Scientists have discovered bacteria that will eat plastic – but how will we control them? CC-licensed photo by Ivan Radic on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Chewy! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Did you miss the Social Warming Substack post last Friday? It’s about Twitter v Threads, and how one will catch the other.
Watch Linda Yaccarino’s wild interview at the Code Conference • The Verge
Jacob Kastrenakes:
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On Wednesday evening, X CEO Linda Yaccarino appeared onstage at the Code Conference with frustration and protest. “I think many people in this room were not fully prepared for me to still come out on the stage,” she told interviewer Julia Boorstin, senior media and tech correspondent at CNBC.
Yaccarino sounded rattled. She’d found out earlier in the day that Kara Swisher, a Code Conference co-founder, had booked a surprise guest to appear an hour before her: Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety. He has been an outspoken critic of the direction Elon Musk has taken the site.
In his interview with Swisher, Roth recounted how Musk put him personally in danger. Musk suggested on Twitter that Roth had advocated for sexualizing children — a completely unfounded claim — which led to death threats and his address being posted online. “I had to sell my house. I had to move,” Roth said. He encouraged Yaccarino to think about how Musk could turn on her, too, and said the site was bleeding users and advertisers.
These criticisms are nothing new, but Yaccarino was visibly bothered by having to appear shortly after a well-known critic of her company. “I’d be happy to respond,” Yaccarino said. “I think I’ve been given about 45 minutes [of notice].” The conference’s 300-some-seat ballroom was packed for her appearance; I caught Swisher reclining on a couch in the back before things kicked off, waiting to see the results of her surprise play out.
Throughout the interview, Yaccarino repeated that she’s only been on the job at X for 12 weeks, as if to say there’s only so much she could have done by now. But in that time, she’s managed to do one thing consistently: dismiss concerns about X, whether it’s the platform’s disinvestment in moderation or Musk’s chaotic leadership.
Her dismissive stance was very much on display Wednesday night.
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And how. I wasn’t impressed by the interviewing (In Britain, we’ve got a different view of what “tough questions” involves, and keeping an interviewee on track), but Yaccarino comes across as befuddled, incoherent, out of touch. She’ll fit in perfectly. Related: How the Elon Musk biography exposes Walter Isaacson, pointing out how credulous Isaacson is.
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The AI fight in Hollywood is probably coming to other industries • Associated Press
Jake Coyle:
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In the coming weeks, WGA [Writers Guild of America, who write screenplays] members will vote on whether to ratify a tentative agreement, which requires studios and production companies to disclose to writers if any material given to them has been generated by AI partially or in full. AI cannot be a credited writer. AI cannot write or rewrite “literary material.” AI-generated writing cannot be source material.
“AI-generated material can’t be used to undermine a writer’s credit or separated rights,” the proposed contract reads.
Many experts see the screenwriters’ deal as a forerunner for labour battles to come. “I hope it will be a model for a lot of other content-creation industries,” said Tom Davenport, a professor of information technology at Babson College and author of “ All-in on AI: How Smart Companies Win Big with Artificial Intelligence.” “It pretty much ensures that if you’re going to use AI, it’s going to be humans working alongside AI. That, to me, has always been the best way to use any form of AI.”
The tentative agreement between the Writers Guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which negotiates on behalf of the studios, doesn’t prohibit all uses of artificial intelligence. Both sides have acknowledged it can be a worthwhile tool in many aspects of filmmaking, including script writing.
The deal states that writers can use AI if the company consents. But a company cannot require a writer to use AI software.
Language over AI became a sticking point in the writers’ negotiations, which dragged on in part due to the challenges of bargaining on such a fast-evolving technology.
When the writers strike began May 2, it was just five months after OpenAI released ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that can write essays, have sophisticated conversations and craft stories from a handful of prompts. Studios said it was it too early to tackle AI in these negotiations and preferred to wait until 2026.
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So, contrary to some earlier reports, the WGA hasn’t completely fought off AI; it just won’t have to share a credit with it.
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Thousands of Derby City Council callers struggling to get help from new AI helpers • Derbyshire Live
Nigel Slater:
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Thousands of callers to Derby City Council have been struggling to get the help they need when being dealt with by the council’s new AI (Artificial Intelligence) digital helpers, according to new figures. And a leading councillor has said a “ring back” option to help solve the problem cannot be put on the cards because it would be too expensive for the local authority to pay for.
New figures have been published showing that within a single week – starting from Monday, September 11 – more than 3,700 callers to the council could not get the answer they required by AI assistants Darcie and Ali or had to be transferred to a human for support. More than 1,500 of these calls ended up as abandoned.
The figures come just months after the council implemented new AI-led phone system technology. Since April, visitors to Derby City Council’s website and those who call the council’s main phone line can seek help from AI “helpers”. Darcie helps with council services and Ali is available to help Derby Homes customers/tenants with housing enquiries.
A human being is on standby if the AI helpers cannot assist callers directly. This form of AI was aimed to improve customer services and make them accessible 24/7, while at the same time delivering cash savings for the authority.
…In July, council bosses said its new AI digital assistants Darcie and Ali had been a huge success. A presentation revealed the use of AI technology since April had already met a savings target of £200,000 within the council’s budget plan. At the time the council said the AI helpers answered more than 100,000 questions from the public via its main phone line.
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So maybe not really that much of a saving or improvement? It’s hard to tell.
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The art of Wikiracing • Slate
Stephen Harrison:
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The final round required navigating from the Wikipedia article on “Stroopwafel” to the page about “Jimmy Wales,” Wikipedia’s co-founder—a tough leap for even the most seasoned Wikiracers. As the challenge appeared on their screens, the contestants leaned into their laptops and tried to quickly strategize their path across the internet encyclopedia. Whoever made it to “Jimmy Wales” from “Stroopwafel” with the fewest clicks would be crowned champion.
Wikiracing has long been viewed as a quirky, low-stakes pastime for friendly nerds—a world away from the high-pressure environment of competitive Scrabble or speedcubing. But while those other “geek sports” have already established their own versions of a Super Bowl, Wikiracing has traditionally remained confined to college dorm rooms and high school computer labs.
Not anymore. Wikiracing was a featured event at this year’s Wikimania, the global conference for dedicated Wikipedia editors, which took place this past August in Singapore. “People took Wikimania 2023’s Wikiracing very seriously, and the level of competition was incredibly high,” said Zack McCune, director of brand at the Wikimedia Foundation. “We had F1 Grand Prix energy in the room.”
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Take any totally innocent activity such as clicking links: people will find a way to turn it into a competition, ideally for money.
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End of the line for barcodes as new square QR code shapes up in shops • The Sunday Times
Louise Eccles:
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The barcode is so integral to daily life that it is scanned ten billion times a day, more times than Google’s search engine is used.
But the familiar black lines are likely to be replaced by the QR code at main supermarkets within five years, according to GS1, the not-for-profit regulator behind most of the world’s barcodes.
A dual-purpose QR code is being developed that can be scanned at the checkout, but also by shoppers on their smartphones, if they want to learn more about the ingredients, potential allergens, expiry date, product recalls, and how to recycle it.
Sarah Atkins, membership director at GS1, said: “This is as significant — if not more significant — than when we first introduced the barcode. The potential for the transformation in the way we shop is massive.”
With increasing labelling demands on retailers, such as making clear what allergens a product contains, shoppers now need 20-20 vision to decipher the tiny but crucial writing on the backs of packets.
In the future, shoppers will be able to scan a jar of sauce and be taken to a screen with a series of icons that can tell them detailed information about every ingredient, including the farm the meat is from, nutritional information and the carbon footprint.
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A UPC-A barcode is 12 digits (including a checkdigit), so 100 billion possible values. A QR code can hold 3kb of data: 7,089 numbers or 4,269 alphanumeric characters.
Related: Apple uses microscopic QR codes on its screens to track manufacturing. Also: five common QR code scams.
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Apple says software bug and certain apps causing iPhone overheating • The Guardian
Dan Milmo:
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Apple has identified the causes of an overheating problem with its latest iPhone series, including a software bug and using certain apps.
The tech company said it would issue an update to fix the bug in its iOS 17 software and was working with developers whose apps had overloaded its handsets. Apple took action after users of its iPhone Pro and iPhone Pro Max products had complained that they had become too hot during use, reaching temperatures of more than 43C (110F) in some cases.
“We have identified a few conditions which can cause iPhone to run warmer than expected,” said Apple in a statement.
The company said on Saturday that it was working on an update to the iOS17 system that powers the iPhone 15 lineup to prevent the devices from becoming uncomfortably hot and was working with apps that were running in ways “causing them to overload the system”.
Apple added that there might also be issues during initial use of the phone. “The device may feel warmer during the first few days after setting up or restoring the device because of increased background activity,” the company said.
Instagram, owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, modified its app last week to prevent it from heating up the device on the latest iPhone operating system.
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So this is Heatgate. Apparently with the new phones there’s also Lipgate (a barely discernible height difference between the screen and case) and Casegate (people don’t like the “Fine Woven” synthetic cases). Fairly routine year for iPhone introductions.
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‘We are just getting started’: the plastic-eating bacteria that could change the world • The Guardian
Stephen Buranyi:
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Before the publication of [professor Kohei] Oda’s paper in 2016, no one knew that bacteria capable of digesting plastic existed. Now, we have one solidly documented case. Given that we have discovered only a tiny fraction of microbial life, a far better candidate might be out there. In engineering terms, we may currently be trying to squeeze elite racing performance out of a Toyota Yaris engine, when somewhere, yet to be discovered, there is the bacterial equivalent of a Ferrari. “This is something we constantly struggle with,” says Beckham. “Do we go back to the well to search and see if nature has the solution? Or do we take the small footholds we have to the lab and work on them now?”
This question has led to a boom in what is known as bioprospecting. Like panning for gold in a river, bioprospectors travel the world looking to discover interesting and potentially lucrative microbes. In 2019, a team at Gwangju National University in South Korea took a construction drilling rig to the municipal dump outside town, and drilled 15 metres under the trash trenches to reveal decades-old plastic garbage. In it, Prof Soo-Jin Yeom and her students found a variety of the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis that appeared to be able to survive using polyethylene bags as food. Yeom’s team is now studying which enzymes the bacterium might be using, and whether it is really able to metabolise the plastic.
In vast mangrove swamps on the coastlines of Vietnam and Thailand, Simon Cragg, a microbiologist from the University of Portsmouth, is hunting for other potential PET-eating microbes. “The plastic-degrading enzymes we’ve already seen are quite similar to natural enzymes that degrade the coatings of plant leaves,” he told me. “Mangroves have a similar waterproof coating in their roots, and the swamps, sadly, also contain a shocking amount of plastic tangled up in them.” His hope is that bacteria capable of degrading the mangrove roots will be able to make the jump to plastic.
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Though our concern is that it’ll go out of control. Tricky balance.
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Disney+ to begin cracking down on password sharing in Canada in November • Mobile Syrup
Bradly Shankar:
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Disney will begin cracking down on password sharing in Canada as of November 1st, 2023.
In an email sent to the service’s Canadian subscribers on Tuesday evening, the company outlined updates to its Subscriber Agreement.
While Disney begins the email by saying new terms have been put forth to coincide with the November 1st launch of its ad-supported membership, it also notes that it is now “implementing restrictions on account sharing.” While Disney’s previous terms also stated that users can’t share their accounts, it never enforced this.
…Interestingly, Disney opens this account sharing section by mentioning “unless otherwise permitted by your Service Tier.” Netflix, the first streamer to crack down on free password sharing, allows those subscribed to its higher tiers to pay an additional $7.99/month to add on ‘Extra Members,’ people outside of their household who can access your account. Therefore, it remains to be seen whether Disney intends to permit those subscribed to certain Disney+ memberships (“Service Tiers”) to do something similar.
It’s worth noting that Disney CEO Bob Iger had confirmed in August that the company would indeed crack down on password sharing, but he indicated this would likely take place next year.
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First they came for the Brazilian Netflix password sharers.. anyway, as before, totally predictable: at the margin, this will increase the number of subscribers. Everything is being tightened up.
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The age of AI is a time for antitrust • Fast Company
Luther Lowe:
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Allowing Google to hardwire its AI technology into its search engine is also a massive risk to the open web. When you search for a business, learn about a new topic, or shop for a product, Google plans to give you the answer it thinks you want—without clear or conspicuous attribution.
That has enormous implications. By remixing copied answers from various parts of the internet un-cited, Google is killing the original function of its search engine: to refer users to other websites. Anyone who puts their own content on the web should be alarmed by the “plagiarism engine” that Google wants to impose on us. And that’s putting aside the genuine concern that the answers are sometimes objectively wrong.
Publishers face a Hobson’s Choice when it comes to “opting out” of services like Bard: Until recently, in order to remove your data from Bard, you had to entirely remove yourself from the index that powers Google’s search engine. If a website opts out, does its historical data Bard has presumably already trained on get purged? Could opting out of Bard hurt a website’s ranking in Google? Google doesn’t say.
Google’s rollout of Bard is the latest chapter of a well-worn Big Tech playbook. Big companies use their incumbent power to kill competition in developing technologies, thereby depriving consumers of choice and undermining innovation in the economy. But that’s Big Tech’s business model. Amazon has a well-documented track record of selling knock-off versions of its best-selling products—undercutting the small businesses that sell on its platform. And Google has been accused of distorting its search results to favor its own “Shopping” service. The poor track record by the largest players to give themselves preferential treatment as a way to extend their dominance is not good news for AI startups hoping to offer fresh services that make us all less dependent on today’s tech giants.
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Lowe is not a totally impartial observer on this: he was, until Friday, working for Yelp, which has repeatedly accused Google of abusing its search monopoly by grabbing data from Yelp. But, that being said, you still have to find coherent arguments against his.
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The Raspberry Pi 5 is finally here • The Verge
Emma Roth:
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Powering the brain of the Raspberry Pi 5 is a 64-bit quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 processor that runs at 2.4GHz, allowing for two to three times the performance boost when compared to the four-year-old Raspberry Pi 4. The device also comes with an 800MHz VideoCore VII graphics chip that the Raspberry Pi Foundation says offers a “substantial uplift” in graphics performance.
I got to try out the device for myself. While I didn’t have time to do much tinkering with it, I found that it boots up pretty quickly, while also loading webpages fast when compared to my older Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+. It does get pretty hot, but luckily, Raspberry Pi sent over an active cooling component that I could mount directly on the board.
Additionally, the Raspberry Pi 5 features a component made by the Raspberry Pi Foundation for the first time: the southbridge, also known as a part of the chipset that helps the device communicate with peripherals. With the RP1 southbridge, the Raspberry Pi Foundation says the microcomputer “delivers a step change in peripheral performance and functionality,” enabling faster transfer speeds to external UAS drives and other peripherals.
It also opens up two four-lane 1.5Gbps MIPI transceivers that let you connect up to two cameras or displays. There’s also a new single-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface for the first time, offering support for “high-bandwidth peripherals.”
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Up to the fifth generation and I still can’t think of anything I’d want to do with one. Also: “powering the brain of the Raspberry Pi is a 64-bit…”? It’s either powering, or it’s the brain. Oh, and it gets hot, does it? Fancy.
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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 