Staff at Twitter faced Elon Musk’s manic insistence on moving a server farm in a mad hurry last Christmas. It went badly. CC-licensed photo by Torkild Retvedt on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Make backups. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Apple’s first ‘carbon neutral’ products are a red herring • The Verge
Justine Calma:
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According to Apple, “select case and band combinations of Apple Watch Series 9, Apple Watch Ultra 2, and Apple Watch SE” will be carbon neutral. To know if a product is carbon neutral, look for a new logo saying so on the package. Apple says it was able to reduce emissions from materials, electricity, and transportation in production of the watches, in part by getting more of its suppliers to switch to clean energy. Any remaining pollution was offset through nature-based projects like restoring forests so that they can capture more CO2. Apple also says it will match customers’ expected electricity use for charging carbon-neutral Apple Watch models with investments in renewable energy projects.
The company is also replacing leather with “a luxurious and durable microtwill” it calls FineWoven. The material is made with nearly 70% postconsumer recycled content, and Apple says it has “significantly lower” carbon emissions than leather. Cattle are a big source of greenhouse gas emissions because cows burp out methane, which is even more potent than CO2 when it comes to its ability to trap heat on the planet.
…The good news is that Apple’s gross carbon emissions are falling, according to its latest environmental progress report. It produced the equivalent of 20.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2022. That just has to drop to net zero by the end of the decade if the company wants to meet its climate goals. Like Octavia Spencer says in her role as Mother Nature in a skit Apple played during today’s event, “Don’t disappoint your mother.”
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I thought that the environmental element of Apple’s presentation was pretty good; the skit wasn’t terrible. The contrast with, well, every other tech company, for which environmental questions don’t even seem to get asked, is quite stark. Though it might be worth asking about that work on “restoring forests”: carbon offsets are often a terrible scam.
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The iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max will let you film spatial video you can watch on the Vision Pro • The Verge
Jay Peters:
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The newly announced iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max will soon let you capture “spatial video” that you can watch on the forthcoming Apple Vision Pro headset.
The new phones will be able to use the main and ultrawide cameras to “create a three-dimensional video,” Apple SVP Greg Joswiak said during Tuesday’s Wonderlust event. You’ll then be able to watch the video captured from those cameras on the Apple Vision Pro, which the company is still planning to release in early 2024.
“This is really important, as your iPhone is with you all the time, so you won’t ever miss capturing a special moment using spatial video, like your family’s beach vacation,” Joswiak said.
The ability to record spatial video on the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max is set to arrive “later this year,” according to an Apple press release. However, we don’t know if you’ll be able to watch those spatial videos in 3D on any other devices — the press release only specifies the Vision Pro — but we’ve asked Apple if it can clarify.
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This was entirely predictable: of course you want to be able to create 3D content for this new platform, and have an easy way for the users of your other platforms to do it. (I felt I had predicted it, but the closest was in June, just after the unveiling, when I wrote “I wonder if the 3D cameras are going to be sold separately [of the Vision Pro] at some stage”. Does this count?)
People are going to use this for sports videos shot from the courtside, and it’s going to be amazing. Smart move by Apple: limited to the top-end iPhones for now, probably all of them next year.
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Slug & Lettuce pub group to charge more at peak hours • BBC News
Oliver Smith:
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The pub group that owns Slug & Lettuce and Yates bars has said it will charge about 20p more per pint during peak hours due to cost increases.
Stonegate Group, the UK’s biggest pub chain, says 800 of its 4,000 pubs will introduce “dynamic pricing” during evenings and weekends. It said the price rise reflected the higher costs the company was facing, including extra security.
Peak-time pricing is used by other sectors like travel when demand spikes.
Stonegate said customers would be alerted to the price increases through notices in their pubs.
The move prompted an angry response from some customers on social media. “It’s already happening at my local pub – something like £3.40 a pint before 7pm, £4.20 after. It’s backfired I think, it’s often empty after 7pm,” said one.“If they push on with this there will be no such thing as a busy Stonegate pub,” said another.
The company has introduced temporary price increases before. The chain charged up to 50p a pint more when England football matches were shown in their pubs during the last two world cups. Prices returned to normal after the matches.
Ride-sharing companies like Uber also use peak-time pricing, and it is commonly used by the hotel and airline industries.
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This is a slightly concerning development. What next? Pricier food at specific times in restaurants? Or at specific tables? It’s the opposite of Happy Hour.
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Elon Musk moving servers himself shows his ‘maniacal sense of urgency’ at Twitter • CNBC
Walter Isaacson, in another extract from his Musk biography:
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“Does this timeframe seem like something that I would find remotely acceptable?” Musk asked. “Obviously not. If a timeline is long, it’s wrong.”
It was late at night on December 22, and the meeting in Musk’s 10th floor conference room at Twitter* had become tense. He was talking to two X infrastructure managers who had not dealt with him much before, and certainly not when he was in a foul mood.
One of them tried to explain the problem. The data-services company that housed one of Twitter’s server farms, located in Sacramento, had agreed to allow them some short-term extensions on their lease so they could begin to move out during 2023 in an orderly fashion. “But this morning,” the nervous manager told Musk, “they came back to us and said that plan was no longer on the table because, and these are their words, they don’t think that we will be financially viable.”
The facility was costing Twitter more than $100m a year. Musk wanted to save that money by moving the servers to one of Twitter’s other facilities, in Portland, Oregon. Another manager at the meeting said that couldn’t be done right away. “We can’t get out safely before six to nine months,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Sacramento still needs to be around to serve traffic.”
…”All you need to do is just move the f—ing servers to Portland,” [Musk] said. “If it takes longer than 30 days, that would blow my mind.” He paused and recalculated. “Just get a moving company, and it will take a week to move the computers and another week to plug them in. Two weeks. That’s what should happen.”
Everyone was silent. But Musk was still warming up. “If you got a godd— U-Haul, you could probably do it by yourself.” The two managers looked to see if he was serious. Two of Musk’s top loyalists, Steve Davis and Omead Afshar were also at the table. They had seen him like this many times before, and they knew that he might be.
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(* The original article says “X, formerly Twitter”, and uses “X” rather than “Twitter”. But at the time these events occurred, it was still Twitter. So I’ve edited it.) The collision between Twitter’s inertia and Musk’s impatience makes for a fun tale, though the outcome wasn’t positive.
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Amateurs pile into 24-hour options: ‘it’s just gambling’ • WSJ
Gunjan Banerji:
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Not long ago, options trading was seen as best left to professionals with access to sophisticated trading tools and data. Now, a new generation of rookie speculators have been trying to strike it big betting on short-term options.
Shorter-dated options, expiring in five or fewer days, accounted for about half of all options-market activity as of August, according data provider SpotGamma, up from around one-third three years ago. Individual investors made up 27% of all activity in options as of June, up from 23% at the start of 2020, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. For popular one-day options tied to the broad S&P 500 index, individual investors made up around one-third of all trades, according to exchange-operator Cboe Global Markets.
A study by finance experts at the London Business School estimated that most individual options traders lose money. Between November 2019 and June 2021, such investors notched losses of some $2.1bn, with the hits concentrated in shorter-dated trades, the study concluded.
“We should stop pretending that’s what’s going on is investing,” said Benjamin Edwards, a professor at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas who has studied securities law. “It’s just gambling.”
Investment professionals have been closely tracking the activity of the rookie traders. Some pros say that wild options activity at the start of the pandemic contributed to mammoth one-day stock moves.
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People don’t learn, do they. Dunning and Kruger should demand royalties or something.
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Google monopolized internet search for a decade, landmark antitrust trial hears • The Guardian
Nick Robins-Early:
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The trial is set to last 10 weeks, as the government makes its case that Google leveraged its market power and wealth to strangle competition. Google spent billions on deals with companies such as Apple and Samsung to make itself the default search browser on their devices, which the government alleges shut out competition and allowed Google to attain a monopoly on searching the internet.
Google denies the Justice Department’s allegations. The company’s longtime chief legal officer, Kent Walker, has argued that consumers can still freely use any rival search engines and that Google’s services represent only a fraction of the ways that people browse the internet.
Google also claims its industry dominance – the government alleges it has about a 90% share of the US search market – is the result of providing a better product than its competitors.
In the government’s opening statements, a Justice Department lawyer, Kenneth Dintzer, laid out the case against Google. Dintzer argued the trial will show that Google maintained a monopoly over search for the past decade through exclusionary deals with device makers that cut out competitors. He also alluded to Google’s attempts to block access to documents and auto-delete internal messaging to stymie antitrust enforcement.
The Justice Department filed its suit in 2020, but later joined in an additional suit against Google brought by attorneys general from more than three dozen states and territories. The states’ case will also be heard during the trial, with antitrust lawyer William Cavanaugh acting as lead attorney for that lawsuit. Cavanaugh also delivered an opening statement on Tuesday, presenting an argument on how Google withheld parts of its services in order to disadvantage competitors.
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Certainly going to be interesting to see how the Justice Department gets on. Google has rehearsed these arguments for decades, in many different legislatures.
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Hackers are salivating over electric cars • The Atlantic
Patrick George:
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Car hacking may call to mind action-movie-like scenes of millions of Teslas being remotely seized by terrorist groups and commanded to drive into hospitals. That’s thankfully far-fetched. The bigger risk is to personal and financial information related to various digital add-ons and connected features, which are essentially unavoidable with modern EVs—as is the requirement that you pay for them over time. Mercedes-Benz will unlock more horsepower for up to $90 a month, BMW lets its cars’ safety cameras record 40-second snapshots of video for $39 a year, and Ford’s BlueCruise hands-off driver-assist feature is now $75 a month.
Many major automakers have big plans for this approach, if they don’t already offer them: Ford just made a big executive hire from Apple to grow future subscription revenue, while General Motors plans to offer more than 50 such features by 2026. And rather than conveniently listing these costs online, some automakers have you find out via the car’s infotainment system itself.
Understandably, these moves have not gone over well with the car-buying public. A BMW plan to charge $18 a month for heated seats (it’s always heated seats, somehow) in countries including the United Kingdom and Korea proved so unpopular that BMW just announced it will be dropping the idea entirely. The company still plans to offer subscriptions for software such as automated parking help, and Jay Hanson, a BMW spokesperson, told me that such subscriptions offer drivers a level of flexibility they’ve never had before. “A customer may choose to add a feature that was not specified when the vehicle was originally ordered,” he said, “or experiment with a feature by purchasing a short-term trial before committing to a purchase.”
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But more than that, they want money, because they’re going to lose what they now get from making tons of replacement parts and selling them to networks of dealers. The hackers, meanwhile, don’t like the idea of being nickel-and-dimed.
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Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows • The Register
Richard Speed:
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Microsoft has made it clear: it will ax third-party printer drivers in Windows.
The death rattle will be lengthy, as the timeline for the end of servicing stretches into 2027 – although Microsoft noted that the dates will be subject to change. There is, after all, always that important customer with a strange old printer lacking Mopria support.
Mopria is part of the Windows’ teams justification for removing support. Founded in 2013 by Canon, HP, Samsung and Xerox, the Mopria Alliance’s mission is to provide universal standards for printing and scanning. Epson, Lexmark, Adobe and Microsoft have also joined the gang since then.
Since Windows 10 21H2, Microsoft has baked Mopria support into the flagship operating system, with support for devices connected via the network or USB, thanks to the Microsoft IPP Class driver. Microsoft said: “This removes the need for print device manufacturers to provide their own installers, drivers, utilities, and so on.”
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That ever-delightful rigmarole of running a wizard to install a printer driver after half an afternoon’s search across the internet and then finding that the printer didn’t like the driver – those days will be gone, all gone.
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Autonomous truck platoons are a bust, but they work if you put them on rails • Ars Technica
Jonathan Gitlin:
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Platoons of driverless cargo trucks cruising across highways is one of those tempting technocrat ideas that doesn’t look like it will pan out. As autonomous driving technology matured in the middle of the last decade, we saw trials of the concept, but human truck drivers do more than just throttle, steer, and brake, and they aren’t likely to be replaced soon.
A better idea would be to shift some of that cargo to our underutilized railways where the idea of platooning is an old one, better known as a “train.” Parallel Systems hopes to do just that with its second-generation autonomous battery-electric freight railcar.
“Our goal is to transfer more of the trucking traffic onto the railroad. In order to do that, the railroad needs to be far more flexible,” explained John Howard, co-founder and vice president of operations at Parallel Systems.
Instead of a conventional train with one or more locomotive cars pulling a long chain of unpowered cargo cars, each rail car is a self-powered electric vehicle. “It’s essentially like a skateboard where you can put individual metal containers on top, you can stack them two high,” Howard told me. “They can stack together to make platoons—they push on each other. But the value proposition is that each individual car can break off and go to where it needs to go,” he explained.
“When you’re looking at a terminal, a traditional freight train is about three miles long, which means you need a place to park three miles of a rolling stock. You need a buffer of about 300 containers. You have trucks going back and forth. It’s a big operation with a lot of real estate and a lot of cost. Our vehicles can interface like a semi truck to go directly where they need to go, load and unload you to get out of the way,” Howard told me.
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There’s something quietly hilarious in the self-driving car business reinventing the train – on rails.
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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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