldest president in US history, who at 80 years old is running for re-election in a likely rematch against Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, 77. Both men have been urged by former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, 76, to “stand aside” and make way for the next generation.

In August, a poll by the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research indicated that three-quarters of the public think Biden is too old to serve as president for another term, including more than two-thirds of Democrats.

Yet unease over America’s gerontocracy is two-fold: while there are concerns over physical fitness and mental competency, a political class dominated by older people has other consequences.

Similar to other minority groups, the severe underrepresentation of young people likely means their interests are not being adequately addressed by policymakers, argue social scientists, which could contribute to political apathy among youth.

Legislatures should “somewhat resemble the population to make decisions that resemble what the overall population wants”, says Stockemer.

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Then again, you look at some of the younger members – Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Bobert, Matt Gaetz – and you might ask: do we want it to look exactly like the population? (Yes, AOC is the counterpoint.)
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Battery cell prices plunge in August, close to tipping point for the end of ICE vehicles • RenewEconomy

Giles Parkinson:

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The price of battery cells has plunged in the last month, taking it below a key benchmark for the first time in two years, and close to the “tipping point” where the price of battery-powered EVs (electric vehicles) can match that of internal combustion engine (ICE) cars.

According to leading analysts Benchmark Lithium, the global weighted average price of lithium ion battery cells fell 8.7% in August, taking it below the $US100/kWh mark for the first time since August, 2021.

It is now priced at $98.2/kWh, a 33% drop from the recent high in March last year of $US146.4/kWh, and is the result of a drop in key commodity prices, including lithium, nickel and cobalt.

Importantly, it is now not far from the $US80/kWh cell price that is crucial to delivering a $US100/kWh battery pack – the level that is considered a tipping point because it will allow EV makers to build electric cars that cost the same as petrol and diesel alternatives.

“The energy and transport revolution continues!” said Gerard Reid, a leading energy analyst and head of Alexa Capital. Reid said the price of lithium battery cells have fallen 80% in a decade, and will continue to fall as they deliver better performance.

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Lithium discovery in US volcano could be biggest deposit ever found • Chemistry World

Anthony King:

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A world-beating deposit of lithium along the Nevada–Oregon border could meet surging demand for this metal, according to a new analysis.

An estimated 20 to 40 million tonnes of lithium metal lie within a volcanic crater formed around 16 million years ago. This is notably larger than the lithium deposits found beneath a Bolivian salt flat, previously considered the largest deposit in the world. Mining at the site is, however, contested by Native Americans for whom the area is sacred, and is believed to be where a massacre took place in 1865.

‘If you believe their back-of-the-envelope estimation, this is a very, very significant deposit of lithium,’ says Anouk Borst, a geologist at KU Leuven University and the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. ‘It could change the dynamics of lithium globally, in terms of price, security of supply and geopolitics.’

New in situ analysis reveals that an unusual claystone, composed of the mineral illite, contains 1.3% to 2.4% of lithium in the volcanic crater. This is almost double the lithium present in the main lithium-bearing clay mineral, magnesium smectite, which is more common than illite.

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One suspects there’s going to be a lot of prospecting in volcanic craters all of a sudden.
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LINGO-1: exploring natural language for autonomous driving • Wayve

Rudi Rankin:

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The lack of explainability in machine learning models is a common concern, as the decision-making process often seems like a black box. However, by leveraging language, we can shed light on how AI systems make decisions.

Creating natural language interfaces could allow users to engage in meaningful conversations with AI models, enabling them to question choices and gain insight into scene understanding and decision-making.

…LINGO-1 can generate a continuous commentary that explains the reasoning behind [autonomous vehicle] driving actions. This can help us understand in natural language what the model is paying attention to and what it is doing. Below are a few examples:

In this first video, LINGO-1 describes the actions it takes when it overtakes a parked car.

LINGO-1: I’m edging in due to the slow-moving traffic
LINGO-1: I’m overtaking a vehicle that’s parked on the side
LINGO-1: I’m accelerating now since the road ahead is clear.

Here is LINGO-1’s explanation as the car approaches a zebra crossing.

LINGO-1: I’m maintaining my speed; the road continues to be clear
LINGO-1: I’m now decelerating, braking, and coming to a stop
LINGO-1: Remaining stopped at the zebra crossing
LINGO-1: I’m now accelerating from a stopped position
LINGO-1: I’m accelerating as the road is clear.

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‘A Pandora’s box’: map of protein-structure families delights scientists • Nature

Ewen Callaway:

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Last year, Google DeepMind used AlphaFold to predict the structure of nearly every known protein from organisms with genome data, amassing some 214 million structures in the AlphaFold database, which is hosted by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Hinxton, UK.

Scientists found the resource instantly handy, but many of them looked only at a single structure, or family of related structures, says Martin Steinegger, a computational biologist at Seoul National University, who was interested in mapping the relationships of the entire database. “I thought it would be interesting to see how big our structural universe really is.”

To do this, a team co-led by Steinegger and computational biologist Pedro Beltrao, at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, developed a tool that quickly could compare every structure in the database, based on similarities in their shape. This identified more than 2 million ‘clusters’ of similarly shaped proteins in the AlphaFold database.

…Next to nothing is known about more than one-third of the protein clusters. “I really hope that biologists put some light on this darkness,” Steinegger says.

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Although it is a direct quote from one of the scientists in Switzerland, I don’t think “Pandora’s box” is quite the right phrase for this. But notice how machine learning is providing the scaffolding for new scientific understanding.
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VPNs, Verizon, and Reels: how students are getting around TikTok bans • The Verge

Monica Chin:

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When he first read the email announcing that public universities in Texas had been asked to ban the use of TikTok on their campuses, UT Dallas student Eric Aaberg feared the worst. As a full-time content creator with over 10,000 followers on the platform, the app was central to his life. Would he be forced to delete it? Would he be punished if he were caught using it?

“I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, are you serious?’” Aaberg recalls. “That’s so BS. There’s no way.”

Then he learned the reality. UTD was making TikTok inaccessible on its campus-provided networks. For him, that was the extent of the ban.

Aaberg immediately relaxed. “I was like, ‘Oh, that’s nothing,’” he says.

…among college students — by far the demographic who use the app the most — the reaction has been much more subdued. It’s best summed up, students say, as a collective eye roll and a quick jump into the Settings app.

“They really just did not care”
Thomas Pablo, a sophomore at the University of Oklahoma, describes the day his school announced a TikTok ban as an utter non-event. “It was just another Monday,” he recalls.

It happened suddenly — one day, TikToks loaded in the app and in mobile browsers, and the next day, they didn’t. But Pablo and all of his friends knew instinctively what to do: turn off the Wi-Fi and use data. For the past several months since the ban, he’s been switching his phone’s internet on and off around four times per day. Others he knows do it much more often.

Pablo never discussed or brainstormed methods with other students, nor did he hear any outcry about the new restriction. The student body, quietly, in unison, added Wi-Fi toggling to their daily routine. “Everyone was so nonchalant about it,” Pablo says. “They really just did not care.”

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Very reminiscent of the early Napster, and its successors such as Limewire: colleges tried to ban it but the students were smarter.
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Oh no, not more tech stuff! • Financial Times

Emma Jacobs:

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One minute you’re admiring the sky, the next you are an “old man yell[ing] at cloud”, to quote The Simpsons. And so it came to pass for me when Apple announced at its product launch that the new iPhone 15 would use a USB-C charger instead of its proprietary lightning cable.

Of course, Apple being Apple, it positioned the switch as a gift the tech group had bestowed on its fan base, instead of what it actually was: complying with an EU directive the company had fiercely resisted.

Last year, the European parliament announced that by autumn 2024, the USB-C would “become the common charging port for all mobile phones, tablets and cameras”. Next time you’re at an Apple store, instead of paying for your iPad, why not reframe the transaction as your decision to bequeath the company some money, and see how that grabs the “geniuses”.

My reaction to hearing the charger news was exasperation at Apple’s sleight of hand but also at the prospect of yet more stuff. Like many, I already have a box full of expired tech bits and bobs: cables, chargers and some random paraphernalia that might just come in handy one day. In the FT’s recent office reorganisation, I unearthed yet more expired tech.

…The short-term pain of Apple ditching its lightning charger will be worthwhile in the end, I know. Ultimately, it will reduce electronic waste. As Material Focus, a non-profit working to recycle electrical goods, says, e-waste is the UK’s “fastest growing waste stream, with 155,000 tonnes of electricals thrown away every year and 527mn items hoarded in homes”.

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It’s a bit tedious to point it out, but Apple’s first use of USB-C was in 2015, on the one-port Macbook. It could have kept Lightning on the iPhone for another year. Lightning is 11 years old, and USB-C is all over the place. Would you really rather have micro-USB or mini-USB?
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