The Las Vegas Sphere is an amazing new landmark, but so far isn’t anywhere near profitable. CC-licensed photo by Nigel Hoult on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Just watch. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Advertisers don’t want sites like Jezebel to exist • 404 Media
Jason Koebler and Emanuel Maiberg:
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Lauren Tousignant, Jezebel’s interim editor in chief, told 404 Media that Jezebel was told “brand safety,” the fact that advertisers don’t want to be next to the type of content Jezebel was publishing, was “one of the biggest factors” that led G/O to stop publishing the site and lay off its staff. Tousignant said that a couple of weeks ago, the ads sales team asked if it could remove Jezebel’s tagline—“Sex. Celebrity. Politics. With Teeth”—from the site.
“They took it off because they’re like, let’s see if this makes a huge difference,” Tousignant said. “So yeah, it was very much the problem here that no one will advertise on Jezebel because we cover sex and abortion. I know taking the tagline off was to see if the algorithm advertising would change. After it was removed one of the editorial directors was like, ‘I’m seeing an ad for J Crew for the first time ever, maybe this will be good.’”
G/O Media has a long history of destroying or otherwise undermining the work of beloved media outlets that have done incredibly important work. Spanfeller blames, as is seemingly required in every CEO layoff notice, “economic headwinds” and “macroeconomic news.” Spanfeller and Great Hill Partners have, surely, mismanaged Jezebel in ways both big and small, and Spanfeller and G/O haven’t given anyone a reason to take their words at face value, but the subtext here is that Jezebel’s content was hard to sufficiently monetize.
This should not be the case considering that millions of people read it and chose, specifically, to visit Jezebel every month. But this is unfortunately how the internet works now, and has for a long time: News terrifies brands big and small, to the point where “brand safety” and “brand suitability” have become gigantic industries that have brought even giants like Facebook and Google to heel.
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The clear downside of being ad-supported. The “brand safety” topic cuts both ways: it gets used to cut the funding for right-wing sites, but also against those like Jezebel deemed too controversial.
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Inside the magical world of AI Prompters on Reddit • Hyperallergic
Aidan Walker:
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Recent research shows that Americans who are learning about AI tools are mostly teaching themselves, often through sources and communities found online. And the best prompt engineers seem to be on Reddit. There’s one big subreddit for each kind of generator, including Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALLE-3, along with several others where users debate, post, and refine prompts. A connected universe of wikis, YouTube tutorials, and influencers flesh out the emerging institutional world of AI-generated art.
Take an image known as “Spiral Town,” generated by a user known as Ugleh and posted to the StableDiffusion subreddit this September. Many of the comments on the original Spiral Town post are people telling Ugleh where they first saw the viral image: “a shrooms facebook group,” says one, while another lists other non-AI subreddits. Ugleh seems ambivalent about it: “I’m fine with it tbh. I only spent about 10 minutes on this photo.”
But as others praise Ugleh and post links to their own YouTube tutorials on how to make images similar to Spiral Town, some commenters double down on the argument that Ugleh should be treated as a “real” artist. Sure, generating the Spiral Town image may have taken minutes, but that doesn’t mean that creating such works doesn’t require skill — in fact, much of the subreddit’s audience seems to be people trying to develop these very abilities. Almost every post on the Stable Diffusion subreddit has a flare next to its title that says “Workflow Included,” meaning it explains the procedure used to create the image.
An Ugleh piece made three days later seems to have taken more than 10 minutes. The checkerboard image below was created starting with the deceptively simple prompt “Medieval village scene with busy streets and castle in the distance,” followed by fifteen lines of complicated and sometimes indecipherable modifiers, including one that instructs the AI to not make the image like a “bad anime.”
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“Prompt engineering” really is taking off, becoming a very arcane space in its own right; though the community around it described here reminds me a bit of hackers, with the anti-commercial approach and wide sharing of tools. The images on show are amazing, though.
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Why we can’t quit email, even though we hate it • Tim Harford
Tim went to the Design Museum in London, which has an exhibition of notable emails:
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Email is the cockroach of computing. BlackBerry instant messenger and Friends Reunited may come and go, but email cannot be killed. The variety of emails displayed on the wall of the exhibition make it clear why. Any new ping in your inbox could be your lover dumping you, a friend proposing an idea that will make you both rich or a stranger with a piece of information that could save your life. Even the everyday traffic will contain both time-wasting spam and a message from a senior colleague that you ignore at your peril. There may be semi-useful administrative information (don’t Reply All), sweet nothings from a spouse, disposable quips from friends, politely phrased requests from complete strangers, interesting newsletters and much more.
It’s all in there. No wonder we feel overwhelmed. No wonder we can’t do without it.
It is that vast range of importance in the emails pouring into our inboxes every day, from the trivial to the life-changing, that explains why the inbox can be so addictive. The psychologist BF Skinner once serendipitously discovered while running low on supplies of rat food that the rats in his laboratory were more motivated by unpredictable food rewards than by predictable ones: the uncertainty grabbed their attention in a way that a steady pay-off never could. Whenever we check our inboxes, we’re like Skinner’s rats. It has been at least 90 seconds since we last checked, after all. Will the email slot-machine offer us a jackpot or a disaster? Or just a chance to hit “refresh” and have another spin?
Despite every effort, I still check my own email too often, but even for those with better habits than I, that range of possibility poses a challenge. I have argued before that one of the underrated habits of any productive person is to clarify what needs to be done — if anything — with each new incoming thing. It rarely takes long to decide with a single email but, given that the scope of possible responses could be anything from “delete” to “find a good lawyer”, it is not surprising that we get bogged down and let the undecided emails accumulate.
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My position is that your inbox is a to-do list created almost randomly by other people. The question is whether you acquiesce to doing those things.
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Las Vegas Sphere reports $98.4m loss; CFO quits • Las Vegas Sun News
Ray Brewer:
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The Sphere in Las Vegas reported an operating loss of $98.4m for the fiscal quarter ending Sept. 30, Sphere Entertainment Co. said this morning on an earnings call.
Additionally, the company lost its chief financial officer, as Gautam Ranji has resigned, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
Ranji’s exit was “not a result of any disagreement with the company’s independent auditors or any member of management on any matter of accounting principles or practices, financial statement disclosure or internal controls,” the company said in the filing.
The New York Post reported Tuesday that Ranji suddenly quit after a bout of yelling and screaming from CEO James Dolan.
Ranji, who had been on the job for 11 months, will be replaced on an interim basis by Greg Brunner, the company’s senior vice president, according to the filing.
…Next week, there will be a multiday takeover of the Sphere for the inaugural Las Vegas Grand Prix, Sphere officials said.
Revenue for the quarter included $4.1m in event revenue — those two sold out U2 shows — and $2.6m from suite licensing and advertising on the Sphere exosphere.
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Sounds like Ranji’s exit was over a disagreement about what to do, not how they account for it. Even so, it’s an amazing object.
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Apple’s AI-powered Siri assistant could land as soon as WWDC 2024 • TechRadar
Mark Wilson:
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The iPhone 16’s biggest new feature could be on-device AI, according to fresh rumors claiming that Apple could announce a next-gen Siri assistant at WWDC 2024.
The speculation comes from the well-known leaker Revegnus on X (formerly Twitter), who claims that “Apple is currently using LLM [large language model] to completely revamp Siri into the ultimate virtual assistant” and that “the first product is expected to be unveiled at WWDC 2024”.
According to the leaks, Apple is preparing to develop Siri “into Apple’s most powerful killer AI app” and plans “for it to be standard on the iPhone 16 models and onwards”. This suggests that a next-gen Siri may need new dedicated hardware, which could leave older iPhones unable to access its most powerful features.
Current iPhones like the iPhone 15 Pro already have powerful chips like the A17 Pro, which are capable of powering some AI-powered tasks. The forthcoming Journal app, for example, is coming to iOS 17 soon and “uses on-device machine learning to create personalized suggestions to inspire a user’s journal entry”, according to Apple.
But the suggestion from these new rumors is that Apple is planning to give Siri a much bigger overhaul with more far-reaching powers. And this is backed up by Samsung’s recent musings about Galaxy AI, which suggest that on-device AI will be the next big smartphone battleground in 2024.
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Would be amazing if Apple weren’t doing this, really, but it’s always the timescale that one wonders about. Having been first with Siri, back in 2011, Apple hasn’t really been first on anything to do with AI.
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Lost in space: astronaut’s toolbag orbits Earth after escaping during spacewalk • The Guardian
Diana Ramirez-Simon:
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Nasa astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara were conducting a rare all-female spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS) on 1 November when their toolbag gave them the slip, according to Nasa.
The astronauts, both on their first spacewalk, were making repairs on assemblies that allow the ISS solar arrays to track the sun continuously, reported SciTechDaily, which was documenting the spacewalk.
“During the activity, one tool bag was inadvertently lost. Flight controllers spotted the tool bag using external station cameras. The tools were not needed for the remainder of the spacewalk. Mission Control analyzed the bag’s trajectory and determined that risk of recontacting the station is low and that the onboard crew and space station are safe with no action required,” said Nasa on its blog.
The white, satchel-like bag is surprisingly bright, shining just below the limit of visibility to the naked eye, which means observers would be able to spot it using binoculars, according to EarthSky. Its visual magnitude is around a 6, making it slightly less bright than the ice giant Uranus.
To track the bag, observers need only to find the ISS, which is the third-brightest object in the night sky, according to Nasa, and can be located using the agency’s Spot the Station tool. The bag will be orbiting Earth two to four minutes ahead of the ISS.
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But will burn up on reentry in a few months. Strange they don’t have a leash.
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If you’ve ever heard a voice that wasn’t there, this could be why • The New York Times
Veronique Greenwood:
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Some years ago, scientists in Switzerland found a way to make people hallucinate. They didn’t use LSD or sensory deprivation chambers. Instead, they sat people in a chair and asked them to push a button that, a fraction of a second later, caused a rod to gently press their back. After a few rounds, the volunteers got the creeping sense of someone behind them. Faced with a disconnect between their actions and their sensations, their minds conjured another explanation: a separate presence in the room.
In a new study published in the journal Psychological Medicine, researchers from the same lab used the ghostly finger setup to probe another kind of hallucination: hearing voices. They found that volunteers were more likely to report hearing a voice when there was a lag between the push of the button and the rod’s touch than when there was no delay.
The findings suggest that the neurological roots of hallucinations lie in how the brain processes contradictory signals from the environment, the researchers said.
Hearing voices is more common than you might think, said Pavo Orepic, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Geneva and an author of the new paper. In surveys, scientists have discovered that many people without a psychiatric diagnosis — perhaps 5 to 10% of the general population — report having heard a disembodied voice at some point in their lives. “There is actually a continuum of these experiences,” Dr. Orepic said. “So all of us hallucinate — at certain times, like if you’re tired, you’ll hallucinate more, for instance — and some people are more prone to do so.”
In the new study, as in earlier work, Dr. Orepic and his collaborators had volunteers sit in a chair and push the button that caused the rod to touch their backs. During some sessions, there was no delay between the push and the touch, while others had a half-second delay — enough time to give volunteers that feeling that someone was nearby.
During all trials, the volunteers listened to recordings of pink noise, a softer version of white noise. Some recordings contained recorded bits of their own voice, while others had fragments of someone else’s voice or no voice at all. In each trial, the volunteers were asked if they had heard anyone speaking.
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The impact of fake reviews on demand and welfare • National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
Akesson et al:
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Although fake online customer reviews have become prevalent on platforms such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook, little is known about how these reviews influence consumer behavior. This paper provides the first experimental estimates of the effects of fake reviews on individual demand and welfare.
We conduct an incentive-compatible online experiment with a nationally representative sample of respondents from the United Kingdom (n = 10,000). Consumers are asked to choose a product category, browse a platform resembling Amazon, and select one of five equally priced products. One of the products is of inferior quality, one is of superior quality, and three are of average quality. We randomly allocate participants to variants of the platform: five treatment groups see positive fake reviews for an inferior product, and the control group does not see fake reviews.
Moreover, some participants are randomly selected to receive an educational intervention that aims to mitigate the potential effects of fake reviews.
Our analysis of the experimental data yields four findings. First, fake reviews make consumers more likely to choose lower-quality products. Second, we estimate that welfare losses from such reviews may be important—on the order of $.12 for each dollar spent in the setting we study. hird, we find that fake reviews have heterogeneous effects. For example, the effect of fake reviews is smaller for those who do not trust customer reviews.
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I’m not totally surprised by the third finding, but the cost – borne by users – of fake reviews really is substantial. Of course, there’s no incentive for the platforms to get rid of them. People buy things anyway.
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Vision Pro, spatial video, and panoramic photos • Daring Fireball
John Gruber got some time with the Vision Pro to find out what it’s like with “spatial video” (which is sort-of 3D) that you shoot yourself on an iPhone 15 Pro:
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Vision Pro is capable of presenting video that looks utterly real — because that’s exactly how pass-through video works and feels. Recorded spatial videos are different. For one thing, reality is not 30 fps, nor is it only 1080p. This makes spatial videos not look low-resolution or crude, per se, but rather more like movies. The upscaled 1080p imagery comes across as film-like grain, and the obviously-lower-than-reality frame rate conveys a movie-like feel as well. Higher resolution would look better, sure, but I’m not sure a higher frame rate would. Part of the magic of movies and TV is that 24 and 30 fps footage has a dream-like aspect to it.
Nothing you’ve ever viewed on a screen, however, can prepare you for the experience of watching these spatial videos, especially the ones you will have shot yourself, of your own family and friends. They truly are more like memories than videos. The spatial videos I experienced yesterday that were shot by Apple looked better — framed by professional photographers, and featuring professional actors. But the ones I shot myself were more compelling, and took my breath away. There’s my friend, Joanna [Stern], right in front of me — like I could reach out and touch her — but that was 30 minutes ago, in a different room.
Prepare to be moved, emotionally, when you experience this.
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I think this, more than the Humane AI pin, is going to be what shifts our view of what’s possible with technology. This creates a human connection: think of how many futuristic films show the protagonist viewing immersive video of past events (particularly, Minority Report).
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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. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 