Car parks in Britain that require parking apps will soon be given a unique number to identify them. But what system should be used to number them? You could help. CC-licensed photo by Elliott Brown on Flickr.

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It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

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A selection of 11 links for you. Which app? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

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Reflecting on 18 years at Google • Hixie’s Natural Log

Ian Hickson joined Google in 2005, just after the IPO:

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My team was nominally the open source team at Google, but I was entirely autonomous (for which I owe thanks to Chris DiBona). Most of my work was done on a laptop from random buildings on Google’s campus; entire years went by where I didn’t use my assigned desk.

In time, exceptions to Google’s cultural strengths developed. For example, as much as I enjoyed [ex-Microsoft] Vic Gundotra’s enthusiasm (and his initial vision for Google+, which again was quite well defined and, if not necessarily uniformly appreciated, at least unambiguous), I felt less confident in his ability to give clear answers when things were not going as well as hoped. He also started introducing silos to Google (e.g. locking down certain buildings to just the Google+ team), a distinct departure from the complete internal transparency of early Google.

Another example is the Android team (originally an acquisition), who never really fully acclimated to Google’s culture. Android’s work/life balance was unhealthy, the team was not as transparent as older parts of Google, and the team focused on chasing the competition more than solving real problems for users.

…Then Google had layoffs. The layoffs were an unforced error driven by a short-sighted drive to ensure the stock price would keep growing quarter-to-quarter, instead of following Google’s erstwhile strategy of prioritising long-term success even if that led to short-term losses (the very essence of “don’t be evil”). The effects of layoffs are insidious. Whereas before people might focus on the user, or at least their company, trusting that doing the right thing will eventually be rewarded even if it’s not strictly part of their assigned duties, after a layoff people can no longer trust that their company has their back, and they dramatically dial back any risk-taking.

…It’s definitely not too late to heal Google. It would require some shake-up at the top of the company, moving the centre of power from the CFO’s office back to someone with a clear long-term vision for how to use Google’s extensive resources to deliver value to users. …I do think the clock is ticking, though.

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An important parking infrastructure decision is about to be made – and I feel like us nerds can help make it right • Odds And Ends Of History

James O’Malley on plans afoot inside the Department of Transport, which aims to unify parking apps into a single system, but which then needs to uniquely identify every car park:

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So here’s the challenge: can you come up with the best way to structure and allocate car park numbers?

I’m told that there will be some key design constraints the final system will need to follow:

• It will need to be numbers only, so that less-tech savvy people can type the numbers on old-fashioned phone keypad when calling to pay for parking
• The largest local authorities have more than 1,000 car parks, but fewer than 10,000, so will need to work with those sorts of numbers in each council area
• Parking codes will be dished out to local authorities in blocks or groups

And for reference, the parking industry is currently kicking around a bunch of ideas that include:

• The numbers could encode some sort of geographic reference (like phone numbers with area codes, or how postcodes contain postal distract letters at the start)
• The system will eventually handle different types of parking (on-street and off-street), and different types of payments (eg, pay before, pay on exit, EV-charging), so some existing proposals include a way of identifying this from the numbers used
• There’s also also lots of complexity in how parking is managed in different places, so there’s some debate over whether codes should reflect geography or owners (eg, a council or a company like NCP).

…So what’s the best way to do it? How many digits should it have? Can you think of some really clever way to encode geography into the numbers? Could the numbers include anything else, like a ‘type’ marker for, eg, car parks at train stations? Is there a rational way to allocate numbers for thousands of car parks that have arisen organically? How would you do it?

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Seems like a challenge we can rise to! (Grammar note for James: “we nerds”, not “us nerds”.) My initial thought was to have both an “operator” and “geography” field. Trouble is, that could lead to pretty long numbers: there are sure to be more than 100 operators (ergo four-figure number) and perhaps 10,000 geographical regions. Already too long for poking into a smartphone on a cold wet Monday night.

So do something more like the mobile phone numbering system, which is also allocated in blocks, and manages to waste two digits (07) yet give everyone in the country a unique number. Sorted.

Let James know your solution in the comments of his post – else Those Who Matter won’t know.
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Congrats to Elon Musk: I didn’t think you had it in you to file a lawsuit this stupid. But, you crazy bastard, you did it! • Techdirt

Mike Masnick has some fun tearing apart Elon Musk’s “nuclear” lawsuit against Media Matters for pointing out that some big-name brands could find their ads placed alongside objectionable content on “exTwitter”, as Masnick calls it:

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Honestly, this feels like what you get when you have a rich but legally ignorant dude who announces on a Friday that there will be a lawsuit on Monday and finally finds some terrible lawyers who are actually willing to file something just to live up to that promise.

It’s not a good lawsuit. It’s barely even a lawsuit at all.

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And he takes it apart thoroughly. (Thanks Terry for the link.) As a followup, people are debunking Musk’s claims by sending him screenshots in real time on his site.
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About that OpenAI “breakthrough” • Marcus on AI

Gary Marcus on the Reuters story that OpenAI had a “breakthrough” with something called Q* which got the board a-flutter and worried:

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I have seen this movie before, often.

OpenAI could in fact have a breakthrough that fundamentally changes the world.

But “breakthroughs” rarely turn to be general to live up to initial rosy expectations. Often advances work in some contexts, not otherwise. Arguably every putative breakthrough in driverless cars has been of this sort; somebody finds something new, it looks good at first, maybe even helps a bit, but at the end of the day, “autonomous” cars still aren’t reliable enough for prime time; no breakthrough has gotten us over the threshhold. AV’s still aren’t general enough that you can just plop down a car that was tuned in pilot studies in Menlo Park, SF and Arizona and expect it to drive gracefully and safely in Sicily or Mumbai. We are probably still many “breakthroughs” away from true level 5 driverless cars.

Or consider what was touted at OpenAI as an extraordinary breakthrough in 2019, when they launched a slick video and blog post about how they’d gotten a robot to solve a Rubik’s cube.

To many, the result sounded amazing. VentureBeat gullibly reported OpenAI’s PR pitch wholesale; “OpenAI — the San Francisco-based AI research firm cofounded by Elon Musk and others, with backing from luminaries like LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and former Y Combinator president Sam Altman — says it’s on the cusp of solving something of a grand challenge in robotics and AI systems.”

Me being me, I called bullshit, slamming OpenAI on Twitter a few days later.

Probably the most relevant bullet point on the right (at least for present purposes) was the one about generalization; getting their algorithm to work for one object (which, cheesily, turned out to be a special Cube instrumented with sensors and LEDS, unlike a Rubik’s cube you’d buy in a store) in carefully controlled lab circumstances hardly guaranteed that the solution would work more broadly in the complex open-ended real world.

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Count him as a big sceptic on Q*, or at least a “show me first”.
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Sonos readies $400-plus headphones to rival Apple and Bose, plus a TV set-top box • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Mark Gurman:

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Sonos, best known for its smart speakers and sound bars, will make a long-awaited push into headphones with a model priced upwards of $400 that’s slated to be released as early as April, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company is also aiming to introduce a TV set-top box, which would compete with products from Apple and Roku, as early as the end of 2024, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t yet public. Sonos looks to charge between $150 and $200 for that device, which would run apps from popular streaming services.

The company is also developing new amplifiers and in-ceiling speakers aimed at professional installers, as well as a higher-end TV sound bar, new subwoofers, an update to the portable Roam speaker and a version of its Era 100 speaker for businesses. And it’s planning an updated voice control system, video service and upgraded smartphone app.

Sonos shares pared losses Tuesday on news of the product push. After falling nearly 4% earlier in the session, they were down 2% by the close in New York.

The new products are part of a bid by chief executive officer Patrick Spence to reignite growth at the audio technology company, which suffered a sales decline in the past year. Demand for smart speakers has cooled, and products like headphones are seen as an opportunity to leverage the Sonos brand to find a new moneymaker.

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To be honest, it’s surprising that Sonos has held off on doing headphones for so long; Gurman says these have been in development since 2019, but repeatedly revised. The full article is essentially the company’s complete product roadmap for the next couple of years, so you could pick and choose what you think will sell, and what will be profitable. Headphones? Yes. Set-top box? Perhaps, but can’t see any profit in it. High-end soundbar? Sure, always a market for that. And so on.
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Electric vehicle battery prices are falling faster than expected • Goldman Sachs

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It wasn’t long ago rising demand and component shortages sparked concern that “greenflation” would drive up prices for the batteries used in electric vehicles. That’s subsiding as prices cool for battery metals, which could help make EVs more competitive with traditional cars more quickly. 

Goldman Sachs Research now expects battery prices to fall to $99 per kilowatt hour (kWh) of storage capacity by 2025 — a 40% decrease from 2022 (the previous forecast was for a 33% decline). Our analysts estimate that almost half of the decline will come from declining prices of EV raw materials such as lithium, nickel, and cobalt. Battery pack prices are now expected to fall by an average of 11% per year from 2023 to 2030, writes Nikhil Bhandari, co-head of Goldman Sachs Research’s Asia-Pacific Natural Resources and Clean Energy Research, in the team’s report.

As battery prices fall, Goldman Sachs Research estimates the EV market could achieve cost parity, without subsidies, with internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles around the middle of this decade on a total-cost-of-ownership basis. 

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There’s also a graph showing EV sales as a percentage of passenger car sales around the world: China leads by a long way at just over 25%, the EU is at 15+%, global average about 12.5%, and the US lagging at about 7.5%.

It’s not as if China is smaller than the US, so why isn’t range anxiety and the usual noises about charging a factor in China? Sales are about 2.5m per month there, compared to about 1.3m in the US. Is it because Chinese buyers are often getting their first car?
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‘Squid Game: The Challenge’ players plan lawsuit over injury claims • Deadline

Jake Kanter:

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Squid Game: The Challenge contestants are threatening legal action against Netflix and producers after claiming they were injured during the filming of the game show.

A British personal injuries law firm is representing two unnamed players who say they suffered hypothermia and nerve damage while shooting in cold conditions in the UK.

Express Solicitors said in a press statement that it had sent letters of claim to Studio Lambert, the co-producer of Netflix’s Squid Game: The Challenge.

The contestants’ allegations concern their experience shooting the show’s opening game ‘Red Light, Green Light,’ in which players must evade the attention of a menacing robotic doll.

The game was filmed at Cardington Studios, a former Royal Air Force base in Bedford, during a cold snap in Britain. Netflix confirmed at the time that three of 456 players required medical attention.

Express Solicitors, which specializes in no win no fee claims, said its clients risked their health by having to stay motionless for long periods during the shoot as they attempted to stay in the competition.

Daniel Slade, CEO of Express Solicitors, said: “We recognise people may see this as a classic David and Goliath battle with the company and its production partners. Contestants thought they were taking part in something fun and those injured did not expect to suffer as they did. Now they have been left with injuries after spending time being stuck in painful stress positions in cold temperatures.”

A spokesperson for Squid Game: The Challenge said: “No lawsuit has been filed by any of the Squid Game contestants. We take the welfare of our contestants extremely seriously.”

Deadline reported in February that Squid Game: The Challenge faced an independent safety inspection after the medical incidents on set.

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As I recall from the original series, suffering from exposure would have been quite a good outcome after facing the “menacing robot doll”. I suspect that the Netflix release form will have covered this, as Netflix probably has the better lawyers. And did nobody watch Takeshi’s Castle? That was basically Squid Game but without the killing. Far more enjoyable.
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Twitter bets big on … CEO’s son • Semafor

Max Tani:

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Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X, formerly Twitter, has turned the service’s Hail Mary bet on an imagined $100m political advertising business over to someone she trusts: her son Matt Madrazo.

Despite owner Elon Musk’s attempts to convert the company into a subscription-based service, the company remains dependent on an advertising business that produced about 90% of its revenue in 2021. And in the initial months after he bought Twitter, Musk expressed a keen interest in restarting the social media company’s political advertising business, which it had voluntarily shuttered in 2019.

In recent weeks, Madrazo, who previously headed ad sales at the non-political, creator-focused media firm Studio71, has been privately introducing himself to influential figures in the political ad world in Washington, D.C. He’s part of what’s essentially a two-man operation to restart X’s political advertising business with the goal of capitalizing on the massive amounts of money that campaigns are about to spend during the 2024 elections.

According to three people with knowledge of the situation, Madrazo has been tasked with outreach to Republican digital advertising firms and spenders. Jonathan Phelps, a Pandora and Univision veteran who also joined X in recent months, is handling the platform’s (far less promising) outreach to Democrats. Working occasionally out of Tesla’s D.C. offices, the duo are hoping to resuscitate a line of cash at a moment when the company is desperate for new revenue.

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Which would be all well and dandy, except that in 2018, the last time Twitter ran political adverts, they brought in.. $3m. Out of $2.16 billion in revenue. How likely is it that that number will multiply 30-fold, even with a presidential election in the offing?
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The end of anonymity on Chinese social media • Rest of World

Caiwei Chen:

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On October 31, Weibo, as well as several other major Chinese social media platforms including WeChat, Douyin, Zhihu, Xiaohongshu, and Kuaishou, announced that they now required popular users’ legal names to be made visible to the public. Weibo stated in a public post that the new rule would first apply to all users with over 1 million followers, then to those with over 500,000.

Chinese social media users expressed criticism and concern over the new rule, with many saying it would violate user privacy, enable toxic online behaviors like doxxing and harassment, and limit the diversity of voices on the Chinese internet. Several famous online influencers, such as science blogger Ming Yu Zhui Ran, have decided to remove some of their followers to avoid making their identity public. Others, such as rapper Kindergarten Killer, have decided to delete their social media accounts altogether. (While Tu Pao Ding is still active on Weibo, her follower count was down to 219,700 at the time of publication.) 

When Cathy Zhang, a 33-year-old lifestyle blogger based in Shanghai, first saw a screenshot announcing Weibo’s new policy, she dismissed it as fake news. “It went against common sense, stripping away all anonymity from social media,” she told Rest of World. But the next day, she realized it was real: Weibo CEO Wang Gaofei’s profile now showed his real name and occupation, “mobile internet analyst.”

With a Weibo following of more than 35,000, Zhang has posted about wellness, and occasionally gender issues, on the platform for over 10 years, relying on her account to support herself financially. She has never posted her full name or identity online, which has partially shielded her from the hateful messages she often receives from online trolls. Although Zhang does not have enough followers to be affected by the new rule, she is worried. “I feel like I’ve just barely dodged a bullet,” she said.

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The amazing thing is that China tolerated anonymity on social media at all. Though maybe it’s public anonymity, not anonymity from the authorities, that’s ending. The latter was probably never there.
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Behind the scenes of Sam Altman’s showdown at OpenAI • WSJ

Keach Hagey, Deepa Seetharaman and Berber Jin:

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People familiar with the [now mostly fired OpenAI] board’s thinking said there wasn’t one incident that led to their decision to eject Altman, but a consistent, slow erosion of trust over time that made them increasingly uneasy. Also complicating matters were Altman’s mounting list of outside AI-related ventures, which raised questions for the board about how OpenAI’s technology or intellectual property could be used. 

The board agreed to discuss the matter with their counsel. After a few hours, they returned, still unwilling to provide specifics. They said that Altman wasn’t candid, and often got his way. The board said that Altman had been so deft they couldn’t even give a specific example, according to the people familiar with the executives. 

The executives requested written examples of the board’s allegations.

Meanwhile, Altman was on the phone with Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, saying he wanted to keep working on the technology. They gamed out ways to undo the day’s events, but also began to hash out a backup plan for Altman to bring a bunch of his top researchers and start a new division at the tech giant, according to people familiar with their conversation. 

Altman also told friends that he was thinking of starting a new company with Brockman and intended to hire away dozens of OpenAI employees. 

Altman blamed himself for not better managing the board, which he felt was taken over by people overly concerned with safety and influenced by “effective altruism”. 

The specter of effective altruism had loomed over the politics of the board and company in recent months, particularly after the movement’s most famous adherent, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, was found guilty of fraud in a highly public trial. 

…Friday, after being fired, Altman immediately flew back to San Francisco. On Saturday, his Russian Hill home became a war room filled with OpenAI employees, including Murati, then the interim CEO, and other members of the executive team, plotting his return to the company.

They began to use X in a coordinated fashion for their campaign.

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The board not quite being able to figure out what it was they objected to about Altman is the icing on the cake. The article is a little confusing in timeline (was Altman on the phone to Nadella on Friday, or Saturday?) but at its heart, this is about “effective altruism” (EA) v “effective acceleration” (e/acc): Altman’s from the latter tribe, wanting to zoom headlong into new technology, and figure out how to mop up the problems later.
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ExxonMobil vs. Google: profits and perceptions explained • OilPrice.com

Robert Rapier:

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Google’s net margin in Q3 was 22.5% (nearly double ExxonMobil’s) and its return on assets was 17.7% [v 11.1% for Exxon]. Google’s 2022 income bill was $11.4bn on net income of $60.0bn. Google shares trade at a price-to-earnings ratio (P/E ratio) of 20.5 based on earnings estimates for the next 12 months — nearly twice that of ExxonMobil.

So, Google makes more money on lower revenues and pays a lower overall tax rate than ExxonMobil. It has a net margin that is nearly double ExxonMobil’s. So why do people rage over ExxonMobil’s profits, but say absolutely nothing about Google’s?

The main reason is that we can see the direct impact of gasoline prices on our pocketbook, and we can’t really see how Google is impacting us. Thus, we feel like ExxonMobil is taking advantage, but we don’t feel the same way about Google.

Nevertheless, it should raise questions about what is an appropriate profit in a capitalistic society. Sure, Google and ExxonMobil are very different types of companies, but can you say what ExxonMobil’s profit margin should be? If I gave you ExxonMobil’s profit numbers, but told you it was for Starbucks or Apple or Nike, would you complain that it’s too much?

The reality is that the energy industry consistently ranks at or near the bottom of all sectors when it comes to profit margins. If you really think ExxonMobil is making too much money, then perhaps you could explain how much would be an “acceptable” amount, how you made that determination, and whether you apply that same standard to other corporations. And of course, you can always choose not to consume the company’s products and contribute to that profit.

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Rapier contrasts Exxon’s profit, where he suggests it has no power over pricing (of oil – though OPEC’s cartel does control about 40% of crude oil production and price), with Google’s, where he suggests it does.
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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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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified