The smog in Delhi, India is so bad that its officials want to use “cloud seeding” to precipitate it out with rain. CC-licensed photo by ben dalton on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Looks like rain? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Delhi plans to unleash cloud seeding in its battle against deadly smog • WIRED
Sushmita Pathak:
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The air is so bad that schools in Delhi and its surrounding areas have announced closures, and offices are allowing employees to work from home. The government has advised children, elderly people, and those with chronic diseases to stay indoors as much as possible. Diesel trucks, except those carrying essential goods, are no longer allowed into the city. Spells of rain last week cleaned up the air, but the respite was short-lived as air quality worsened again, aided by firecrackers set off over the weekend to celebrate Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights.
Now, Delhi officials are seeking permission from federal agencies in India to try cloud seeding. The technique involves flying an aircraft to spray clouds with salts like silver or potassium iodide or solid carbon dioxide, also known as dry ice, to induce precipitation. The chemical molecules attach to moisture already in the clouds to form bigger droplets that then fall as rain. China has used artificial rain to tackle air pollution in the past—but for cloud seeding to work properly, you need significant cloud cover with reasonable moisture content, which Delhi generally lacks during the winter. If weather conditions are favorable, scientists leading the project at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur plan to carry out cloud seeding around November 20.
Until then, at least, Delhi will remain shrouded in a thick gray haze, which has become a toxic winter ritual. The smog, a dangerous cocktail of particulate matter and noxious gasses, results from a series of unfortunate events that happen at the start of winter.
In late October, farmers in northern India, particularly wheat growers in the states of Punjab and Haryana northwest of Delhi, use a cheap and easy method to clear their paddy fields for fresh sowing—lighting fires to burn off stalks left behind after harvesting. In doing so, they inadvertently send plumes of smoke into the air. Authorities have tried to convince farmers to switch to using machines to remove crop residue instead of burning it, but farmers can’t always afford that method. Some small startups turn the crop residue into pulp that can then be used to make cardboard items. State and federal governments have also been looking into paying farmers to not burn their fields.
[But] Even on the worst days, smoke from crop burning only accounts for about a third of Delhi’s pollution, says Somvanshi.
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In the UK, farm stubble burning was banned in 1993. Cloud seeding will have unpredictable effects; this might not be the magic solution the Delhi authorities think.
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Humane will be updating its AI Pin reveal video to address a big error • The Verge
Jay Peters:
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Humane will be updating its AI Pin reveal video to address a big error.In the video, Humane’s AI Pin confidently lied about the best places to watch April’s upcoming total solar eclipse, but Humane staffer (and Verge alum) Sam Sheffer said in Humane’s Discord that this was a bug that’s since been resolved. Sheffer says Humane will be updating the video on its website, but as of this writing, the wrong eclipse information is still in it.
The device also misstated the amount of protein in a handful of almonds. Sheffer says the pin was spelling out the amount of protein for a half cup of almonds, which was the “correct and current” behavior. However, he says the behavior will “improve over time.” The video on Humane’s website has a footnote that says “protein amount estimated” — I’m not sure if this was there originally.
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That’s a lot of wrong already. How might you know whether the generative AI projecting answers onto your hand is getting other things wrong which are bugs that have yet to be resolved?
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Apple gets 36% of Google’s Safari search revenue • MacRumors
Juli Clover:
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We previously learned that Google is paying Apple billions of dollars to be the primary [no: the default – Overspill Ed] search engine on Apple devices, and now, Bloomberg has shared the total percentage of Google’s revenue that Apple earns.
Google pays Apple 36% of the total revenue that it earns from searches conducted on the Safari browser on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with the number shared by an economics expert testifying on Apple’s behalf. According to Bloomberg, Google’s main lawyer “visibly cringed” when the revenue data was shared, as it was meant to remain confidential.
Last month, wealth management company Bernstein suggested that Apple is getting anywhere from $18bn to $20bn per year, representing somewhere around 15% of Apple’s total annual operating profits.
Apple and Google have both worked to keep details in the antitrust lawsuit private, claiming that publicly sharing the information would “undermine Google’s competitive standing.”
Google has been the default search engine on Apple devices since 2002, though the agreement between the two tech companies has been revised multiple times. Apple earns a ton of money from the deal, while Google gets to be the default search option on the world’s most popular smartphone.
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Jason Kint calculates that Google probably spends $90bn annually on search default deals. For its most recent fiscal year, its total revenue was just under $280bn. So nearly a quarter of revenues go straight out the door on default deals. That doesn’t suggest complete confidence in being “the best search engine”.
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UK petrol station group EG to buy Tesla ultra-fast chargers • Reuters
Sachin Ravikumar and Nick Carey:
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British petrol station operator EG Group said on Monday it would buy Tesla ultrafast charging units to boost its electric vehicle charging network across Europe, as the EV maker continues to expand the reach of its charging business.
EG, owned by the billionaire Issa brothers who also own UK supermarket chain Asda, will expand its charging network to more than 20,000 EV chargers at its own sites over time, from above 600 currently deployed.
The first Tesla chargers will be installed by the end of this year, EG said, though it didn’t provide details on the cost or time frame for the total purchase.
The “open network” Tesla chargers will be accessible to all EV drivers regardless of their vehicles’ brand.
“The rapid installation of reliable, easy-to-use EV charging infrastructure is the right step towards a sustainable future,” said Rebecca Tinucci, Tesla’s senior director of charging infrastructure.
…The UK had just over 49,000 public electric vehicle charging devices installed as of Oct. 1, according to government figures.
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Impressive that the Issa brothers are actually thinking ahead to a time when (fossil) fuelling stations are less and less useful, but electric charger more and more so. Might be ten years, but it’s coming.
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Tech groups push back on Biden AI executive order, raising concerns that it could crush innovation • FedScoop
Nihal Krishan:
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“Broad regulatory measures in Biden’s AI red tape wishlist will result in stifling new companies and competitors from entering the marketplace and significantly expanding the power of the federal government over American innovation,” Carl Szabo, vice president and general counsel at NetChoice, an advocacy group that represents major AI companies such as Amazon, Google and Meta, said in a statement.
“This order puts any investment in AI at risk of being shut down at the whims of government bureaucrats,” he continued. “That is dangerous for our global standing as the leading technological innovators, and this is the wrong approach to govern AI.”
Szabo added that there are many federal government regulations that already govern AI that can be used to rein in the technology, but the Biden administration “has chosen to further increase the complexity and burden of the federal code.”
The Chamber of Commerce said the EO shows promise and addresses important AI priorities, but also raises concerns and needs more work.
“Substantive and process problems still exist,” Tom Quaadman, executive vice president of the Chamber’s Technology Engagement Center, said in a statement. “Short, overlapping timelines for agency-required action endangers necessary stakeholder input, thereby creating conditions for ill-informed rulemaking and degrading intra-government cooperation.”
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That last quotation could have come from ChatGPT, but the point about Biden’s EO is that it strengthened the position of the incumbents, and made entrance harder for those not already there. As is going to be the case for any sort of regulation.
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The selfie camera has gotten too good • The Atlantic
Caroline Mimbs Nyce:
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A camera is fundamentally a tool for documenting the world, but it is also pretty subjective. And what makes a photograph “good” depends on what you want to do with it. If you’re taking a photo of your eyelid eczema to send to your doctor, you probably want an extreme level of detail. If you’re taking a selfie in front of the Eiffel Tower to send to your boyfriend, you probably don’t want every blemish on your skin in high-def. Apple’s software is post-processing selfies en masse, but “there’s no one universal algorithm that will make every picture better for the purpose it’s intended for,” Cooper said.
It’s hard to build a camera that’s just right. Five years ago, the iPhone presented the opposite problem. In 2018, Apple’s newly launched XR and XS models took photos that made people look suspiciously good. The phones were accused of artificially smoothing skin, in what came to be known as “beautygate.” Apple later said that a software bug was behind these unusually hot photos, and shipped a fix. “Do you want a nicer photo or a more accurate representation of reality?” Nilay Patel, the editor in chief of The Verge, wrote in his review of the XR. “Only you can look into your heart and decide.”
The answer to Patel’s question seems to be that people want something in the middle—not too hot, but not too real either. People are chasing a Goldilocks ideal with the selfie camera: They want it to be real, authentic, and messy, just not too real, authentic, or messy.
“When someone thinks of a perfect selfie, they don’t think of having no pores,” Maria-Carolina Cambre, an education professor at Concordia University in Montreal, told me. “And they don’t think of having every single pore visible. It’s neither one of those extremes.” For more than years, Cambre and a colleague ran selfie focus groups in Canada, discussing the style of photography with more than 100 young people. They found that people examine selfies in a very specific way, which they termed the “digital-forensic gaze.” People inspect such images closely, pinching in to look for details and for evidence of any filtering. They look for flaws and inconsistencies. “This is the paradox,” she told me. “Everything is optimized, but the best selfies look like they haven’t been optimized. Even though they have.”
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(Thanks G for the link.)
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The Lego-like way to get CO2 out of the atmosphere • The Washington Post
Shannon Osaka:
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Graphyte, a new company incubated by Bill Gates’s investment group Breakthrough Energy Ventures, announced Monday that it has created a method for turning bits of wood chips and rice hulls into low-cost, dehydrated chunks of plant matter. Those blocks of carbon-laden plant matter — which look a bit like shoe-box sized Lego blocks — can then be buried deep underground for hundreds of years.
The approach, the company claims, could store a ton of CO2 for around $100 a ton, a number long considered a milestone for affordably removing carbon dioxide from the air.
Carbon removal may not seem like a top priority — why not just stop using fossil fuels in the first place? — but virtually every projection of cutting greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050 involves some amount of it. That’s because certain areas of the economy like aviation, cement-making and steelmaking, are very challenging to do with renewable energy and batteries. It’s hard to make temperatures hot enough with electricity to produce cement or steel, and to fly planes on heavy lithium-ion batteries.
“We’ve bet the future of our planet on our ability to remove CO2 from the air,” said Chris Rivest, a partner at Breakthrough Energy Ventures. “Pretty much every IPCC scenario that has a livable planet involves us pulling like 5 to 10 gigatons of CO2 out of the air by mid- to late-century,” he added, referring to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Five to 10 gigatons of CO2 a year is around 12% to 25% of what humanity currently emits every year.
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Just a reminder – “giga” is 10^9, so to remove that amount from the atmosphere, even at $100 per ton(ne), would cost $100bn per gigaton. One has to wonder, again, if it isn’t cheaper to not put the stuff in the atmosphere in the first place. (Thanks G for the link.)
Google’s AI Magic Editor won’t work on IDs, faces, or bodies • The Register
Katyanna Quach:
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Google’s AI-powered Magic Editor will not work if you try to alter images of ID cards, receipts, human faces, or body parts.
The feature, now available in the Google Photos app on the latest Pixel 8 smartphones, uses generative AI to edit images. Users can do all sorts of things like removing unwanted objects, like people in the background, repositioning the focus of a photo, or changing its lighting.
But it won’t touch up everything you might want it to. The software has been designed to avoid editing documents that contain personally identifiable information, such as IDs or receipts, or the faces and body parts of humans, Android Authority reported. If you try to highlight any of these things to try and change in Google Photos, the app will likely show you an error message.
Google refers to its policy detailing what its generative AI technologies should and shouldn’t do. Changing IDs, for example, could allow people to impersonate others or create content for deceptive or fraudulent activities, like helping underage teenagers buy alcohol, for example. Whereas altering faces and body parts could be used to harm others, like creating non-consensual deepfakes or cyberbullying.
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I thought part of what it did was to alter faces in order to get the “best” picture, but perhaps that’s just picking from the ones that it captures in that moment. Anyway, very reminiscent of scanners refusing to scan dollar bills.
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Analysis: China’s emissions set to fall in 2024 after record growth in clean energy • Carbon Brief
Lauri Myllyvirta:
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China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are set to fall in 2024 and could be facing structural decline, due to record growth in the installation of new low-carbon energy sources.
The new analysis for Carbon Brief, based on official figures and commercial data, shows China’s CO2 emissions continuing to rebound from the nation’s “zero-Covid” period, rising by an estimated 4.7% year-on-year in the third quarter of 2023.
The strongest growth was in oil demand and other sectors that had been affected by pandemic policies, until the lifting of zero-Covid controls at the end of 2022.
Other key findings from the analysis include:
• China has been seeing a boom in manufacturing, which has offset a contraction in demand for carbon-intensive steel and cement due to the ongoing real-estate slump
• The emissions rebound in 2023 has been accompanied by record installations of low-carbon electricity generating capacity, particularly wind and solar
• Hydro generation is set to rebound from record lows due to drought in 2022-23
• China’s economic recovery from Covid has been muted. To date, it has not repeated previous rounds of major infrastructure expansion after economic shocks
• There has been a surge of investment in manufacturing capacity, particularly for low-carbon technologies, including solar, electric vehicles and batteries
• This is creating an increasingly important interest group in China, which could affect the country’s approach to domestic and international climate politics
• On the other hand, coal power capacity continues to expand, setting the scene for a showdown between the country’s traditional and newly emerging interest groups.«
You’re wondering about the mix of renewables? “All in all, 210GW of solar, 70GW of wind, 7GW hydro and 3GW of nuclear are expected to be added in China this year.” Notable how tiny nuclear is in this.
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Netflix and bill: the high price of a subscription lifestyle • Tim Harford
The economist strikes again:
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The subscription business model has expanded from traditional products, such as newspapers and gym memberships to software, streaming media, vegetable boxes, shaving kits, makeup, clothes and support for creative types via Patreon or Substack. We should all be asking ourselves, if so many people are paying not to go to the gym, what else are we paying not to do?
A new working paper from economists Liran Einav, Benjamin Klopack and Neale Mahoney attempts an answer. Using data from a credit and debit card provider, they examine what happens to subscriptions for 10 popular services when the card that is paying for them is replaced. At this moment, the service provider suddenly stops getting paid and must contact the customer to ask for updated payment details. You can guess what happens next: for many people, this request reminds them of a subscription they had stopped thinking about and immediately prompts them to cancel it. Relative to a typical month, cancellation rates soar in months when a payment card is replaced — from 2% to at least 8%.
Einav and his colleagues use this data to estimate how easily many people let stale subscriptions continue. Relative to a benchmark in which infallible subscribers instantly cancel once they decide they are no longer getting enough value, the researchers predict that subscribers will take many extra months — on average 20 — to get around to cancelling.
Don’t take the precise numbers too seriously — as with most social science, this is not a rigorously controlled experiment but an attempt to tease meaning out of noisy real-world data. What you should take seriously is the likelihood that you are swimming in barely noticed subscriptions, some of which you would choose to cancel if you were forced to pay attention to them for a few minutes. Perhaps you should. Come to think of it, perhaps *I* should.
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The working paper is worth a read; it notes that the “subscription economy” is reckoned to have quadrupled in size over the past decade.
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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 