Machine learning-based systems can now pilot drones through an obstacle course better than the best humans. CC-licensed photo by Ed Schipul on Flickr.
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A selection of 11 links for you. Self-piloting. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Foxconn puts its empty buildings in Wisconsin up for sale • The Verge
Nilay Patel:
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remember when Foxconn bought a bunch of buildings around Wisconsin just before an election and said it was building “innovation centers” around the state in a transparent attempt to build support for the giant tax credits it was given to build an LCD factory that never arrived? Yeah, it’s selling two of those buildings. The news was first reported by Wisconsin Public Radio, which got a quote from Foxconn saying that “selling its Green Bay property, known as the Watermark building, will add to the vibrancy of the city’s downtown.” Very good.
You might recall two of these buildings, in Eau Claire and Green Bay, because The Verge’s Josh Dzieza went and looked in the windows months after they were purchased and noticed they were empty. This groundbreaking reporting prompted Foxconn’s Alan Yeung to say that the buildings were not empty at an event celebrating the purchase of yet another building in Madison. That building has never been occupied by Foxconn, and two of its floors are now for lease, as reported by the Wisconsin State Journal.
“I can assure you that they are not empty,” Yeung said at the time. “We do have a plan and we actually will make sure the building is adequate and well-equipped before we move people in. So you will see a lot more coming in the next months, the next year or so,” he added.
“I can assure you it will not be empty and they’re not empty right now,” he said.
Anyway, we checked in again a year later, and the buildings were still empty.
Foxconn never built an LCD factory or created 13,000 jobs in southeastern Wisconsin, even after getting a sweetheart tax deal from the state and local government and a groundbreaking ceremony featuring then-President Donald Trump wielding a golden shovel.
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Shocking, eh. Such a longrunning boondoggle, but The Verge has been on its tail all the time.
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Officials investigate death at Burning Man as thousands stranded by floods • The Guardian
Michael Sainato:
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Over 70,000 attendees of the annual Burning Man festival in the Black Rock desert of Nevada are stranded as the festival comes to a close on Monday due to heavy rains that have cut off access to the site.
Attendees have been ordered to shelter in place and to conserve food, water, and fuel, although no shortages have been reported. A death that occurred at the festival is currently under investigation, but no details have been released, including the identity of the deceased or the suspected cause of death.
All traffic apart from emergency vehicles in and out of the festival site has been halted. More rain is forecast at the festival site on Sunday afternoon. Local officials said some attendees have been walking out of the site, but conditions remain too wet and muddy for vehicles to get out and could trap many attendees at the site for days.
“We do not currently have an estimated time for the roads to be dry enough for RVs or vehicles to navigate safely. Monday late in the day would be possible if weather conditions are in our favor. We will let you know. It could be sooner, and it could be later,” said an update on the Burning Man website on Saturday evening.
“We are also deploying buses to Gerlach to take people to Reno who might walk off the playa. See our recommendations on when walking is viable or not. This is not likely a 24-hour operation at this time.”
The update said the site is working to set up mobile cell service and internet trailers at the festival site and trying to configure the organization’s on-site wifi for public access.
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Rain isn’t unknown at Burning Man, but people seem to be shocked that it would turn the desert into mud and have the audacity to interrupt their travel plans.
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Person died after Cruise cars blocked ambulance, SFFD says • SF Gate
Ariana Bindman:
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On Aug. 14, two stalled Cruise vehicles delayed an ambulance from leaving the scene of a crash in which a driver had hit a pedestrian with their car, according to reports from the San Francisco Fire Department. The pedestrian later died of their injuries, which first responders linked to the delay in getting them to the hospital.
“The fact that Cruise autonomous vehicles continue to block ingress and egress to critical 911 calls is unacceptable,” one emergency responder wrote in a report. Cruise spokesperson Tiffany Testo countered that one of the cars cleared the scene and that traffic to the right of it remained unblocked. “The ambulance behind the AV had a clear path to pass the AV as other vehicles, including another ambulance, proceeded to do,” she wrote in a statement to SFGATE.
According to several reports written by first responders, first obtained by Forbes, emergency personnel arrived at Seventh Street and Harrison in SoMa and began treating a “critically injured” pedestrian who had been struck by a car. The patient was quickly loaded into an ambulance, but the ambulance driver was unable to immediately leave the scene, according to two reports written by members of the ambulance team.
Two autonomous Cruise vehicles and an empty San Francisco police vehicle were blocking the only exits from the scene, according to one of the reports, forcing the ambulance to wait while first responders attempted to manually move the Cruise vehicles or locate an officer who could move the police car.
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So it wasn’t entirely the autonomous cars at fault. But they were quite at fault. Maybe they need an emergency service override.
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X, formerly known as Twitter, may collect your biometric data and job history • CNN Business
Brian Fung and Clare Duffy:
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X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, said this week it may collect biometric and employment information from its users — expanding the range of personal information that account-holders may be exposing to the site.
The disclosures came in an update to the company’s privacy policy, which added two sections related to the new data collection practice.
“Based on your consent, we may collect and use your biometric information for safety, security, and identification purposes,” the policy read.
In addition, under a new section labeled “job applications,” X said it may collect users’ employment and educational history.
The company also said it could collect “employment preferences, skills and abilities, job search activity and engagement, and so on” in order to suggest potential job openings to users, to share that information with prospective third-party employers or to further target users with advertising.
For X Premium users, the company will give an option to provide a government ID and a selfie image for verification purposes. The company may extract biometric data from both the government ID and the selfie image for matching purposes, the company told CNN in a statement.
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This sounds like a terrible idea from start to finish. So no doubt Musk will try to make it compulsory. Wanting to become LinkedIn is a nice wish, but LinkedIn is going to defend that turf with everything it’s got.
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Population collapse almost wiped out human ancestors, say scientists • The Guardian
Hannah Devlin:
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Early human ancestors came close to eradication in a severe evolutionary bottleneck between 800,000 and 900,000 years ago, according to scientists.
A genomics analysis of more than 3,000 living people suggested that our ancestors’ total population plummeted to about 1,280 breeding individuals for about 117,000 years. Scientists believe that an extreme climate event could have led to the bottleneck that came close to wiping out our ancestral line.
“The numbers that emerge from our study correspond to those of species that are currently at risk of extinction,” said Prof Giorgio Manzi, an anthropologist at Sapienza University of Rome and a senior author of the research.
However, Manzi and his colleagues believe that the existential pressures of the bottleneck could have triggered the emergence of a new species, Homo heidelbergensis, which some believe is the shared ancestor of modern humans and our cousins, the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Homo sapiens are thought to have emerged about 300,000 years ago.
“It was lucky [that we survived], but … we know from evolutionary biology that the emergence of a new species can happen in small, isolated populations,” said Manzi.
Prof Chris Stringer, the head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, who was not involved in the research, said: “It’s an extraordinary length of time. It’s remarkable that we did get through at all. For a population of that size, you just need one bad climate event, an epidemic, a volcanic eruption and you’re gone.”
The decline appears to coincide with significant changes in global climate that turned glaciations into long-term events, a decrease in sea surface temperatures, and a possible long period of drought in Africa and Eurasia. The team behind the work said the time window also coincides with a relatively empty period on the fossil record.
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It’s an amazing story, and the researchers think it partly explains why there are substantial gaps in the human fossil record: because there were so few humans alive to become fossilised.
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Champion-level drone racing using deep reinforcement learning • Nature
Elia Kaufmann et al from the University of Zurich’s Robotics and Perception group, and Intel:
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First-person view (FPV) drone racing is a televised sport in which professional competitors pilot high-speed aircraft through a 3D circuit. Each pilot sees the environment from the perspective of their drone by means of video streamed from an onboard camera.
Reaching the level of professional pilots with an autonomous drone is challenging because the robot needs to fly at its physical limits while estimating its speed and location in the circuit exclusively from onboard sensors.
Here we introduce Swift, an autonomous system that can race physical vehicles at the level of the human world champions. The system combines deep reinforcement learning (RL) in simulation with data collected in the physical world.
Swift competed against three human champions, including the world champions of two international leagues, in real-world head-to-head races. Swift won several races against each of the human champions and demonstrated the fastest recorded race time. This work represents a milestone for mobile robotics and machine intelligence2, which may inspire the deployment of hybrid learning-based solutions in other physical systems.
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This is why SF films that show the human pilot taking the spaceship through the crowded asteroid field is nonsense. You’d leave that stuff to the computer. This work shows that we’re already on the cusp of (or past) the “Kasparov moment”, when the machines do it better. (There’s video with this tweet.)
And: coming soon to a warzone near you!
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Power laws have more power than you think • Every
Doug Shapiro:
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The Long Tail, published in 2004, argued that because the internet dramatically lowered the cost to store and transport information goods, it would result in practically unlimited shelf space. Faced with far more choice, consumers would shift most of their consumption to the “tail,” heralding the end of mass culture and waning importance of hits. If anything, Anderson underestimated the size of the tail because he didn’t anticipate social media. The tail is not Icelandic synth pop, as it turns out, but an endless amount of user-generated content.
That the internet would yield more choice and, therefore, more fragmentation was intuitive then and is indisputable now. But it only tells half the story. Though it seems contradictory, the internet both fragments and concentrates attention.
Understanding those dynamics matters. The contention that there are still hits may seem uncontroversial and certainly feels right intuitively. We know that when Beyonce or Taylor Swift releases an album, or the next season of Stranger Things or Game of Thrones drops, the collective attention of popular culture, much like the eye of Sauron, will be trained on it—at least until the next thing comes along. But understanding why there are still hits provides insight into whether this will persist as the supply of content keeps growing faster than demand.
The internet concentrates attention because it connects everyone in a big network. And networks are subject to powerful feedback loops. Since consumers increasingly both discover and consume content through information networks, their decisions are increasingly influenced by other people’s decisions. These feedback loops amplify the popularity of a small number of choices—hits.
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The inevitability of the power law is so difficult to describe, but you only have to look at what has happened with the new social networks – Bluesky, Threads – to see that the big get bigger, and the minnows remain small.
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OpenAI reportedly on track to generate more than $1 bln revenue over 12 months • Reuters
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OpenAI is on track to generate more than $1bn in revenue over the next 12 months from the sale of artificial intelligence software and computing capacity that powers it, The Information reported on Tuesday.
Earlier, the ChatGPT maker projected $200m in revenue for this year.
The Microsoft-backed company is generating more than $80m in revenue per month, compared to just $28m in the entire last year, the report added.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Besides ChatGPT, it makes money by selling API access to its AI models for developers and enterprises directly and through a partnership with Microsoft, which invested over $10 billion into the company in January.
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That would be quite the uptick, and it would be revealing to see just where that money’s coming from. My suspicion is it’s programmers using it to write frameworks.
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China reaches peak gasoline in milestone for electric vehicles • Bloomberg Hyperdrive newsletter
Colin McKerracher:
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Earlier this month, Chinese oil giant Sinopec made a surprise announcement that mostly flew under the radar. It’s now expecting gasoline demand in China to peak this year, two years earlier than its previous outlooks.
The main culprit? The surging number of electric vehicles on the road.
As I’ve written previously, calling peaks is often a no-win endeavor for industry analysts. The call will either be correct but seem obvious after the fact, or wrong and lead to years of mockery. But this isn’t an analyst calling a peak; it’s China’s largest fuel distributor. Sinopec knows the fuel business, and more importantly, it has an interest in the business remaining robust. Saying it’s all downhill from here for gasoline is quite a statement.
China has been the largest driver of global growth for refined oil products like gasoline and diesel over the last two decades. But EV adoption rates in China are now soaring, with August figures likely to show plug-in vehicles hitting 38% of new passenger-vehicle sales. That’s up from just 6% in 2020 and is starting to materially dent fuel demand.
Fuel demand in two and three-wheeled vehicles is already in structural decline, with BNEF estimating that 70% of total kilometers traveled by these vehicles already switched over to electric. Fuel demand for cars will be the next to turn, since well over 5% of the passenger-vehicle fleet is now either battery-electric or plug-in hybrid. The internal combustion vehicle fleet is also becoming more efficient due to rising fuel-economy targets.
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I’m fascinated by the use of the word “culprit” in that second paragraph. Not using fossil fuels is a bad thing now? Just saying “reason” would have been just as accurate without offering a bizarre judgement on what’s happening.
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Ukraine cannot win against Russia now, but victory by 2025 is possible • Financial Times
Richard Barrons is a former British Army general, and previous commander of Joint Forces Command:
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Ukraine’s current counteroffensive will not throw Russia out — not that anyone expected it to. Nor is it likely to cut the occupation in half before the winter, which might have been one of the more optimistic aims. It has, however, shown how the Russian army can be beaten. Not in 2023, but in 2024 or 2025. Thus the refrain among western allies of supporting Kyiv “for as long as it takes”.
The modest progress achieved this summer shows that, while overcoming a well-prepared conventional battlefield defence may be one of the hardest operations in war, it can be done. The Ukrainian military has only breached the first line of trenches to take Robotyne in the south, having battled for weeks through minefields to get there. Progress is about eight miles with another 55 miles to go (through three lines of defences) before reaching the sea. The aim is to cut the land bridge to Crimea. To the north and south of Bakhmut, advances amount to about five miles with 10 miles to the Russian main defensive line and 60 miles to the border.
The presumed assassination of Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin and the top leadership of his mercenary group has had no effect on the fighting, save perhaps for stiffening the troops’ loyalty to Vladimir Putin. Russian forces are stretched, worn out and short of reserves but unless they simply give up, this will still be a long haul.
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Basically just checking in on this. Progress in wars is slow, and then fast; gradual, and then sudden.
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Algospeak is driving us mad • New Statesman
Marie Le Conte:
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There are moments when being online makes you feel insane. I had one of those recently, scrolling down my Instagram time line. There was a picture of a stripper wearing a jaunty little pink thong, vertiginous plastic heels and kneeling by a pole. That part was normal; I have a rich and varied social life. There’s often a lot of skin on my social media.
The madness-inducing cognitive dissonance came from the caption, in which it was explained that the dancer in question loved embracing her “seggsuality”. It made me want to throw my phone at the wall. Here was about 90% of a woman’s arse, out for all to see, yet the account felt unable to spell out a word that describes a fundamental part of adult human life.
Strip clubs are places where you can look but you cannot touch, and the internet is fast becoming a space where you can ogle but cannot spell. If “seggs” made your teeth itch, then I can only apologise for introducing you to “corn” (porn), “le dollar bean” (lesbian), “mascara” (penis) and “unalive” (suicide).
The last word here may feel like the odd one out, but it isn’t. They’re all “algospeak”; lingo developed to evade the algorithmic content filters now used by social media platforms. We’re all products of sex and we’ll all die one day but apparently we’re not allowed to talk about either.
Well, it isn’t clear what we’re allowed to talk about. Many of those phrases originated on TikTok but TikTok says it does not ban or penalise sensitive content. Do we trust it? Apparently the teens do not. Other moderation policies are equally as opaque. It isn’t always clear what they will and will not allow, so content creators self-censor just in case, as do the ones who follow them.
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It’s an outgrowth of the Scunthorpe phenomenon (look it up if you need to) combined with these networks coming from the absurdly prudish American culture. (Requires a free login to read in full.)
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 