Coal use in Britain peaked in 1956. Since then it’s fallen to a level not seen since 1757. CC-licensed photo by rauter25 on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Anil Kapoor wins battle against AI, supports Hollywood strikes • Variety
Naman Ramachandran:
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Top Indian actor Anil Kapoor has won a landmark judgement against artificial intelligence (AI).
The “Slumdog Millionaire” star had filed a suit in the Delhi High Court through his lawyer Ameet Naik for protection of his personality rights including his name, image, likeness, voice and other attributes of his personality against any misuse including on digital media. The suit provided various instances of misuse of his attributes. The court, after a detailed hearing, granted an order on Wednesday acknowledging his personality rights and restraining all offenders from misusing his personality attributes without his permission in any manner.
“I’m very happy with this court order, which has come in my favor, and I think it’s very progressive and great for not only me but for other actors also,” Kapoor told Variety. “Because of the way technology and the AI technology, which is which is evolving every day [and] which can completely take advantage of and be misused commercially, as well as where my image, voice, morphing, GIFs and deep fakes are concerned, I can straight away, if that happens, send a court order and injunction and they have to pull it down.”
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Simples! Well, good luck with that, Mr Kapoor. I’m sure conquering the internet with legal letters will be a pushover now. In fact, Tom Hanks would like a word…
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Tom Hanks warns fans about ‘AI version of me’ promoting dental plan • Variety
Michaela Zee:
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Tom Hanks is not informing fans to get their teeth cleaned.
The Oscar-winning actor shared a computer-generated image of himself on Instagram Saturday, warning his followers about a promotional video for a dental plan circulating online.
“BEWARE!! There’s a video out there promoting some dental plan with an AI version of me. I have nothing to do with it,” Hanks wrote over the photo of his AI counterpart.
Hanks has previously discussed the rise of artificial intelligence and deepfake technology in the creative industries, saying on an episode of “The Adam Buxton Podcast” that it’s now possible for him to continue acting after his death.
“Anybody can now recreate themselves at any age they are by way of AI or deep fake technology. I could be hit by a bus tomorrow and that’s it, but performances can go on and on and on and on,” Hanks said. “Outside the understanding of AI and deepfake, there’ll be nothing to tell you that it’s not me and me alone. And it’s going to have some degree of lifelike quality. That’s certainly an artistic challenge but it’s also a legal one.”
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We imagine that AI is going to bring us a brand new frontier, marvellous new insights, an inspired depth of knowledge. Instead it’s used for hokey porn and to push crypto and dental plans.
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Why Kagi is the best Google alternative I’ve tried yet • The Verge
David Pierce:
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I’ve become a total convert to the Kagi search engine. I wrote a big story about Neeva and search a few months ago, and a bunch of people were like, “Try Kagi! It’s awesome!” It is, in fact, awesome. Here’s what I like about it:
• It’s customisable. Kagi looks a lot like Google and generally feels very similar to use. But unlike Google, Kagi lets you block sites you don’t like and promote sites you do like. You can also create “lenses” to only search certain sites or domains — Kagi has a bunch built in, too, like a “Small Web” lens that favors blogs, forums, and other parts of the web that tend to get blotted out by the giants
• No ads. The catch with Kagi is you have to pay for it. You get a few searches a month for free, but $10 buys you unlimited access. That’s a lot of money for a search engine! But the pages are so much cleaner and less confusing that I was surprised how quickly I paid up
• It’s great for videos and podcasts. Podcast search is, like, impossible. But I’ve had surprisingly good luck Kagi-ing topics I’m interested in and finding related podcast episodes, and the engine does a similarly good job of scouring YouTube for interesting stuff
• Its AI is handy but not in the way. For a lot of queries, Kagi puts a little “Quick Answer” button at the top — click it, and you get a brief AI-generated answer, with cited sources you can click on. That’s exactly the amount of AI I’m looking for in most of my searches
• The mobile browser is great. Kagi’s mobile app is a browser called Orion, and it’s as no-frills a mobile browser as you’ll find. But that’s cool by me! It’s fast and easy to use. You can also supposedly download Kagi as a Safari extension on iOS, but I haven’t managed to make that work. (On Android, you can just switch to Kagi as your default search engine because Android is much better at this.)
• It seems… good? I’ve tried basically all the search engines, and I usually end up back on Google because Google has better results. (Or at least the results I’m expecting and looking for.) With Kagi, I’ve found myself going back to Google less than usual. I don’t know if that’ll hold up forever, but I’m impressed so far.«
I wondered why I hadn’t used Kagi, then came to the bit about needing to pay. Even if you don’t sign up, you can see some example results (here’s “best headphones” (and here’s the comparison for DuckDuckGo).
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Passport database ‘will be used to catch shoplifters and burglars’ • The Times
Matt Dathan:
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Britain’s passport database of 45 million people will be used to help catch shoplifters, burglars, car and bike thieves under plans to tackle crime.
Video of suspected crime from CCTV, doorbell and dashcam technology would be compared against facial images from a range of government databases to find a match under the plans.
The immigration and asylum biometrics system would also be available in order to search for foreign nationals who are not on the passports database.
Chris Philp, the crime and policing minister, said he is planning to integrate data from the police national database (PND), HM Passport Office and other national databases in order to enable police to find a match with the “click of one button”. He said he is aiming to have the amalgamated system up and running within two years and predicted it would be a gamechanger for catching thieves. He also called on members of the public to make citizen’s arrests in supermarkets if they see shoplifters.
Currently, police forces only run facial recognition software through the PND but that only holds information on people who have been arrested.
While they currently have access to the passport database, police forces are not using it to find criminals as it sits on a completely separate IT system.
Philp said in the short term he wants police forces to start running footage of crime scenes through the separate passport system while the new combined database is created.
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Easy to predict that this is going to be challenged in the courts by every NGO imaginable.
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The art of aphantasia: how ‘mind blind’ artists create without being able to visualise • The Conversation
Matthew MacKisack:
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Glen Keane, the Oscar-winning artist behind such Disney classics as The Little Mermaid (1989), was once described by Ed Catmull the former president of Pixar and Walt Disney Studios as “one of the best animators in the history of hand-drawn animation”. But when he sat down to design Ariel, or indeed the beast from Beauty and the Beast (1991), Keane’s mind was a blank. He had no preconception of what he would draw.
This is because he has aphantasia, a recently-identified variation of human experience affecting 2-5% of the population, in which a person is unable to generate mental imagery. Perhaps surprisingly, Keane is not alone in being a visual artist who cannot visualise.
When aphantasia was named and publicised, a number of creative practitioners – artists, designers and architects – contacted the researchers to say that they too had no “mind’s eye”. Intrigued by the seemingly counter-intuitive notion, we gathered a group of these people together and curated an exhibition of their work.
How is it, then, that a person like Keane can draw a picture of Ariel without a mental picture to guide him?
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I wasn’t aware of aphantasia (how wonderful that a Disney illustrator should have it, given that Disney’s first film was called Fantasia), but it is fascinating to consider. One person told me they can’t read fiction because they can’t imagine the voices of the characters; nor can they imagine a conversation they’d have between themselves and someone else. The link to the article about aphantasia really is worth your time.
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June 2021: The mRNA vaccine revolution is just beginning • WIRED UK
Stephen Buranyi in June 2021:
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The scope of mRNA vaccines always went beyond any one disease. Like moving from a vacuum tube to a microchip, the technology promises to perform the same task as traditional vaccines, but exponentially faster, and for a fraction of the cost. “You can have an idea in the morning, and a vaccine prototype by evening. The speed is amazing,” says Daniel Anderson, an mRNA therapy researcher at MIT. Before the pandemic, charities including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) hoped to turn mRNA on deadly diseases that the pharmaceutical industry has largely ignored, such as dengue or Lassa fever, while industry saw a chance to speed up the quest for long-held scientific dreams: an improved flu shot, or the first effective HIV vaccine.
Amesh Adalja, an expert on emerging diseases at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in Maryland, says mRNA could “make all these applications we were hoping for, pushing for, become part of everyday life.”
“When they write the history of vaccines, this will probably be a turning point,” he adds.
While the world remains focused on the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines, the race for the next generation of mRNA vaccines – targeted at a variety of other diseases – is already exploding. Moderna and BioNTech each have nine candidates in development or early clinical trials.
There are at least six mRNA vaccines against flu in the pipeline, and a similar number against HIV. Nipah, Zika, herpes, dengue, hepatitis and malaria have all been announced. The field sometimes resembles the early stage of a gold rush, as pharma giants snap up promising researchers for huge contracts – Sanofi recently paid $425m (£307m) to partner with a small American mRNA biotech called Translate Bio, while GSK paid $294m (£212m) to work with Germany’s CureVac.
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On Monday the Nobel for Physiology and Medicine went to the people who figured out how to tweak mRNA to make vaccines. There are now two candidate vaccines for malaria. The speed with which this has gone from theory to practice to product is about 30 years. Still impressive.
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Warning: BMW wireless charging may break iPhone 15’s Apple Pay chip • MacRumors
Joe Rossignol:
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If you have an iPhone 15 and drive a BMW, it might be best to avoid charging the device with the vehicle’s wireless charging pad for now.
Over the past week, some BMW owners have complained that their iPhone 15’s NFC chip no longer works after charging the device with their vehicle’s wireless charging pad, according to comments shared on the MacRumors Forums and X, formerly known as Twitter. Affected customers say the iPhone goes into a data recovery mode with a white screen, and the NFC chip is no longer functional after the device reboots.
In an iPhone, the NFC chip powers features like Apple Pay and digital car keys. Affected users receive a “Could Not Set Up Apple Pay” error message in the Wallet app, and there does not appear to be a way to fix the problem. Some customers say Apple replaced their iPhone after confirming the NFC chip failed, but the replacement iPhone is then vulnerable to the same issue, so there is currently no permanent solution.
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Yikes. And it only seems to be the new iPhones. Which is odd. Side note: I got a new iPhone 15 Pro, and it wouldn’t charge or (I thought) send/receive data via the USB-C port. Took it to the Apple Store, where it did plug in to a laptop and take a firmware update. Voila: port works for charging and data. Not sure what the solution for BMWs is, though.
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Rivian’s quest to build the ultimate electric truck burns through billions • WSJ
Sean McLain:
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Rivian Automotive set out to build the ultimate electric vehicle for American consumers—a pickup truck with sports-car handling and a dizzying array of features.
Engineers gave the truck a beefy underlying metal frame for higher crash-test ratings and one of the most complicated suspension systems on the market for a smoother ride on- and off-road. It can go from zero to 60 miles an hour in 3 seconds. Rivian added pop-out flashlights stored away in the doors and a portable Bluetooth speaker.
All that comes at a cost. Rivian vehicles sell for over $80,000 on average. Yet they’re so expensive to build that in the second quarter the company lost $33,000 on every one it sold. That’s roughly the starting price of a base model Ford F-150.
When Rivian launched onto the electric-vehicle scene, industry watchers expected it to beat rivals to market and become the “Tesla of trucks.” Investors piled into its splashy market debut in 2021, when it raised nearly $12 billion in cash and became the U.S.’s largest IPO in years. For a short while, Rivian was worth more than Ford Motor and General Motors.
In two years, Rivian has blown through half of its $18 billion cash pile, in part because it struggled to master the nuts and bolts of manufacturing. While production is now growing and losses have narrowed, Rivian still loses money on its vehicle sales. In an industry known for narrow margins and tough competition, Rivian pays too much for parts and produces too few vehicles to cover its costs.
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So you’re suggesting that Tesla’s ability to make a profit is actually impressive? Also, Rivian is aiming to produce about 52,000 vehicles annually. Tesla was doing more than that back in 2016.
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‘Big Short’ author Michael Lewis says Sam Bankman-Fried came to him for advice on ideas — like buying Twitter with Elon Musk • Business Insider via Yahoo News
Kai Xiang Teo:
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Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced former CEO of crypto exchange FTX, used “The Big Short” author Michael Lewis as a sounding board for ideas — including one about acquiring Twitter.
That’s according to Lewis, who was speaking to CBS’ “60 Minutes” about his upcoming book on cryptocurrency exchange cofounder, “Going Infinite.”
Lewis told CBS that Bankman-Fried came to him for advice on a variety of ideas. When asked for details, Lewis said, “For just, like, decisions he was making. Should I join Elon Musk in buying Twitter? You know? Should we do this? Should we do that?”
“Mostly, my answers were no, no, and no. And he would look at me and say, ‘You’re a boring grownup.'” Lewis added.
For context, Bankman-Fried’s interest in acquiring Twitter with Musk appears to have gone past the ideation stage. Text exchanges from March last year revealed that philosopher Will MacAskill — an advisor to Bankman-Fried — relayed his interest to Elon Musk and tried to set up a meeting between the two. The text messages were part of the discovery process in Musk’s court battle with Twitter.
In April last year, Musk’s former partner Grimes texted Musk that Bankman-Fried would be willing to contribute up to $5bn to Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.
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Only one of Lewis and SBF is facing jail time, of course. I’m a little puzzled that Lewis, who for decades has looked razor-sharp in spotting the bad guys and scammers, seems to have been taken in by SBF.
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Analysis: UK emissions fall 3.4% in 2022 as coal use drops to lowest level since 1757 • Carbon Brief
Simon Evans:
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The UK’s coal demand fell by another 15% in 2022 to just 6.2m tonnes. This is the lowest level since 1757, according to Carbon Brief analysis of historical data.
That year in the UK, George II was king, William Cavendish was prime minister and the industrial revolution had not yet begun. A year earlier, Wolgang Amadeus Mozart had been born in Austria.
In the years that followed, UK coal use climbed rapidly as industrialisation took off. Annual demand for the fuel rocketed to 60Mt by 1850 and peaked at 221Mt in 1956.
This is shown in the chart [in the article], which combines data covering 1853 onwards from the UK government with estimates for earlier years published by historian Paul Warde.
(The UK’s historical coal use is the main reason it remains the eighth-largest contributor to current warming. Its contribution is particularly notable given its modest population.)
…Last year, there had been fears of a coal “comeback” or a “return to coal” in the face of the global energy crisis. In the event, use of the fuel to generate electricity fell by 15% in 2022.
Electricity system operator National Grid had paid an estimated £386m to keep old coal plants open and stocked with coal, in case electricity supplies were tight. But the plants never ran.
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The graph shows use peaking in 1956, at 221m tonnes. Lots of fascinating data in the article.
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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 