The fast food chain Wendy’s told analysts it was going to try out surge pricing – and then backtracked following social media reaction. CC-licensed photo by Mike Mozart on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. For the right price. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Apple cancels its electric car project • NPR

Bobby Allyn:

»

Apple has ended its secret plans of building a self-driving electric car, a decade-long effort that was seen as one of the most ambitious undertakings in the company’s history.

Apple executives on Tuesday informed teams working on the tech giant’s vehicle, called Project Titan internally, that hundreds of employees who worked on the car will be shifted to divisions working on artificial intelligence, according to multiple reports.

The push at Apple to build an autonomous vehicle is estimated to have cost the company billions of dollars, with around 2,000 employees working on the endeavor.

While some Apple employees are being moved to work on AI products, many others are expected to be laid off, though the exact number of workers affected remains unclear.

…The prospect of Apple, one of richest companies in the world, releasing an Apple-branded car had the potential to transform the auto industry and was being closely watched by auto executives and Apple diehards alike.

Despite the anticipation, analysts said Apple was still many years away from ever releasing its own car. Engineers at the company have for years been testing Apple car technology on public roads.

At one point, Apple was attempting to build a car without a steering wheel or pedals. But it abandoned the idea, since it was not possible with current technology, Bloomberg reported in late 2022.

«

So now it’s going to be broken up for parts – John Gruber suggests, and I think he’s right, that when Kevin Lynch (who’s in charge of the Apple Watch) took over the project in late 2021 it was to figure out which its could be reused elsewhere. The project’s been dying a long time.
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Sam Bankman-Fried asks court to reduce prison time to six years in fraud conviction • Coindesk

Amitoj Singh and Nikhilesh De:

»

Former FTX boss Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), found guilty of fraud last year and due to be sentenced next month, has asked the court for a “just” sentence of 63 to 78 months, according to a court filing submitted Tuesday.

Bankman-Fried’s lawyers objected to the Presentence Investigation Report (PSR), which recommends a sentence of 100 years in prison, calling it “grotesque.” Bankman-Fried was convicted on seven charges of fraud and conspiracy last November after a month-long trial probing the 2022 collapse of FTX.

“Sam is a 31-year-old, first-time, non-violent offender, who was joined in the conduct at issue by at least four other culpable individuals, in a matter where victims are poised to recover—were always poised to recover—a hundred cents on the dollar,” said the filing, which was signed by Bankman-Fried’s new attorneys Marc Mukasey and Torrey Young.

The lawyers argue that “an appropriate method of arriving at a just sentence” would be to consider an adjusted offense level based on “zero loss,” which would lead to “an advisory Guidelines range of 63-78 months.” The filing heavily draws on how “the harm to customers, lenders, and investors is zero” because the FTX bankruptcy estate has stated it expects to fully repay its customers.

«

I wasn’t aware that FTX had magically found all the billions that it funnelled away. Anyway, nice to get a low bid in, Mr SBF.
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Why electric bikes actually give more exercise than pedal bikes • Electrek

Micah Toll:

»

Believe it or not, electric bikes offer more exercise than pedal bikes on average. That fact might sound strange (and has been known to let the steam out of some fitness riders’ lycra outfits), but the science is clear. Now let’s talk about the “how” and “why”.

Study after study has shown that people who ride e-bikes get more exercise than those who ride pedal bikes. That finding grinds the gears of traditional cyclists who seem to hold an “us vs them” attitude in cycling, but it’s a result that has been repeatedly demonstrated across many different countries and cultures.

When you actually break down the reasons for that surprising finding though, it actually makes a lot of sense.

Electric bikes, which include a motor and battery to assist the rider, tend to rack up more miles.
On average, studies have found that e-bike riders typically ride for longer periods of time than pedal bike riders. Not only do they log more hours, but they log a lot more miles, too. Even though they’re getting some pedal assist, they’re still doing a lot of pedaling – and in fact a lot more.

A major contributing factor comes down to the fact that the electric motor takes some of the pain out of the harder parts of cycling, namely hill climbs and tough starts.

Researchers have discovered that when riders find it less grueling, they tend to go on longer rides. A 2019 study of over 10,000 adults across seven countries found that the Metabolic Equivalent Task minutes per week was measurably higher for electric bike riders than for pedal bike riders.

Another reason for those longer rides comes down to the perceived enjoyment of e-bikes over pedal bikes. Researchers have consistently found that e-bike riders tend to report that riding an electric bike is more enjoyable. When the activity is more fun, it leads to more time spent participating in the activity.

«

This is very counterintuitive (to me). It also suggests that there must be a perfect balance of “help” from the electric part against the mechanical work the human has to put in; at one end, no help, at the other, no pedalling. Where’s the sweet spot?
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The economics of skiing in America • The Economist

»

In basic economic theory, excessive market power reduces the efficiency of an industry. Firms reduce output so as to be able to charge more. There is, however, an exception: if a monopolistic firm can charge different prices to different customers, it need not reduce output to increase its profit.

The skiing industry shows the truth of this. As the industry has consolidated, daily prices have soared, extracting more cash from price-insensitive skiers. But if you buy a season pass early, or one or your friends does, you can get a ticket for a lot less, and so the slopes are still busy. Last year 65m people visited American resorts, the largest number ever, according to the National Ski Areas Association, an industry group. Vail’s revenue increased by 14%. Season passes now make up 61% of the firm’s lift-ticket revenue.

Yet the transformation is not entirely popular. As the number of people with passes grew, “locals started losing their shit at all of these people coming into town,” says Mr Winchester. On a t-Bar drag lift at Breckenridge [in Colorado], Vince, a paramedic who has been skiing there since the 1980s, says that Vail “is the evil empire”. With far more people skiing, the lift queues have grown, especially on the best snow days. A skiing culture that catered to locals has changed into a mass business. Real estate has soared in value—and with it property taxes. Vince says he had to sell his house and move farther away. Getting back to ski is tougher. Traffic jams snake up the mountain, and parking is no longer free.

Vail may soon hit the limits of its ability to squeeze more skiers onto the slopes. Although lift passes can be had cheaply, the cost of accommodation has soared. Last year the firm raised its minimum wage to $20 per hour, but staff shortages remain a problem—in towns where houses now cost millions, that doesn’t go very far. On the biggest days, the firm has had to resort to rationing—limiting the number of lift tickets available, and drastically raising the cost of things like parking, so as to stop the crowds.

«

Meanwhile in Europe a number of the lower-lying ski resorts this year have simply been unable to offer skiing: it’s been too warm even for the artificial snow-makers. The Vail monopoly might soon have to reckon with the climate.
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China’s EVs are going to hit Detroit like a wrecking ball • The New York Times

Robinson Meyer:

»

It happened very quickly, so fast that you might not have noticed it. Over the past few months, America’s Big Three automakers — Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, the oddly named company that owns Dodge, Chrysler and Jeep — landed in big trouble.

I realize this may sound silly. Ford, General Motors and Stellantis made billions in profit last year, even after a long strike by autoworkers, and all three companies are forecasting a big 2024. But recently, the Big Three found themselves outmaneuvered and missing their goals for electric vehicle sales at the same time that a crop of new affordable, electrified foreign cars appeared, ready to flood the global market.

About a decade ago, America bailed out the Big Three and swore it wouldn’t do that again. But the federal government is going to have to help the Big Three and the rest of the U.S. car market again very soon. And it has to do it in the right way — now — to avoid the next auto bailout.

The biggest threat to the Big Three comes from a new crop of Chinese automakers, especially BYD, which specialize in producing plug-in hybrid and fully electric vehicles. BYD’s growth is astounding: It sold three million electrified vehicles last year, more than any other company, and it now has enough production capacity in China to manufacture four million cars a year. But that isn’t enough: It’s building factories in Brazil, Thailand, Hungary and Uzbekistan, to produce even more cars, and it may soon add Indonesia and Mexico to that list. A deluge of electric vehicles is coming.

BYD’s cars deliver great value at prices that beat anything coming out of the West. This month BYD unveiled a plug-in hybrid that gets decent all-electric range and will retail for just over $11,000. How can it do that? Like other Chinese manufacturers, BYD benefits from its home country’s lower labor costs, but this explains only some of its success. The fact is that BYD and other Chinese automakers like Geely, which owns Volvo Cars and Polestar brands, are very good at making cars.

«

There’s a narrative that EV sales are slowing and that people don’t see the point in them. But the fact is they’re very cheap to run: almost zero maintenance and electricity isn’t expensive.
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OpenAI accuses NYT of hacking ChatGPT to set up copyright suit • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

In a court filing Monday, OpenAI alleged that “100 examples in which some version of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model supposedly generated several paragraphs of Times content as outputs in response to user prompts” do not reflect how normal people use ChatGPT.

Instead, it allegedly took The Times “tens of thousands of attempts to generate” these supposedly “highly anomalous results” by “targeting and exploiting a bug” that OpenAI claims it is now “committed to addressing.”

According to OpenAI this activity amounts to “contrived attacks” by a “hired gun”—who allegedly hacked OpenAI models until they hallucinated fake NYT content or regurgitated training data to replicate NYT articles. NYT allegedly paid for these “attacks” to gather evidence to support The Times’ claims that OpenAI’s products imperil its journalism by allegedly regurgitating reporting and stealing The Times’ audiences.

“Contrary to the allegations in the complaint, however, ChatGPT is not in any way a substitute for a subscription to The New York Times,” OpenAI argued in a motion that seeks to dismiss the majority of The Times’ claims. “In the real world, people do not use ChatGPT or any other OpenAI product for that purpose. Nor could they. In the ordinary course, one cannot use ChatGPT to serve up Times articles at will.”

In the filing, OpenAI described The Times as enthusiastically reporting on its chatbot developments for years without raising any concerns about copyright infringement. OpenAI claimed that it disclosed that The Times’ articles were used to train its AI models in 2020, but The Times only cared after ChatGPT’s popularity exploded after its debut in 2022.

«

Worst of friends, or possibly best of enemies, until they get around to settling out of court. (My prediction.)
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Wendy’s hints at possible ‘surge-pricing’ menu, then backtracks • The Hill

»

Earlier this week, widespread media reports relayed that fast food giant Wendy’s may adopt a “surge-pricing” model similar to that of ride-sharing companies, based on hints during an earnings call last week. That announcement was met with widespread criticism on social media. On February 27, Wendy’s released a new statement saying they would not raise prices dynamically.

During a Feb. 15 investor call, CEO Kirk Tanner said the company plans to spend about $20m to roll out digital menu boards to all restaurants by the end of 2025. “We will begin testing more enhanced features like dynamic pricing and daypart offering, along with AI-enabled menu changes and suggestive selling,” Tanner said in the earnings call.

But in the Feb. 27 statement, Wendy’s said: “We said these menuboards would give us more flexibility to change the display of featured items. This was misconstrued in some media reports as an intent to raise prices when demand is highest at our restaurants. We have no plans to do that and would not raise prices when our customers are visiting us most.”

Wendy’s added, “Any features we may test in the future would be designed to benefit our customers and restaurant crew members.

«

So yes, Wendy’s was actually planning to introduce dynamic pricing, ran into an absolute media storm, and hit ^W^W^W^W.
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How a small Iowa newspaper’s website became an AI-generated clickbait factory • WIRED

Condé Nast:

»

In his spare time, Tony Eastin likes to dabble in the stock market. One day last year, he Googled a pharmaceutical company that seemed like a promising investment. One of the first search results Google served up on its news tab was listed as coming from the Clayton County Register, a newspaper in northeastern Iowa. He clicked, and read. The story was garbled and devoid of useful information—and so were all the other finance-themed posts filling the site, which had absolutely nothing to do with northeastern Iowa. “I knew right away there was something off,” he says. There’s plenty of junk on the internet, but this struck Eastin as strange: Why would a small Midwestern paper churn out crappy blog posts about retail investing?

Eastin was primed to find online mysteries irresistible. After years in the US Air Force working on psychological warfare campaigns he had joined Meta, where he investigated nastiness ranging from child abuse to political influence operations. Now he was between jobs, and welcomed a new mission. So Eastin reached out to Sandeep Abraham, a friend and former Meta colleague who previously worked in Army intelligence and for the National Security Agency, and suggested they start digging.

What the pair uncovered provides a snapshot of how generative AI is enabling deceptive new online business models. Networks of websites crammed with AI-generated clickbait are being built by preying on the reputations of established media outlets and brands. These outlets prosper by confusing and misleading audiences and advertisers alike, “domain squatting” on URLs that once belonged to more reputable organizations. The scuzzy site Eastin was referred to no longer belonged to the newspaper whose name it still traded in the name of.

«

There’s a telling quote from Emerson Brooking, at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab: “This report feels like it is an accurate snapshot of how AI is actually changing our society so far—making everything a little bit more annoying.”
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Google CEO Sundar Pichai calls AI tool’s responses ‘completely unacceptable’ • Semafor

Reed Albergotti got hold of the memo that Pichai sent out to all staff, and it begins like this:

»

I want to address the recent issues with problematic text and image responses in the Gemini app (formerly Bard). I know that some of its responses have offended our users and shown bias – to be clear, that’s completely unacceptable and we got it wrong.

Our teams have been working around the clock to address these issues. We’re already seeing a substantial improvement on a wide range of prompts. No AI is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry’s development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes. And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale.

Our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful is sacrosanct. We’ve always sought to give users helpful, accurate, and unbiased information in our products. That’s why people trust them. This has to be our approach for all our products, including our emerging AI products.

We’ll be driving a clear set of actions, including structural changes, updated product guidelines, improved launch processes, robust evals and red-teaming, and technical recommendations. We are looking across all of this and will make the necessary changes.

Even as we learn from what went wrong here, we should also build on the product and technical announcements we’ve made in AI over the last several weeks.

«

Somehow this reminds me of Rishi Sunak floundering as he tries to come up with a form of words to excuse one of his MPs’ wilder spoutings. The memo doesn’t get to the heart of the problem, which is that even though loads of people tried this out, none of them stuck their hand up and said it was wrong. Google’s internal culture has withered if such a high-profile product can get through QA with such obvious problems. And that says bad things about all the other Google products, existing and future.

Pichai might need to face the awful truth: the CEO sets the culture.
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Lapse, the app turning your phone into an old-school camera, snaps up $30m • TechCrunch

Ingrid Lunden:

»

It can cost a fortune in 2024 to find an analogue camera, buy film (and maybe special batteries) for it and take pictures that then need to be paid for to be developed. Yet the experience had a charm and a simplicity to it. For those longing for those old days, a startup called Lapse has been giving smartphone users an alternative — you take pictures that you have to wait to see “developed,” with no chance of editing and retaking, before sharing them with a select group of friends if you choose.

Lapse has been been gaining some traction in the market — claiming millions of users, 100 million photos captured each month and a coveted, consistent top-10 ranking in the U.S. app store for photographic apps. Now it’s announcing a new round of funding of $30m to take its ambitions to the next level.

Greylock — the storied consumer app investor that was an early backer of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok (when it was Musical.ly) and LinkedIn — co-led the round with the equally iconic DST Global Partners. Previous backers GV, Octopus Ventures and Speedinvest also participated. Following on from a previous $12.4m raised in seed and pre-seed funding back in 2021, this brings the total to just over $42m and a valuation of around $150m, according to sources.

«

Oh well, that’s $40m or so that they won’t see back. But the principle, of “slow things that are make you consider what you’re doing”, fits in with vinyl records and the “music restricted to floppy disks” story yesterday.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk is opposing salmon farming in her homeland. Will she win? CC-licensed photo by Daniele Dalledonne on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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

Vending machine error reveals secret face image database of college students • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Canada-based University of Waterloo is racing to remove M&M-branded smart vending machines from campus after outraged students discovered the machines were covertly collecting facial-recognition data without their consent.

The scandal started when a student using the alias SquidKid47 posted an image on Reddit showing a campus vending machine error message, “Invenda.Vending.FacialRecognitionApp.exe,” displayed after the machine failed to launch a facial recognition application that nobody expected to be part of the process of using a vending machine.

“Hey, so why do the stupid M&M machines have facial recognition?” SquidKid47 pondered.

The Reddit post sparked an investigation from a fourth-year student named River Stanley, who was writing for a university publication called MathNEWS. Stanley sounded the alarm after consulting Invenda sales brochures that promised “the machines are capable of sending estimated ages and genders” of every person who used the machines—without ever requesting their consent.

This frustrated Stanley, who discovered that Canada’s privacy commissioner had years ago investigated a shopping mall operator called Cadillac Fairview after discovering some of the malls’ informational kiosks were secretly “using facial recognition software on unsuspecting patrons.”

Only because of that official investigation did Canadians learn that “over 5 million nonconsenting Canadians” were scanned into Cadillac Fairview’s database, Stanley reported. Where Cadillac Fairview was ultimately forced to delete the entire database, Stanley wrote that consequences for collecting similarly sensitive facial recognition data without consent for Invenda clients like Mars remain unclear. Stanley’s report ended with a call for students to demand that the university “bar facial recognition vending machines from campus.”

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Good to see that university students, at least, are capable of some investigative journalism.
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What happened with Gemini image generation • Google blog

Prabhakar Raghavan is a senior vice-president at Google:

»

The Gemini conversational app is a specific product that is separate from Search, our underlying AI models, and our other products. Its image generation feature was built on top of an AI model called Imagen 2.

When we built this feature in Gemini, we tuned it to ensure it doesn’t fall into some of the traps we’ve seen in the past with image generation technology — such as creating violent or sexually explicit images, or depictions of real people. And because our users come from all over the world, we want it to work well for everyone. If you ask for a picture of football players, or someone walking a dog, you may want to receive a range of people. You probably don’t just want to only receive images of people of just one type of ethnicity (or any other characteristic).

However, if you prompt Gemini for images of a specific type of person — such as “a Black teacher in a classroom,” or “a white veterinarian with a dog” — or people in particular cultural or historical contexts, you should absolutely get a response that accurately reflects what you ask for.

So what went wrong? In short, two things. First, our tuning to ensure that Gemini showed a range of people failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range. And second, over time, the model became way more cautious than we intended and refused to answer certain prompts entirely — wrongly interpreting some very anodyne prompts as sensitive.

These two things led the model to overcompensate in some cases, and be over-conservative in others, leading to images that were embarrassing and wrong.

«

There is a lot of discussion externally about this: not just one but multiple people inside Google, at multiple levels, must have seen these flaws before Gemini was made public. But they didn’t speak up. Why not? Obviously: culture. The culture inside Google must militate against speaking up. It’s the danger of big corporations: they become more interested on their internal politics than their external customers and users.
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US judge halts government effort to monitor crypto mining energy use • The Guardian

Oliver Milman:

»

The US government has suspended its effort to survey cryptocurrency mining operations over their ballooning energy use following a lawsuit from an industry that has been accused by environmental groups of fueling the climate crisis.

A federal judge in Texas has granted a temporary order blocking the new requirements that would ascertain the energy use of the crypto miners, stating that the industry had shown it would suffer “irreparable injury” if it was made to comply.

The US Department of Energy had launched an “emergency” initiative last month aimed at surveying the energy use of mining operations…

…The federal government has said it needs better information about major miners’ power use, but estimates that up to 2.3% of the US’s total electricity demand last year came from just 137 mining facilities. Globally, crypto miners are thought to soak up as much as 1% of all electricity demand, which is the same as the entire country of Australia, with bitcoin mining’s energy use doubling just last year.

This new thirst for electricity risks worsening the climate crisis, campaigners say. In the US, where nearly four in 10 of all bitcoin are now mined, up to 50m tons of carbon dioxide is released each year due to the mining operations, according to RMI, a clean energy thinktank.

The rise of crypto mining has also placed a strain upon certain electricity grids. Last year it emerged that authorities in Texas paid a bitcoin enterprise called Riot more than $31m in energy credits to voluntarily lower its electricity usage during a heatwave that caused a spike in power demand from the public.

«

I find the judge’s order puzzling: the bitcoin mining companies would suffer “irreparable harm”?
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How 93.4% of all shop transactions are now contactless • This is Money

Helen Kirrane:

»

More over-65s than ever before are using contactless for payments, data suggests.

Today, 80% of 85 to 95-year-olds pay with contactless, a new report from Barclays shows. 

For the third year in a row, the fastest growth for contactless usage was among the over 65s.

A record 93.4% of all in-store card transactions up to £100 were made with ‘touch and pay’ in 2023, cementing it as the UK’s most popular payment method.

Customers are spending more on average too, the report shows.  The average spend per customer last year, was £3,623 – up 8.9% annually as customers bought more expensive items more frequently. The average purchase cost £15.69 – up 3.8% on last year.

When it comes to payments over £100, chip and pin is the preferred way of paying across all age demographics, followed by cash. Younger customers prefer to use mobile payments, with a quarter of 18-34-year-olds preferring to use their phone. 

Mobile payments do not have an upper limit for contactless through two-factor authentication.

By contrast, just 3% of over-75s prefer a mobile payment over using a physical card. 

Some younger shoppers now choose not to bring their card at all when leaving the house. More than one in five of those aged 18-34 regularly leave their wallet behind when out shopping in favour of paying with their smartphone.

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Contactless payments started in the UK in 2007. A tiny number of shops are trying a retrograde action to back cash, but bank closures also makes it harder for them to deposit cash at the end of the day. This looks like a one-way track.
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Shouldn’t broadband mapping data belong to the public? • POTs and PANs

Doug Dawson:

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My biggest current pet peeve about the FCC [US Federal Communications Commission] mapping is that the agency made the decision to give power over the mapping and map challenge process to CostQuest, an outside commercial vendor.

The FCC originally awarded CostQuest $44.9m to create the broadband maps. Everybody I know who works with mapping thinks this is an exorbitant amount, but if this was the end of the mapping story, then congratulations to CostQuest for landing a lucrative federal contract – lots of other companies have made hay doing so over the years.

Unfortunately, this is only the beginning of the mapping story because the FCC gave CostQuest the ability to own the rights to the mapping fabric, which is the database that shows the location of every home and business in the country that is a potential broadband customer. This is a big deal because it means that CostQuest, a private company, controls the portal for data needed by the public to understand who has or doesn’t have broadband.

A case in point is that soon after CostQuest created the first FCC map, the company was hired by the NTIA to provide the databases and maps for the BEAD grant process for a price tag of $49.9m – more than the FCC paid to create the maps. CostQuest will also sell access to the mapping fabric to others for a fee. I have to imagine that the FCC is also paying CostQuest a big fee twice a year to update the FCC maps and to process map challenges.

I’m just flabbergasted that there is a private company that holds the reins to the database of broadband availability and which only makes it available for a fee. I can’t think of even one reason why the database created by CostQuest is not openly available to everybody.

«

In a way, it’s almost comforting that the US can screw this up in just the same way as the UK can – lots of data that the UK public pays to get collected then isn’t available. But as Dawson points out, that doesn’t make it right.
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Björk targets Icelandic salmon farms • Happy Eco News

Grant Brown:

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Internationally revered Icelandic songstress Björk has riled her homeland once again by leveraging star activist power against a burgeoning national industry – fish farming. Already fueling growing export markets across Europe and North America, Icelandic aquaculture has recently set sights on quintupling salmon production over five years through open-ocean cages seeded near fjords and sheltering bays. But Björk and over 100,000 citizens demand that these coastal encampments of penned fish be purged from Iceland’s precious seascape and wildlife sanctuaries.

While not her first foray opposing government policies, the avant-pop virtuoso’s latest salvo represents an escalation in homegrown dissent spanning directly from her idyllic doorstep to a signature export sector. Yet familiar dynamics recur as officials endeavor to persuade the singer that economic realities preclude simply abandoning an industry heavily promoted by large offshore companies. Still, Björk holds fast, asserting aquaculture will only irreparably stain the aquatic ecosystems underpinning Icelandic heritage and global artistic inspiration she’s cultivated over decades.

…The musical icon acknowledges salmon aquaculture’s significance for numerous citizens across Iceland yet maintains environmental justice calls for abolishing rather than regulating an intrinsically polluting industry. She invokes the precautionary principle’s rationale that cessation must prevail over scaling an irreversible threat without scientific certainty around severely harmful impacts from fish pens.

Having newly emerged with fragile stability after financial crashes, Björk suggests Iceland embrace this pivotal moment to redefine resilient futures around what communities value most beyond economic metrics

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The story’s almost worth reading just for the hyperbolic descriptions of Björk: “internationally revered Icelandic songstress”, “avant-pop virtuoso” and so on. Not “car alarm imitator” or “former swan-outfitted“? Pity. Though I’m fairly sure she hasn’t newly emerged with fragile stability after financial crashes – that better describes Iceland.
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I went to a rave with the 46-year-old millionaire who claims to have the body of a teenager • The Atlantic

Matteo Wong:

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His origin story follows a familiar arc: Johnson enjoyed massive success in work, found that his soul was crushed as a consequence, and experienced a kind of epiphany in response. He had founded an online-payment company called Braintree that was eventually acquired by PayPal for $800m. Meanwhile, Johnson has said, he struggled with depression, left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and soothed himself with late-night binge eating. A few years ago, he grew tired of being miserable in and feeling powerless over his body. So he ceded control of it: Just as he imagines that AI will one day run the planet, a much simpler algorithm now runs his body.

Every decision about his health is made by specialized software and a team of 30 medical specialists who monitor and analyze data about his organs. In addition to rising around 4:30 a.m. and going to bed at 8:30 p.m., getting plenty of intense exercise, and taking dozens of supplements throughout the day, Johnson has gotten experimental blood-plasma transfusions from his teenage son, bone-marrow transplants, and gene therapy. He claims that this anti-aging protocol, called Blueprint, has slowed his overall pace of aging by 31 years, put his cardiovascular capacity among the top 1.5% of 18-year-olds, and delivered nighttime erections that are frequent enough to rival a teenager’s. (He tracks them through a wearable device called the Adam Sensor while he sleeps.)

Over the past year, Johnson has refashioned himself from a hopeful immortal into a kind of messiah. On social media, he compares himself favourably to Jesus, reasoning that his algorithmically sanctioned, lentil-and-macadamia-nut-heavy diet beats refined carbohydrates and wine.

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Definitely TMI in there. Also tempted to make the joke about how he’d better hope the police don’t find the teenager’s body. And, finally, Jesus was doing fairly well until a demise mediated by politics, so a critique on dietary terms doesn’t seem justified.
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Twitter (X) use predicts substantial changes in well-being, polarization, sense of belonging, and outrage • Communications Psychology

Victoria Oldemburgo de Mello, Felix Cheung and Michael Inzlicht:

»

In public debate, Twitter (now X) is often said to cause detrimental effects on users and society. Here we address this research question by querying 252 participants from a representative sample of U.S. Twitter users 5 times per day over 7 days (6,218 observations). Results revealed that Twitter use is related to decreases in well-being, and increases in political polarization, outrage, and sense of belonging over the course of the following 30 minutes.

Effect sizes were comparable to the effect of social interactions on well-being. These effects remained consistent even when accounting for demographic and personality traits. Different inferred uses of Twitter were linked to different outcomes: passive usage was associated with lower well-being, social usage with a higher sense of belonging, and information-seeking usage with increased outrage and most effects were driven by within-person changes.

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The authors are all at the University of Toronto. Which of the three categories (passive, social or information-seeking) do we think Elon Musk belongs to?

(Incidentally a great confirmation for my hypothesis in Social Warming, though the finding about “social usage” is unexpected.)
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A psychiatrist tried to quit gambling. Betting apps kept her hooked • WSJ

Katherine Sayre:

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Kavita Fischer couldn’t believe her luck.

She started with $750 and hit a hot streak last summer that stretched over six days. She played round after round of online casino games until her winnings hit $500,000. The windfall would make up for every bad bet and pay off all she owed.

Fischer, a 41-year-old mental-health professional and suburban homeowner with two boys, was by then in debt by six figures from online gambling losses. For nearly a year, she lost again and again, complaining to at least one gambling company that she had a problem but couldn’t stop. As a psychiatrist familiar with human impulses and addiction, Fischer knew better than most what she needed to do.

Yet she was up against an industry skilled in the art of leveraging data analytics and human behavior to keep customers betting. Gambling companies tracked the ups and downs of Fischer’s betting behavior and gave bonus credits to keep her playing. VIP customer representatives offered encouragement and gifts.

After her six-day hot streak, Fischer made several requests to start withdrawing the half-million dollars from the PointsBet gambling app. But she kept changing her mind and plowed the money back into play.

Within a day, she lost nearly all of it. “There’s nothing in your brain that says, ‘OK, stop now, you’re done. You’ve won your money back, you can put this behind you,’” Fischer said. “There was just something in my brain that made me keep going.”

…Casinos have always wooed their high-rollers with special treatment, but online-betting has intensified industry tactics. Companies closely track betting habits 24 hours a day, collecting such data as how much time each customer spends on an app, how much money they gamble, what kind of bets they place and how much they lose.

With a real-time view of a customer’s gambling activity, VIP hosts [who contact online gamblers directly from the company] keep in close touch. They can track when customers last used the app and offer credits and other incentives to persuade their most-valued gamblers—by definition, the biggest losers—to return. Payment options give gamblers immediate access to funds that some can’t cover.

Gamblers are assigned VIP hosts based on how much they are wagering. The personal attention pays off. At PointsBet—acquired in 2023 by Fanatics, a sports-merchandise company—VIP sports bettors representing 0.5% of the customer base generated more than 70% of the company’s revenue in 2019 and 2020, according to internal company documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

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Classic whale arithmetic. I’ve never understood the attraction of gambling. The future is uncertain; why would you think putting money on one outcome over another will change that fact?
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Flop rock: inside the underground floppy disk music scene • The Verge

Alexis Ong:

»

The first computery thing I do in the year 2024 is nudge a 3.5-inch floppy disk into a USB floppy drive that I bought from an online merchant working out of Singapore’s onetime hotbed of ’90s computer piracy. I’m briefly startled by the drive’s low mechanical whirring — a warm, ambient background score that instantly transports me back to my childhood. Some of my first painfully preteen journals were hidden poorly on nondescript floppies just like this one. I click on the disk’s sole file, an MP3 titled “Inability to Perform Social Activities Is Considered Inferior,” and Yasuyuki Uesugi’s growling wall of experimental noise rolls through my apartment like a rogue wave at the beach. The track is one minute, 27 seconds long, and at 1.33MB, it almost hits the diskette’s limit of 1.44MB. 

Next up is a split release by two artists — Pregnant Lloyd and Team Phosphenes — then another filled with a mix of short experimental tracks. These small treasures have all come from a floppy-only net label called Floppy Kick, a one-man operation run by Mark Windisch in Debrecen, Hungary. Each disk is numbered as part of a limited run. My copy of “Inability to Perform Social Activities Is Considered Inferior” is the third of five, which makes sense since there’s a finite number of floppies being circulated around the world. 

Floppy disk music arguably peaked in the 2010s, but in the 2020s, it’s still going strong; Discogs.com shows a healthy 500-plus floppy releases in the 2020 category, which is more than the documented number of floppy music releases in the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s altogether. Perhaps it’s because we’ve moved a little closer to their impending extinction. Or maybe they’re perfect reminders of how violently smashing bytes together on a thin, vulnerable plastic / magnet sandwich is still one of the most punk things you can do as a musician and artist. 

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Obviously, the difficulty obtaining and playing this music is part of the attraction; the limits on disk space and consequent constriction on song length all add to it. Plus the attraction of having something that’s physically limited in number. It’s one of the peculiarities of creativity: reducing freedoms can inspire something you wouldn’t think of to reach a solution. Less space means more invention.
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Riders in the smog • Rest of World

Zuha Siddiqui, Samriddhi Sakunia and Faisal Mahmud:

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[Sami] Iqbal is a self-employed gig worker who works across multiple ride-hailing apps, including Careem, Bykea, and inDrive. As he set off for his first job that day, the city was covered in a thick, poisonous smog. He drove through visible specks of reddish dust and other particulate matter, breathing through his muffler and trying to ignore the metallic, almost sulfurous stench permeating his nostrils.

“I’ve been ill for a week,” Iqbal told Rest of World, his voice hoarse. “It’s probably because of the smog. I’m on the road for so long.”

Lahore is the most polluted city in the world, according to Swiss air quality monitoring platform IQAir. In November, the air was so poisonous that authorities issued a citywide lockdown, closing schools, markets, and parks for four days, and advising people to stay indoors.

Other cities in South Asia have similarly alarming levels of air quality: Eight out of the top 10 most polluted cities globally are in the region. Causes include rapid urbanization, construction, vehicular pollution, coal-fueled power plants, crop burning, and the operation of brick kilns. Air quality in the region is at its worst from October to February due to atmospheric conditions which cause pollutants to be trapped closer to the ground.

Exposure to this pollution can have serious health impacts — from headaches and breathing difficulties to heart and lung disease, stroke, and cancer. For gig workers, who often have no choice but to work in the smog, the effects are clear. By the end of a day’s work, Iqbal said, his whole body feels lifeless. “I also experience exhaustion, I get a lot of headaches. I get body aches,” he said.

Rest of World spoke to 25 gig workers in Lahore, New Delhi, and Dhaka, all of whom reported symptoms that health experts believe are the consequence of routine exposure to carcinogenic pollutants, including eye and throat irritation, persistent coughs, dizziness, and nausea.

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More than that: ROW gave the gig workers pollution monitors. And wow, the numbers they brought back are incredible. Yet another terrific feature idea and execution from this excellent publication. (Its financials look healthy too. Principal funder: Google ex-CEO Eric Schmidt’s daughter.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Newly unsealed court filings show that Microsoft tried to sell its Bing search engine to Apple – but Tim Cook didn’t bite. CC-licensed photo by official_powerset on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. Search harder. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Humane pushes Ai Pin ship date to mid-April • TechCrunch

Brian Heater:

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Hardware is difficult, to paraphrase a famous adage. First-generation products from new startups are notoriously so, regardless of how much money and excitement you’ve managed to drum up. Given all that, it’s likely few are too surprised that Humane’s upcoming Ai Pin has been pushed back a bit, from March to “mid-April,” per a new video from the Bay Area startup’s Head of Media, Sam Sheffer.

In the Sorkin-style walk and talk, he explains that the first units are set to, “start leaving the factory at the end of March.” If Humane keeps to that time frame, “priority access” customers will begin to receive the unit at some point in mid-April. The remaining preorders, meanwhile, should arrive “shortly after.”

Humane captured a good deal of tech buzz well before its first product was announced, courtesy of its founders’ time at Apple and some appropriately enigmatic prelaunch videos. The Ai Pin was finally unveiled at an event in San Francisco back in early November, where we were able to spend a little controlled hands-on time with the wearable.

The device is the first prominent example of what’s likely to be a growing trend in the consumer hardware world, as more startups look to harness the white-hot world of generative AI for new form factors. Humane is positioning its product as the next step for a space that’s been stuck on the smartphone form factor for more than a decade.

Of course, this will almost certainly also be the year of the “AI smartphone” — that is to say handsets leveraging platforms’ GPT models from companies like OpenAI, Google and Microsoft to bring new methods for interacting with consumer devices. Meanwhile, upstart rabbit generated buzz last month at CES for its own unique take on the generative AI-first consumer device.

For its part, Humane has a lot riding on this launch. The company has thus far raised around $230 million, including last year’s $100m Series C. There’s a lot to be said for delaying a product until it’s consumer ready. While early adopters are — to an extent — familiar with first-gen bugs, there’s always a limit to such patience. At the very least, a product like this will need to do most of what it’s supposed to do most of the time.

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Hard to keep the tech buzz through a delay. The usefulness is still undemonstrated.
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Google says Microsoft offered to sell Bing to Apple in 2018 • CNBC

Jordan Novet:

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Microsoft offered to sell its Bing search engine to Apple in 2018, Google said in a court filing earlier this month. The document, from Google’s antitrust case against the US Justice Department, was unsealed on Friday.

The legal battle over whether Alphabet has a monopoly in web search advertising touches on key agreements Google has in place with Apple and Android phone makers to ensure exclusivity of its search engine. In 2021, Google spent more than $26bn to keep its search engine the default, according to a slide shown during the trial in October. Google has been trying to prove in the case that it competes fairly.

In the filing earlier this month, Google argued that Microsoft pitched Apple in 2009, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2020 about making Bing the default in Apple’s Safari web browser, but each time, Apple said no, citing quality issues with Bing.

“In each instance, Apple took a hard look at the relative quality of Bing versus Google and concluded that Google was the superior default choice for its Safari users. That is competition,” Google wrote in the filing.

…Google said in its filing that when Microsoft reached out to Apple in 2018, emphasizing gains in Bing’s quality, Microsoft offered to either sell Bing to Apple or establish a Bing-related joint venture with the company.

“Microsoft search quality, their investment in search, everything was not significant at all,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, according to the filing. “And so everything was lower. So the search quality itself wasn’t as good. They weren’t investing at any level comparable to Google or to what Microsoft could invest in. And their advertising organization and how they monetize was not very good either.”

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$100bn (which the DoJ says Microsoft had invested in Bing) isn’t “significant”. Easy to forget how gigantic Google’s business and capex is.
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The paradox holding back the clean energy revolution • The New York Times

Ed Conway:

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In the 1990s, when multicolor LED lights were invented by Japanese scientists after decades of research, the hope was that they would help to avert climate catastrophe by greatly reducing the amount of electricity we use. It seemed perfectly intuitive. After all, LED lights use 90% less energy and last around 18 times longer than incandescent bulbs.

Yet the amount of electricity we consume for light globally is roughly the same today as it was in 2010. That’s partly because of population and economic growth in the developing world. But another big reason is there on the Las Vegas Strip: Instead of merely replacing our existing bulbs with LED alternatives, we have come up with ever more extravagant uses for these ever-cheaper lights, from immersive LED art installations and carpets that glow to basketball courts that can play video. As technology has advanced, we’ve only grown more wasteful.

There’s an economic term for this: the Jevons Paradox, named for the 19th-century English economist William Stanley Jevons, who noticed that as steam engines became ever more efficient, Britain’s appetite for coal increased rather than decreased.

We’ve known about the Jevons Paradox for years, but it’s becoming a more troubling problem now that governments have pledged to eliminate their net carbon emissions to slow global warming. A significant part of that carbon reduction is expected to come from using more efficient products, be they electric motors instead of internal combustion engines, or LED lights instead of traditional bulbs. But the logic of Jevons is that instead of banking the efficiency savings we make as technology advances, we go out and spend it.

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This is, indeed, a worry – unless the energy that we so wastefully use is generated by green means. This is why we need the wind farms, solar farms, and nuclear power stations. Especially in view of the next demand source…
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Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring — and mostly secret • Nature

Kate Crawford:

»

Last month, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman finally admitted what researchers have been saying for years — that the artificial intelligence (AI) industry is heading for an energy crisis. It’s an unusual admission. At the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Altman warned that the next wave of generative AI systems will consume vastly more power than expected, and that energy systems will struggle to cope. “There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough,” he said.

I’m glad he said it. I’ve seen consistent downplaying and denial about the AI industry’s environmental costs since I started publishing about them in 2018. Altman’s admission has got researchers, regulators and industry titans talking about the environmental impact of generative AI.

So what energy breakthrough is Altman banking on? Not the design and deployment of more sustainable AI systems — but nuclear fusion. He has skin in that game, too: in 2021, Altman started investing in fusion company Helion Energy in Everett, Washington.

Most experts agree that nuclear fusion won’t contribute significantly to the crucial goal of decarbonizing by mid-century to combat the climate crisis. Helion’s most optimistic estimate is that by 2029 it will produce enough energy to power 40,000 average US households; one assessment suggests that ChatGPT, the chatbot created by OpenAI in San Francisco, California, is already consuming the energy of 33,000 homes. It’s estimated that a search driven by generative AI uses four to five times the energy of a conventional web search. Within years, large AI systems are likely to need as much energy as entire nations.

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Fusion. Bah. And we haven’t got rid of the colossal waste of bitcoin either.
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Trials and tribulations of 360° video in Juno • Christian Selig

Christian Selig wrote an app called Juno to play YouTube videos natively in Apple’s Vision Pro. But some video, such as 360º video, won’t play, because, well..:

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if we want to play back a 4K YouTube video on our iOS device, we’re looking at a VP9 video plain and simple. The catch is, you cannot play VP9 videos on iOS unless you’re granted a special entitlement by Apple. The YouTube app has this special entitlement, called com.apple.developer.coremedia.allow-alternate-video-decoder-selection, and so does Safari (and presumably other large video companies like Twitch, Netflix, etc.)

But given that I cannot find any official documentation on that entitlement from Apple, safe to say it’s not an entitlement you or I are going to be able to get, so we cannot play back VP9 video, meaning we cannot play back 4K YouTube videos. Your guess is as good as mine why, maybe it’s very complex to implement if there’s indeed not a native hardware decoder, so Apple doesn’t like giving it out. So if you want 4K YouTube, you’re looking at either a web view or the YouTube app.

(Given that no one could agree on a video format, everyone went back to the drawing board, formed a collective group called the Alliance for Open Media (has Google, Apple, Samsung, Netflix, etc.), and authored the AV1 codec, hopefully creating the one video format to rule them all, with no licensing fees and hopefully no patent issues.

Google uses this on YouTube, and Apple even added a hardware decoder for AV1 in their latest A17 and M3 chips. This means on my iPhone 15 Pro I can play back an AV1 video in iOS’ AVPlayer like butter.

Buuuuttttt, the Apple Vision Pro ships with an M2, which has no such hardware decoder.)

So the tl;dr so far is YouTube uses the VP9 codec for 4K YouTube, and unless you’re special, you can’t playback VP9 video directly, which we need to do to be able to project it onto a sphere. Why not just do 1080p video?

Because even 4K video looks bad in 360 degrees.

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So Apple needs Google to develop the YouTube app to make 360º video useful on the Vision Pro headset. Probably fortunate for Apple that Google isn’t working on a VR headset. As far as we know, anyway.
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Samsung has big ambitions for the Galaxy Ring • The Verge

Allison Johnson:

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The Galaxy Ring prototypes I was able to try out were presented in three colors: platinum silver, ceramic black, and gold. I wasn’t allowed to take any photos during that session, but gold looked right at home next to my wedding ring. The Galaxy Ring is lighter than it looks and doesn’t feel as dense as I thought it would. It has a slightly concave shape, and each color was offered in sizes from 5 to 13, which is a slightly wider range of options than usual, with sizes marked as S through XL on the inside of the band.

Samsung’s VP of digital health, Dr. Hon Pak, didn’t specifically say what sensors are in the ring but mentioned sleep insights based on heart rate, movement, and respiratory indicators. Pak says that Samsung’s partnership with Natural Cycles (which already brings period and fertility tracking to its Galaxy Watch series) will extend to the ring, too — putting it in direct competition with the Oura Ring. On the Galaxy Ring, battery size increases slightly in the larger band sizes, though Pak couldn’t share any exact battery life estimates.

The Galaxy Ring will help inform a new metric Samsung is introducing to the Health app in the near future called My Vitality Score. It’s based on a model from the University of Georgia that incorporates four factors: sleep, activity, resting heart rate, and heart rate variability.

The Vitality Score will be a feature of Samsung’s Galaxy Watches, too, coming first to the Watch 6 later this year — but will require a Galaxy S24-series phone to work. Ring owners will also be able to specify certain health goals and receive related updates and tips in the form of something called Booster Cards, which are also coming to the Galaxy Health app later this year.

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It’s always telling which things they don’t want to tell you. In this case: the battery life. The Oura ring, which is a lot more chunky-looking, claims four to seven days. Wonder what Samsung will manage.
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We each have an average of 100 online accounts. Here’s how to make sure they aren’t a nightmare for your family if you die • CNN Business

Samantha Murphy Kelly:

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When Rebecca Bistany’s 40-year-old husband Paul died suddenly of a heart attack in November 2022, she didn’t know what kind of assets he left behind for her and their infant daughter.

Compounding her heartache, Paul didn’t leave a will. Bistany wanted to access key business and financial accounts by resetting passwords but found herself in a spot many who lose loved ones encounter: She couldn’t get into his phone, leaving her locked out of everything from personal photos to critical estate information.

Her story is tragic and increasingly common. With password management company NordPass saying each person has an average of 100 online accounts, the deaths of loved ones have become ever more complicated.

During already-difficult grieving times, figuring out how to get into, maintain or shut down accounts can range from the personally difficult to financially necessary. And while digital legacy planning can ease some of that burden, experts say far too few people take advantage of those tools.

“He had a four-digit passcode and I literally tried everything I could,” Bistany, who lives on Long Island, New York, told CNN. “I kept a list of what I tried because the more you got it wrong, the longer it would lock you out. I did it so many times, I can’t even try anymore.”

Although she contacted Apple, AT&T and even the police asking for help unlocking the phone, companies do not allow family members access unless the owner lists them as their legacy contact. Still, she keeps his phone number active, paying a monthly plan and holding out hope she’ll one day be able to access not only financial accounts but years of photos and videos of their life together.

And even for some people who can access their loved one’s accounts, the process can be daunting. Laura Orrico, a widow from Chicago, said she had to hire an IT professional to help go through everything on her late husband’s computer. “I had widow brain,” she said. “I couldn’t even organize a drawer let alone figure out his computer.”

Experts recommend people of all ages develop a digital legacy plan, from putting passwords in one place to deciding what happens to your social media presence.

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You could put your passcode and essential passwords in your will, I suppose? Besides the electronic method of legacy contacts.
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Cycling UK hails “clever” policing after bait bicycle used to track down £130,000 bike theft gang in one shift • road.cc

Dan Alexander:

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Cycling UK has urged more police forces to consider the “substantial results” that can be yielded from “sensible, clever policing” to tackle bike theft, without needing “massive intelligence or money”. The comments come after City of London Police managed to track down a bike theft gang in a single shift, the thieves found with a huge collection of stolen bicycles totalling £130,000 in value, the haul believed to be the biggest of its kind in the force’s history.

Last week we reported that four more men had been jailed for their role in the organised crime operation which saw the prolific theft of bicycles in the City of London during 2020, police ultimately bringing the gang down in November of that year by tracking a bait bicycle, left in the area with the intention of getting it stolen so officers could track the thieves back to their base.

…Detective Constable Matt Cooper this week spoke to the Daily Mail (link is external) and recalled the moment they tracked the bait bike back to a plant hire business in east London where £130,000 worth of stolen bikes were discovered.

“I was just shocked,” he said. “We had tracked one stolen bike to a plant hire business in East London — and found about 60 more. Bikes in the office, bikes in the toilet, bikes hanging up on rails, bikes stacked up everywhere. There was about £130,000 worth. It was hard to take in.

“We bought a relatively high-value bike and left it locked up in Rood Lane, off Fenchurch Street. This is an area targeted by bike thieves — but there is also a lot of CCTV coverage. We left it there in the morning and it was stolen by thieves, who cut through the lock with an angle grinder, at 2.30pm.”

Once the gang had been tracked to a warehouse on a business estate in Tower Hamlets, two members were arrested at 3.12pm on the same day, with stolen bikes and mobile phones seized.

“It took three of our biggest police vehicles to transport all the bikes to Bishopsgate police station — and colleagues in the property store are still emailing me to ask when they can go,” the detective constable continued.

“The CCTV footage shows some of them arriving four or five times a day, from first thing in the morning to last thing at night, each time with a new bike.

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Stolen with an angle grinder in central London, in the middle of the day, in full view of multiple offices.
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Climate techno-fixes raise concerns among the UK’s civil servants • Climate Change News

Joe Lo:

»

British civil servants have grave doubts about their government’s favoured techno-fixes for climate-polluting industries like meat production and air travel, new documents show.

In risk assessments made public because of an ongoing court case, officials warned that technology to reduce methane emissions from cow burps is “nascent” and there might not be enough plants or hydrogen available to power the world’s planes more sustainably.

Yet despite the uncertainties surrounding these and other climate solutions like carbon dioxide removal, the UK government is relying on such technologies to meet a big chunk of its climate plans.

Internal government documents disclosed in court show civil servants had “low” or “very low” confidence in about half of the planned emissions reductions up to 2037 and “very high confidence” in just a tiny fraction.

In court, the government’s lawyer said that these categories should not be taken out of context – and that certain measures could be rated “very low confidence” just because it is “early days”.

The risk analysis was put together by unnamed civil servants at the UK’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero in 2022 and was supposed to help shape the government’s latest carbon budget delivery plan, aimed at keeping the country on track for net-zero emissions by mid-century.

The plan was published in March 2023 along with a sanitised version of the risks and uncertainties that civil servants foresaw in meeting it.

But the full risk tables were made public this week as environmental campaigners took the government to court, arguing that civil servants did not give then climate minister Grant Shapps enough information to judge whether the UK’s climate plan was sufficient.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Fingertips are incredibly sensitive, able to feel objects at nanometre scale. CC-licensed photo by Bart Everson on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Texas’s social-media law is dangerous. Striking it down could be worse • The Atlantic

Zephyr Teachout:

»

As a progressive legal scholar and activist, I never would have expected to end up on the same side as Greg Abbott, the conservative governor of Texas, in a Supreme Court dispute. But a pair of cases being argued next week have scrambled traditional ideological alliances.

The arguments concern laws in Texas and Florida, passed in 2021, that if allowed to go into effect would largely prevent the biggest social-media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok, from moderating their content. The tech companies have challenged those laws—which stem from Republican complaints about “shadowbanning” and “censorship”—under the First Amendment, arguing that they have a constitutional right to allow, or not allow, whatever content they want. Because the laws would limit the platforms’ ability to police hate speech, conspiracy theories, and vaccine misinformation, many liberal organizations and Democratic officials have lined up to defend giant corporations that they otherwise tend to vilify. On the flip side, many conservative groups have taken a break from dismantling the administrative state to support the government’s power to regulate private businesses. Everyone’s bedfellows are strange.

I joined a group of liberal law professors who filed a brief on behalf of Texas. Many of our traditional allies think that siding with Abbott and his attorney general, Ken Paxton, is ill-advised to say the least, and I understand that. The laws in question are bad, and if upheld, will have bad consequences. But a broad constitutional ruling against them—a ruling that holds that the government cannot prohibit dominant platforms from unfairly discriminating against certain users—would be even worse.

…The Texas law says that platforms can’t censor or moderate content based on viewpoint, aside from narrow carve-outs (such as child-abuse material), but it doesn’t explain how that rule is supposed to work. Within First Amendment law, the line between subject matter and viewpoint is infamously difficult to draw, and the broad wording of the Texas statute could lead to platforms abandoning content moderation entirely.

…Last year, the Supreme Court agreed to consider the constitutionality of both laws.

The plaintiff is NetChoice, the lobbying group for the social-media companies. It argues that platforms should be treated like newspapers when they moderate content. In a landmark 1974 case, the Supreme Court struck down a state law that required newspapers to allow political candidates to publish a response to critical coverage. It held that, under the First Amendment, a newspaper is exercising its First Amendment rights when it decides what to publish and what not to publish.

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Apple ponders making new wearables: AI glasses, AirPods with cameras, smart ring • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman:

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For now, the ring idea is just that — an idea. The company isn’t actively developing such a device, but there are certainly people within the walls of Apple’s campus promoting the concept. The glasses, meanwhile, are in an exploratory phase known as “technology investigation” within Apple’s hardware engineering division. The company also is looking into other ideas, such as equipping AirPods with cameras.

Let’s begin with the hypothetical ring, which would be focused on heath and fitness. There are many people who buy the Apple Watch for health tracking. They want to monitor their heart rate, blood oxygen saturation, calories burned and steps taken. And there’s an overlap between that group and people who don’t necessarily want the other bells and whistles of an Apple Watch — like apps and phone calls.

There are also millions of people who don’t want an Apple Watch because they prefer traditional wristwatches or don’t like wearing one at all. Or they dread the idea of having another device that needs nightly charging.

That’s where the ring comes in. Such a device could serve as a low-cost way to gather key health data without the need to wear a full-blown watch. Samsung Electronics Co. and Oura Health Oy have both already shown this notion is feasible. Samsung is preparing to launch its first ring later this year, and Oura has turned the concept into a big enough business to be mulling an initial public offering.

Apple could tie the ring to its Health and Fitness apps and sell it is as an iPhone accessory. It won’t generate as much money as a smartwatch, but Apple can court a new type of customer (and even theoretically offer it as a subscription). Finally, an Apple ring owner would be less likely to ditch the iPhone for an Android device.

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Gurman’s sources are generally good, but his logic is utterly rubbish. First, Samsung is pushing the idea that Apple is “doing a ring” because it is, and wants to be seen as offering the Android alternative; if Apple never produces a ring, or is never described as even thinking about doing one, Samsung is basically hung out to dry.; Oura is not a name on anyone’s lips. The ring is not a thing Apple will do, even though it’s not going to come out and say so.

Next, charging. What items does Apple sell whose charging lasts more than 48 hours of continuous use? The Watch Ultra, perhaps; AirTags; Bluetooth keyboards, mice, trackpads. Ring? Would have to be super-low-power (and hence not much use.)
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The state of the culture, 2024 • The Honest Broker

Ted Gioia:

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A whistleblower released internal documents showing how Instagram use leads to depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. Mark Zuckerberg was told all the disturbing details.

He doesn’t care. The CEOs all know the score. The more their tech gets used, the worse all the psychic metrics get.

But still they push aggressively forward—they don’t want to lose market share to the other dopamine cartel members. And with a special focus on children. They figured out what every junk peddler already knows: It’s more profitable to get users locked in while they’re young.

And the virtual reality headsets raise even more issues—because they rewire users’ brains. Experts are already talking about “simulator sickness,” and that’s just the physical nausea, dizziness, and headaches. Imagine the psychic dislocations.

And you thought artists had it tough back in the day?

Even the dumbest entertainment looks like Shakespeare compared to dopamine culture. You don’t need Hamlet, a photo of a hamburger will suffice. Or a video of somebody twerking, or a pet looking goofy.

Instead of movies, users get served up an endless sequence of 15-second videos. Instead of symphonies, listeners hear bite-sized melodies, usually accompanied by one of these tiny videos—just enough for a dopamine hit, and no more.

This is the new culture. And its most striking feature is the absence of Culture (with a capital C) or even mindless entertainment—both get replaced by compulsive activity.

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As Elon Musk would say: concerning. (Thanks Owen F for the link.)
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Feeling small: fingers can detect nano-scale wrinkles even on a seemingly smooth surface • ScienceDaily

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In a ground-breaking study, Swedish scientists have shown that people can detect nano-scale wrinkles while running their fingers upon a seemingly smooth surface. The findings could lead such advances as touch screens for the visually impaired and other products, says one of the researchers from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

The study marks the first time that scientists have quantified how people feel, in terms of a physical property. One of the authors, Mark Rutland, Professor of Surface Chemistry, says that the human finger can discriminate between surfaces patterned with ridges as small as 13 nanometres in amplitude and non-patterned surfaces.

“This means that, if your finger was the size of the Earth, you could feel the difference between houses from cars,” Rutland says. “That is one of the most enjoyable aspects of this research. We discovered that a human being can feel a bump corresponding to the size of a very large molecule.”

The research team consisted of Rutland and KTH PhD student Lisa Skedung, and psychologist Birgitta Berglund and PhD student Martin Arvidsson from Stockholm Universiy. Their paper, Feeling Small: Exploring the Tactile Perception Limits, was published on September 12 in Scientific Reports. The research was financed by a grant from Vinnova and the Knowledge Foundation to the SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden. Rutland says that the project will pursue applications of the research together with SP.

The study highlights the importance of surface friction and wrinkle wavelength, or wrinkle width — in the tactile perception of fine textures.

When a finger is drawn over a surface, vibrations occur in the finger. People feel these vibrations differently on different structures. The friction properties of the surface control how hard we press on the surface as we explore it. A high friction surface requires us to press less to achieve the optimum friction force.

“This is the breakthrough that allows us to design how things feel and are perceived,” he says. “It allows, for example, for a certain portion of a touch screen on a smartphone to be designed to feel differently by vibration.”

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This appeared in 2013, and it seemed interesting enough to use now. Also, fingers haven’t changed. The touchscreens never came through, though, did they. (I did see some Finnish research in 2012 which gave touchscreens texture: it was really interesting. Came to nothing.)
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How Saudi Arabia ‘buys Guinness World Records in new whitewashing’

Jack Malvern:

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Guinness World Records (GWR) is a bestseller every year, drawing in readers with descriptions of the longest accordion recital (51 hours, 43 minutes and 40 seconds) and the longest mullet hairstyle (172.72 cm).

Less well known is the company’s sideline of accepting money to help authoritarian governments put out positive messages about their record-breaking achievements.

This week, GWR certified ten new records for Saudi Arabia, which is condemned by human rights groups as a repressive state that is holding two people on death row who were children at the time of their alleged offences.

While individuals who submit records are expected to do something interesting to gain entry to GWR’s index, the records announced this week included “largest covered water reservoir for storing drinking water”, “largest multi-effect distillation desalination unit” and “largest dental hospital”.

Analysis by The Times of GWR’s database shows that Saudi Arabia has rapidly increased its tally of records since 2019. Of the records listed with dates, 54 were certified before 2019 and 160 afterwards. In 2023 alone it set 56, including “largest intellectual property lesson” and “smallest floating golf green”.

GWR said that of the 223 records it held that listed Saudi Arabia as the location of the attempt, 135 were the result of paid-for consultations.

The company’s consultation service, which offers to “deliver a customised solution that works to your budget”, started as a sideline but now makes more money than its publishing arm. In its most recent accounts, for 2022, it made £12.37m from consulting and £12.32m from publishing.

…GWR admitted that its “inclusive approach comes with risks, so we take our lead from the UK and US governments on where we are able to do business”.

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Magician says a Democratic operative paid him to make the fake Biden robocall that spread in New Hampshire • NBC News

Alex Seitz-Wald:

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A Democratic consultant who worked for a rival presidential campaign paid a New Orleans magician to use artificial intelligence to impersonate President Joe Biden for a robocall that is now at the center of a multistate law enforcement investigation, according to text messages, call logs and Venmo transactions the creator shared with NBC News.

Paul Carpenter says he was hired in January by Steve Kramer — who has worked on ballot access for Democratic presidential candidate Dean Phillips — to use AI software to make the imitation of Biden’s voice urging New Hampshire Democrats not to vote in the state’s presidential primary.

“I created the audio used in the robocall. I did not distribute it,” Carpenter said in an interview in New Orleans, where he is currently residing. “I was in a situation where someone offered me some money to do something, and I did it. There was no malicious intent. I didn’t know how it was going to be distributed.”

Carpenter — who holds world records in fork-bending and straitjacket escapes, but has no fixed address — showed NBC News how he created the fake Biden audio and said he came forward because he regrets his involvement in the ordeal and wants to warn people about how easy it is to use AI to mislead.

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Kramer told NBC News that he’d explain it all in an op-end to be published last Saturday. Web search reveals no article by Kramer. However, on Sunday he did confirm to NBC News that he was behind it.
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When media outlets shutter, why are the websites wiped, too? • Slate

Scott Nover:

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there are technical challenges around maintaining a defunct website. Greg Lavallee, Slate’s vice president of technology, was kind enough to clue me in on those. There are innumerable problems with maintaining the original website—links, code scripts, and ad networks can quickly present security risks if not properly monitored and maintained. “It wouldn’t be expensive to maintain the content,” Lavallee explained. “It would be expensive to maintain functionality: logins, membership programs, commenting systems, anything that has any kind of user input or interaction.”

Lavallee suggested that media execs—or anyone looking to archive a defunct site—use the free, open-source project Webrecorder, which allows people to effectively download full archives of their sites and then host the archive instead of the original site: “You need to make a copy that’s frozen, but frozen in an intelligent manner.” The only cost would be for hosting the site.

One executive at a major media company, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me it is “very, very cheap to host an archive of static pages for a large website—like a few hundred dollars a month, with the cost entirely dependent on how much traffic it gets.” (Traffic to a defunct site would, predictably, fall and ad networks can quickly become co-opted by bad actors running malware, Lavallee said, noting it wouldn’t be worth it to try to monetize remaining traffic.) Sure, a few hundred dollars a month is not nothing—and if you’re a media exec who has created a dumpster fire that you are trying to move on from, it’s probably really annoying! For a billionaire media owner like Finkelstein or a media company that was once valued at $5.7bn like Vice (which, yes, has since filed for bankruptcy), this shouldn’t be an insurmountable cost.

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News agencies rebel over ‘unrealistic and unworkable’ Sun and Times payment terms • Press Gazette

Bron Maher:

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The trade association representing Britain’s independent press agencies has warned of a “mass rebellion” against the publisher of The Sun and The Times over what it calls its “tyrannical” treatment of freelances.

The National Association of Press Agencies (NAPA) says rates of pay imposed on agencies by News UK have not increased in up to 40 years due to a decades-old self-billing system.

And it claims that unless the publisher urgently reviews its relationship with agencies, their news and picture suppliers could seek legal redress and move to their own invoicing business models to secure better payment.

“Unsung heroes” of the news industry argue they have been “tied in” to decades-old payment terms
Press agencies provide consumer news brands with content to supplement the work of their own journalists. Times editor Tony Gallagher described them as the “unsung heroes” of the news industry for the volume of content they anonymously contribute, when he spoke at the NAPA awards in 2017.

Under self-billing agreements publications pay agencies and freelancers using a rate card calculated by the publications themselves, some of which the agencies say were drawn up as long ago as the early 1980s. It means agencies are paid after publication at pre-agreed rates for whatever content is used.

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Utterly amazing. But totally believable. Roughly the same is true for writing: rates have hardly moved for the vast majority for three decades.
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The varieties of inner experience: anauralics lack the ability to imagine sounds, the auditory analogue to aphantasia • Nautilus

Ajdina Halilovic:

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Jessie Donaldson has played the flute for 26 years. One of her favorite pieces to play is “Romance No. 2” by Beethoven, a sweet and stately composition for flute, oboes, bassoons, horns, and violin. But mentally rehearsing the flute part is tricky for the occupational therapist, who lives in Auckland, New Zealand. Jessie lacks the ability to simulate sounds in her mind. When I ask her to conjure the music that she has mastered over decades, she says she can feel the fingerings she has practiced, but can’t hear the parts in her mind’s ear. In those moments, Jessie’s mind is filled with thoughts of the rhythm and structure of the music but none of the actual sounds her flute or the other instruments produce.

Going as far back as she can remember, this same silence permeates her memories, too. “I know what the sound of a laugh is,” she tells me, “but I can’t hear it in my mind. I have no memories with sounds.” Jessie only discovered that this was unusual when, by chance, she met a researcher who studies people like her.

​​​​If you think of a sound, such as a dog barking, a loved one’s voice, or a favorite tune, to what extent can you hear that sound in your mind? Not at all? As vividly as actually hearing it in real time and space? Somewhere in between? Researchers have long understood that people’s sensory imaginations vary widely. But it is only in the last decade that they have started paying close attention to those at the ends of this spectrum.

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Like people who can’t imagine objects, but this time for sounds. The two often overlap. And you also get the opposite – people who are really good at imagining objects are good at it for sounds.
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Solar panels can dramatically cut the running costs of a home – but usually, only the well-off can afford them. How do we help those who can’t? CC-licensed photo by Oregon State University on Flickr.

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Instacart’s AI recipes look literally impossible • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

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I hate cookbooks without pictures. We eat with our eyes first, as chefs love to say, but what’s more important to me is that if I’m making a dish for the first time, I want to see what the final product should look like to know I did it right. It’s not so much about presentation as it is about knowing that I browned the chicken skin enough.

An image of a recipe will not be this useful, I think, if it was AI-generated, and especially so if the fact that the image was AI-generated wasn’t disclosed by the recipe. That, to my surprise, is exactly the case with thousands of recipes the grocery delivery service Instacart is suggesting to its users. Some of the recipes include unheard of measurements and ingredients that don’t appear to exist. Business Insider first reported about Instacart’s AI generated recipes in January.

Generally, I try to avoid using Instacart if possible because it treats its workers badly, but I had just come back from the hospital with a newborn and was desperate enough to pay a lot of money to have eggs and some other basics delivered to my doorstep. As I was browsing, I noticed that Instacart was offering me recipes that appeared to complement the ingredients I was looking at. 

The concept doesn’t make a ton of sense to me—I’m going to Instacart for the ingredients I know I need for the food I know I’m going to make, not for food inspiration—but I had to click on a recipe for “Watermelon Popsicle with Chocolate Chips” because it looked weird in the thumbnail. 

Since I have eyeballs with optical nerves that are connected to a semi-functioning brain I can tell that the image was generated by AI. To be more specific, I can see that the top corner of the plate doesn’t match its square shape, that the table-ish looking thing it’s resting on is made up of jumbled slats (AI is particularly bad at making these series of long, straight lines), and then there are the titular watermelon popsicles, which defy physical reality. They clip into each other like bad 3D models in a video game, one of them to the left appears hollow, and for some reason they are skewered by what appears to be asparagus spears on the bottom end and capped by impossible small watermelon rinds at the top. 

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But also, chocolate chips on watermelon? Instacart juggled around the images once it was found out, but it’s still using AI. Are we really feeding people recipes that AI has dreamed up? Because that doesn’t sound like a good idea.
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The solar panel theory of socioeconomic unfairness • BusinessGreen

James Murray:

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In his 1993 novel Men at Arms, the late, great comic writer Terry Pratchett deployed one of his characters to present what was to become a famous economic theory: “A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

A similar phenomenon is at risk of undermining the net zero transition. A solar panel theory of socioeconomic unfairness, if you will.

Solar panels and other clean technologies slash energy and fuel bills for households, while minimising exposure to future energy price hikes and air pollution. A recent analysis from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit calculated the average household that improved its energy efficiency, installed solar panels and a heat pump, and switched to an EV would enjoy running costs that were nearly £2,000 a year lower than a household with no clean technologies in place. Which is great, but like Pratchett’s boots you can only access those savings if you can afford to deploy the technologies in the first place. Meanwhile, poorer households spend thousands of pounds more on their energy bills and are still cold. 

To make this unfairness worse still, it is lower income households that are most exposed to the higher food and insurance costs that are resulting from worsening climate impacts, not to mention the inherently regressive short term levies imposed on energy bills to help fund the necessary upfront investment in cleaner energy infrastructure that should curb costs in the long term. 

Of course, the costs and benefits associated with solar panels are not quite as simple as Pratchett’s expensive boots. When it comes to climate change we really are all in it together. Everyone benefits from improved air quality, reduced fossil gas imports, and lower carbon emissions. But while there are net gains for the economy as a whole, it remains true the financial savings are most immediately apparent for those who can afford to deploy clean technologies relatively early in the transition.

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There are of course schemes in the UK where a company will install the panels and either take a cut of the feed-in tariff or just treat the installation as a long-term loan; that makes it more affordable. (Also, I don’t think Pratchett invented the idea; “only the rich can afford cheap shoes” has been a saying for a long time.)
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New York judge rebukes law firm for using ChatGPT to justify its fees • FT

Joe Miller:

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A New York judge has scolded a law firm for citing ChatGPT to support its application for “excessive” attorneys’ fees of up to $600 an hour.

The Cuddy Law Firm had invoked the predictive artificial intelligence tool in a declaration to the court over a case it won against the city’s education department. It said it had done so “to provide context to what a parent — having ChatGPT-4 open and available to them — might take away in researching whether to hire an attorney and who to accept or reject”.

When asked what would be a “reasonable hourly rate” to expect for an associate attorney with up to three years experience in a hearing over disabilities education, the large language model said it could “range anywhere from $200 to $500 an hour”, an attorney at the firm wrote.

He also pointed out that ChatGPT concluded that “lawyers who specialise in a certain type of law (such as special education law, in this case) may command higher rates” and that an attorney with “25 years of experience” might command an hourly rate of up to $1,200 “or even more”.

Judge Paul Engelmayer, who ultimately cut the fees to be awarded to Cuddy’s lawyers by more than half, called the firm’s reliance on the AI program “utterly and unusually unpersuasive”, adding that “barring a paradigm shift in the reliability of this tool, the [firm] is well advised to excise references to ChatGPT from future fee applications”.

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I think I might have been inclined to cut their fees to zero for being so unutterably stupid. What is it about American lawyers and ChatGPT?
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Scientists claim AI breakthrough to generate boundless clean fusion energy • Vice

Mirjam Guesgen:

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Donut-shaped tokamak reactors rely on magnets to squeeze plasma particles close together and keep them constantly spinning around a ring, creating a lasting fusion reaction. They’re one of the front-runners in designs for a practical fusion reactor. But if there’s one little disruption to the magnetic field lines running through the plasma, the delicate balance keeping it all contained gets out of whack: The plasma escapes the magnets’ clutches and the reaction ends. 

Chijin Xiao, a plasma physicist at the University of Saskatchewan who wasn’t involved in the study, explained that these instabilities can lead to catastrophic consequences. “When the plasma stops operating, there are several risks: one is that all the energy stored in the plasma is going to be released as thermal energy and may damage the wall of the reactor,” she said. “More importantly, a sudden change in the [magnetic] current can introduce a great deal of force on the reactor that can really destroy the device.”

Xiao added that one of the biggest tokamak reactors around today, ITER in France, is only designed to withstand a few of these plasma disruptions before the whole machine has to be repaired—a huge expense. The goal is to catch instabilities while they’re small and intervene.

The Princeton lab’s model can predict so-called tearing mode instabilities 300 milliseconds before they happen. It doesn’t sound like a lot of heads-up, but it’s enough time to get the plasma under control, their study shows.

Researchers tested the algorithm on a real reactor, the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego. They saw that their AI-based system could control the power being pumped into the reactor and the shape of the plasma to keep the swirling particles in check.

Co-author Azarakhsh Jalalvand said in a statement that the success of the AI model comes from the fact that it was trained on real data from previous fusion experiments, rather than theoretical physics models. 

“We don’t teach the reinforcement learning model all of the complex physics of a fusion reaction,” Jalalvand said. “We tell it what the goal is—to maintain a high-powered reaction—what to avoid—a tearing mode instability—and the knobs it can turn to achieve those outcomes. Over time, it learns the optimal pathway for achieving the goal of high power while avoiding the punishment of an instability.”

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*weary voice* hurrah, boundless clean energy is only *checks watch* 20 years away again
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Scientists are putting ChatGPT brains inside robot bodies. What could possibly go wrong? • Scientific American

David Berreby:

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Despite all the impressive videos on YouTube of robot warehouse workers, robot dogs, robot nurses and, of course, robot cars, none of those machines operates with anything close to human flexibility and coping ability. “Classical robotics is very brittle because you have to teach the robot a map of the world, but the world is changing all the time,” says Naganand Murty, CEO of Electric Sheep, a company whose landscaping robots must deal with constant changes in weather, terrain and owner preferences. For now, most working robots labor much as their predecessors did a generation ago: in tightly limited environments that let them follow a tightly limited script, doing the same things repeatedly.

…LLMs have what robots lack: access to knowledge about practically everything humans have ever written, from quantum physics to K-pop to defrosting a salmon fillet. In turn, robots have what LLMs lack: physical bodies that can interact with their surroundings, connecting words to reality. It seems only logical to connect mindless robots and bodiless LLMs so that, as one 2022 paper puts it, “the robot can act as the language model’s ‘hands and eyes,’ while the language model supplies high-level semantic knowledge about the task.”

…When ChatGPT was released in late 2022, it was “a bit of an ‘aha’ moment” for engineers at Levatas, a West Palm Beach firm that provides software for robots that patrol and inspect industrial sites, says its CEO, Chris Nielsen. With ChatGPT and Boston Dynamics, the company cobbled together a prototype robot dog that can speak, answer questions and follow instructions given in ordinary spoken English, eliminating the need to teach workers how to use it. “For the average common industrial employee who has no robotic training, we want to give them the natural-language ability to tell the robot to sit down or go back to its dock,” Nielsen says.

Levatas’s LLM-infused robot seems to grasp the meaning of words—and the intent behind them. It “knows” that although Jane says “back up” and Joe says “get back,” they both mean the same thing. Instead of poring over a spreadsheet of data from the machine’s last patrol, a worker can simply ask, “What readings were out of normal range in your last walk?”

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But, and here is the very big but, should you believe the answer you get?
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Keep your phone number private with Signal usernames • Signal Blog

Randall Sarafa is Signal’s chief product officer:

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New default: Your phone number will no longer be visible to everyone in Signal
• If you use Signal, your phone number will no longer be visible to everyone you chat with by default. People who have your number saved in their phone’s contacts will still see your phone number since they already know it.

Connect without sharing your phone number
• If you don’t want to hand out your phone number to chat with someone on Signal, you can now create a unique username that you can use instead (you will still need a phone number to sign up for Signal). Note that a username is not the profile name that’s displayed in chats, it’s not a permanent handle, and not visible to the people you are chatting with in Signal. A username is simply a way to initiate contact on Signal without sharing your phone number.

Control who can find you on Signal by phone number
• If you don’t want people to be able to find you by searching for your phone number on Signal, you can now enable a new, optional privacy setting. This means that unless people have your exact unique username, they won’t be able to start a conversation, or even know that you have a Signal account – even if they have your phone number.

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This is going to be very welcome, and it’s a smart idea. Giving out your phone number has never felt ideal for an app that’s really very focussed on privacy.

Presently this is in beta, but it’s rolling out over the next few weeks. (In which case.. is that really beta testing?)
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Analysis: record drop required in China’s CO2 emissions to meet 2025 target • Carbon Brief

Lauri Myllyvirta:

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China’s energy sector carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions increased 5.2% in 2023, meaning a record fall of 4-6% is needed by 2025 to meet the government’s “carbon intensity” target.

The new analysis for Carbon Brief, based on official figures and commercial data, shows rapid electricity demand growth and weak rains boosted demand for coal power in 2023, while the rebound from zero-Covid boosted demand for oil.

Other key findings from the analysis include:

• China’s CO2 emissions have now increased by 12% between 2020 and 2023, after a highly energy- and carbon-intensive response to the Covid-19 pandemic
• This means CO2 emissions would need to fall by 4-6% by 2025, in order to meet the target of cutting China’s carbon intensity – its CO2 emissions per unit of economic output – by 18% during the 14th five-year plan period
• China is also at risk of missing all of its other key climate targets for 2025, including pledges to “strictly limit” coal demand growth and “strictly control” new coal power capacity, as well as targets for energy intensity, the share of low-carbon energy in overall demand and the share of renewables in energy demand growth
• Government pressure to hit the targets, most of which are in China’s updated international climate pledge under the Paris Agreement, makes it more likely that China’s CO2 emissions will peak before 2025 – far earlier than its target of peaking “before 2030”.

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Come ONNNNN China, come ONNNNN
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Vice’s new owners prepare to slash what’s left of its work force • The New York Times

Benjamin Mullin:

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Executives at Vice Media are planning to lay off hundreds of more than 900 employees over the next week, eliminating staff from its digital publishing division, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The cuts will be the latest in a series of severe cutbacks that the company has endured in recent years, winnowing the globe-spanning digital colossus to a husk of its former self. Over the past half-decade, Vice has had near annual layoffs and mounting losses, and has filed for bankruptcy, making it the poster child for the battered digital-media industry.

When Vice emerged from bankruptcy last year, some observers hoped its new owners — a consortium led by the private-equity firm Fortress Investment Group — would reinvest to return the company to growth.

Instead, Fortress has decided to make sweeping cuts, as part of an attempt to stem the endless tide of red ink. The company is planning to inform employees of its new business strategy in the next week.
Vice did not have any immediate comment.

The layoffs come amid gale-force headwinds for the entire media industry.

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Related: Yahoo lays off the leaders of Engadget, dumping 10 staff, while

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the editorial team will split into two sections: “news and features” and “reviews and buying advice.” The news teams will focus on traffic growth, while the reviews teams will report to commerce leaders.

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Stick a fork in and raise a glass.
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Tech newsbrand with ‘optimistic view’ and 20-strong team launches in London • Press Gazette

Dominic Ponsford:

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A technology news brand is launching in London with a 20-strong team hoping to buck the trend of industry decline over the last 12 months.

Digital Frontier has a nine-strong editorial team producing a website, twice-weekly podcast and daily newsletter. Other staff bring the title’s total headcount to 20.

The independent title plans to make revenue from subscriptions, advertising and events. Its plan is to provide deeply-reported journalism, rather than breaking news, and inform business leaders across various sector who need to understand the impact of disruptive technology.

Digital Frontier launches in a business climate which has seen numerous cutbacks and closures, with around 1,000 news media jobs lost in the UK and USA so far this year. However subscriptions and events have been relatively robust – with advertising being the main problem area for publishers, as evidenced by the recent DMGT results.

Digital Frontier is privately owned with investment from Josh Hewes, the founder and chief executive of Blockspace, who has a background in digital assets and financial services.

“Too much contemporary technology journalism falls into one of two traps: on the one hand a fixation on the trivial and on the other a tendency to pessimism. We want to bring rigour and a dose of optimism to the industry. We believe technology has led a huge improvement to people’s lives over the past century and has the potential to drive an even bigger change over the coming century.”

Digital Frontier said it will target an audience of “future-focused leaders, business decision-makers, entrepreneurs and investors”.

It is mainly targeting a B2B audience, but expects to also attract B2C readers.

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That’s a pretty big headcount. Watch this space, I guess.
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In Minnestoa, the Birkebeiner cross-country ski race used to be a predictable winter fixture. Now the warming climate has made it uncertain. CC-licensed photo by _ Kripptic on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 12 links for you. Believe it. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

ChatGPT meltdown: users puzzled by bizarre gibberish bug • Mashable

Mike Pearl:

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ChatGPT hallucinates. We all know this already. But on Tuesday it seemed like someone slipped on a banana peel at OpenAI headquarters and switched on a fun new experimental chatbot called the Synonym Scrambler. 

Actually, ChatGPT was freaking out in many ways yesterday, but one recurring theme was that it would be prompted with a normal question — typically something involving the tech business or the user’s job — and respond with something flowery to the point of unintelligibility. For instance, according to an X post by architect Sean McGuire, the chatbot advised him at one point to ensure that “sesquipedalian safes are cross-keyed and the consul’s cry from the crow’s nest is met by beatine and wary hares a’twist and at winch in the willow.”

These are words, but ChatGPT seems to have been writing in an extreme version of that style where a ninth grader abuses their thesaurus privileges. “Beatine” is a particularly telling example. I checked the full Oxford English Dictionary and it’s not in there, but Wiktionary says it relates to the theologian Beatus of Liébana, a scholar of the end times who died in the year 800, so maybe “beatine” meant “apocalyptic” at some point in the first millennium CE. Or, judging from how it’s used in dusty old books, maybe it’s just another way of saying “beatific” which one would think is already an obscure enough word. In other words, ChatGPT was giving new meaning to the term “esoteric.” 

The chatbot was briefly doing things like this to tons of its users. One Redditor, homtanksreddit, noted that ChatGPT 3.5 — the one available to free users — was apparently unaffected, so the bug may have only affected paying users.

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Perhaps in retrospect it was a mistake to expand its training data with those James Joyce books.
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Apple’s new Sports app for the iPhone is all about the scores • Fast Company

Harry McCracken:

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Since the day the iPhone first went on sale, it’s come with Apple’s apps for checking the weather and monitoring stock prices. Now the company is finally getting around to offering an app that delivers timely information of a different sort with at least as much mass appeal: sports scores.

Named (probably inevitably) Apple Sports, the app is available in the App Store starting today. It features schedules of upcoming games, real-time play-by-play details on ones in progress, player stats, links to broadcasts on Apple TV where applicable, and (though they can be turned off) betting odds. Leagues currently covered include NBA, men’s and women’s NCAA basketball, NHL, MLS, Bundesliga, LaLiga, Liga MX, Ligue 1, Premiere League, and Serie A, with MLB,  NFL, NCAAF, NWSL, and WNBA on the way when their seasons start.

Apple has already offered a way to keep tabs on schedules, scores, and stats in the form of My Sports, a feature in Apple News and Apple TV. But in those apps, scores are just one part of the sports experience, and sports are just one slice of the overall mission, albeit an important one. Apple Sports, which will sync with favorites users have already selected in My Sports, doesn’t do anything but sports. And it isn’t even trying to be the ultimate hub for fans.

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It’s pretty dull, and in the UK doesn’t have much (yet). But you can see this as a pathway to much bigger things – particularly pushing immersive video of sports for the Vision Pro. Speaking of which..
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Apple teases MLS playoffs Immersive Video for Vision Pro coming soon, shot in 8K 3D • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

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As this year’s MLS season kicks off, Apple is promoting its MLS Season Pass subscription service in full-force. Hidden in today’s launch, however, is a tidbit for Vision Pro users for the “first-ever sports film captured in Apple Immersive Video.”

In a press release today, Apple says that a new film showcasing the 2023 MLS Cup Playoffs is coming soon for all Vision Pro users. The film was captured in 8K 3D with a 180-degree field of view with Spatial Audio, according to Apple:

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Coming soon, all Apple Vision Pro users can experience the best of the 2023 MLS Cup Playoffs with the first-ever sports film captured in Apple Immersive Video. Viewers will feel every heart-pounding moment in 8K 3D with a 180-degree field of view and Spatial Audio that transports them to each match.

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Apple doesn’t have any additional details to share on this right now. It’s the first sports-related content announcement we’ve seen for Apple Vision Pro. Apple has shown off things like MLS, NBA, and MLB games in their promotional material for Vision Pro, but nothing had been formally announced until now.

Vision Pro users won’t need an MLS Season Pass subscription to watch this film.

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Now things begin to get interesting.
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Adobe brings conversational AI to trillions of PDFs with the new AI Assistant in Reader and Acrobat • Adobe

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Today, Adobe introduced AI Assistant in beta, a new generative AI-powered conversational engine in Reader and Acrobat. Deeply integrated into Reader and Acrobat workflows, AI Assistant instantly generates summaries and insights from long documents, answers questions and formats information for sharing in emails, reports and presentations. AI Assistant is bringing generative AI to the masses, unlocking new value from the information inside the approximately 3 trillion PDFs in the world.

AI Assistant leverages the same artificial intelligence and machine learning models behind Acrobat Liquid Mode, the award-winning technology that supports responsive reading experiences for PDFs on mobile. These proprietary models provide a deep understanding of PDF structure and content, enhancing quality and reliability in AI Assistant outputs. 

“Generative AI offers the promise of more intelligent document experiences by transforming the information inside PDFs into actionable, knowledge and professional-looking content,” said Abhigyan Modi, senior vice president, Document Cloud. “PDF is the de facto standard for the world’s most important documents and the capabilities introduced today are just the beginning of the value AI Assistant will deliver through Reader and Acrobat applications and services.”

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So basically it’s a TL;DR machine. What’s the point of having a long document if it just gets summarised? Is this a modern version of “if I’d had more time I’d have written a shorter letter”?
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AI search is a doomsday cult • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

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Generative AI, where it is right now, is not totally dissimilar from what happened during the cryptocurrency bubble during the height of the pandemic: Hundreds of startups, flush with cash from a bull market, started trying to build crypto-backed consumer products after they had already decided the technology was the future — not the other way around. 

Case in point: the Arc Browser.

For years, The Browser Company has been promising to save the internet. Its Arc Browser is a smart refresh of what a modern gateway to the web should look and feel like and it generated a lot of goodwill with early users. And then, earlier this month, they released their AI-powered search app, which “browses the internet for you.”

The Browser Company’s new app lets you ask semantic questions to a chatbot, which then summarizes live internet results in a simulation of a conversation. Which is great, in theory, as long as you don’t have any concerns about whether what it’s saying is accurate, don’t care where that information is coming from or who wrote it, and don’t think through the long-term feasibility of a product like this even a little bit.

But the base logic of something like Arc’s AI search doesn’t even really make sense. As Engadget recently asked in their excellent teardown of Arc’s AI search pivot, “Who makes money when AI reads the internet for us?” But let’s take a step even further here. Why even bother making new websites if no one’s going to see them? At least with the Web3 hype cycle, there were vague platitudes about ownership and financial freedom for content creators. To even entertain the idea of building AI-powered search engines means, in some sense, that you are comfortable with eventually being the reason those creators no longer exist.

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Broderick is really good at putting his finger on the flaws of these ideas amid all the noise.
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Dynabook Americas recalls 15.5m Toshiba laptop AC adapters due to burn and fire hazards • CPSC.gov

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Hazard: the laptop AC adapters can overheat and spark, posing burn and fire hazards.

This recall involves AC adapters sold with Toshiba brand personal laptop computers as well as sold separately. They have date codes between April 2008 through December 2012 in either a year month, date format, i.e. April 2008 is 0804, or year week, date format, i.e. week 15 of 2008 is 0815.

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Are there really 15.5 million of these still in use? The oldest is going to be 16 years old, the youngest 12 years old. Though some people might have kept the chargers just to use on newer machines, perhaps.
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Putting your wet iPhone in rice to dry it is a bad move, Apple warns • Macworld

Michael Simon:

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For years, we’ve turned to a simple household staple when we need to save our iPhones from a liquid death: a bag of rice. The method is decidedly low-tech. Just pop your phone in a bag of rice, seal it up, and wait for a day or so. The idea is that the rice will draw the water out from inside the phone before it can fry any internal parts. People who have experienced waterlogged phones swear by it, and there’s tons of anecdotal evidence to show that it does indeed work.

However, researchers have been claiming for years that it’s all a myth and rice doesn’t actually dry your phone faster and could slow down the process, leaving your logic board susceptible to further damage. And a new 2024 support document from Apple actually advises against using rice to dry out your iPhone since it could make matters worse, as “doing so could allow small particles of rice to damage your iPhone.”

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Basically, the phones now are (quick dunk) waterproof; the only place where you might have a problem is the connector, which means the support document is all about dealing with that.
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The death of snow in America: winters are getting permanently warmer • Business Insider

Alexandria Herr:

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Jocie Nelson has been cross-country skiing for as long as she can remember. When she was growing up, the sport was her way of connecting with nature during the long, harsh Minnesota winters, where temperatures often reach the minus 30s Fahrenheit. Thousands of Americans share her enthusiasm: Since high school, Nelson has joined nearly 15,000 other skiers in the American Birkebeiner, a 50km cross-country ski race through the small town of Hayward, Wisconsin. The crowds of spectators line several people deep.

“Everybody is cheering like crazy,” Nelson said of her first time crossing the finish line, “and it seems like they’re all cheering for you.”

Nelson is now approaching her 25th race, but this year, the event is facing major roadblocks. “We’re looking at a low-snow year. These bands of snow just completely have missed Hayward,” Shawn Connelly, the Birkebeiner Ski Foundation’s marketing and communications director, said. Despite worries around cancellation, the Birkebeiner is moving forward, albeit with a shortened and altered course.

Across much of the upper Midwest, last December was the warmest ever recorded. In Minneapolis, it was a tropical 54ºF (12ºC) on Christmas. Minnesota’s State Climatology Office dubbed this year “The Lost Winter.” While the warm weather is in part exacerbated by this year’s El Niño weather pattern, it’s also a sign of what’s to come as the climate warms. February marked the first time Earth warmed 1.5ºC over the prior 12 months, a milestone long dreaded by climate scientists. In other words, this isn’t just a fluke; it’s the beginning of a new normal.

The climate crisis is altering our winters forever — making them warmer, shorter, and less predictable. As a result, communities around the world are hurtling toward what the researchers Alexander Gottlieb and Justin Mankin have dubbed “the snow-loss cliff.” Their research has found that once temperatures reach a certain threshold, snow disappears faster and faster. The magic number, it turns out, is an average winter temperature of 17ºF (-8ºC). After that, the warmer a region gets, the more rapidly it shifts toward a snow-free future.

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To me, that’s a low average temperature, but it’s in the research.
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Google to fix AI picture bot after ‘woke’ criticism • BBC News

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Google is racing to fix its new AI-powered tool for creating pictures, after claims it was over-correcting against the risk of being racist.

Users said the firm’s Gemini bot supplied images depicting a variety of genders and ethnicities even when doing so was historically inaccurate. For example, a prompt seeking images of America’s founding fathers turned up women and people of colour. The company said its tool was “missing the mark”.

“Gemini’s AI image generation does generate a wide range of people. And that’s generally a good thing because people around the world use it. But it’s missing the mark here,” said Jack Krawczyk, senior director for Gemini Experiences. “We’re working to improve these kinds of depictions immediately,” he added.

It is not the first time AI has stumbled over real-world questions about diversity. For example, Google infamously had to apologise almost a decade ago after its photos app labelled a photo of a black couple as “gorillas”.

Rival AI firm, OpenAI was also accused of perpetuating harmful stereotypes, after users found its Dall-E image generator responded to queries for chief executive, for example, with results dominated by pictures of white men.

Google, which is under pressure to prove it is not falling behind in AI developments, released its latest version of Gemini last week.

The bot creates pictures in response to written queries. It quickly drew critics, who accused the company of training the bot to be laughably woke.

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AI your home on Street View • Google Maps Mania

Keir Clarke:

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Have you ever wanted to radically alter the ambiance of your neighborhood? Perhaps you’ve always dreamed of turning your sleepy suburban road into a bustling inner-city street. Or maybe you’ve always wanted to dig up your nearby traffic heavy roads and replace them with green fields and trees. Well now you can – at least virtually.

Panoramai is a new fun tool which allows you to grab Google Maps Street View panoramas from any location in the world and change their appearance based on your own AI prompts. For example the animated GIF above shows my childhood home re-imagined as a Vincent van Gogh painting, as a sc-fi landscape, a post-zombie apocalypse and under 3 feet of water.

You can also change the appearance of your home on Street View using the Netherlands Board of Tourism’s Dutch Cycling Lifestyle map.

It is a matter of great sadness to the Dutch people that people in the rest of the world are not able to live in cycle-friendly environments. Therefore the Netherlands Board of Tourism decided to help the great car-worshiping unwashed picture the beauty of a car free environment. Enter your address into the Dutch Cycling Lifestyle and you can see how your street might look without that noisy road and those dirty cars.

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Though when you go to Panoramai now, it says “We had to turn off the generation of new panoramas for now because of cost. You can still browse pre-computed examples.” AI is pricey!

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Help! AI is stealing my readers • The Honest Broker

Ted Gioia:

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I’ve seen all of the impersonation scams. At least I thought I had until now. Because AI has arrived on the scene.

A few days ago, a friend sent me a photo of a new jazz book. What made this especially interesting is that the author’s last name is Gioia. What an odd coincidence. Gioia is an uncommon name. If there were another jazz writer who shared my name, I’d know about it.

The book is attributed to two authors—Frank Gioia & Ted Alkyer. As it turns out, Alkyer is also a last name familiar to jazz insiders. Frank Alkyer is editor and publisher of the leading jazz magazine Downbeat. Another coincidence!

So I reached out to Frank, and asked him if he knew about this book. He was as shocked as me. Alkyer is also an uncommon name. Neither of us had anything to do with this book. And we don’t know jazz writers with these names—so similar to our own.

You don’t need to be as smart as an Einstein chatbot to figure out what’s happening here. As I told Frank, I’d wager that:
• The book is written by AI
• The people behind it attribute the book to two authors based on us, switching our first names so that no direct impersonation can be proven—ensuring that the book always comes up in the results when somebody does a search for either of us
• Needless to say, these two authors do not exist
• The intent is to fool readers and divert them from anything we’ve written to some crappy AI book.

Both Frank and I filed complaints with Amazon—and the book is no longer listed there. But it’s still available from other retailers. An audiobook has also been released.

A few hours later, a Twitter connection alerted me to another interesting jazz book. It’s written by Luke Ellington.

Luke Ellington? Is he any relation to Duke Ellington?

…It took me decades to become a jazz expert. My writing career really didn’t take off until I was in my forties—because you can’t develop mastery of this material without years of constant effort. Does AI now get to swallow up everything I’ve learned in a few gulps—and then use it to impersonate me?

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Well not exactly – Amazon does that. If books still went through traditional publishers, you’d still be safe. (Thanks Mark C for the link.)
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Fake: it’s only a matter of time until disinformation leads to calamity • Tim Harford

Tim Harford:

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Not long after Eric Hebborn was murdered, an off-the-record conversation with the famed artist-turned-forger was published. On tape, Hebborn made explosive claims about his time as a student at the Royal Academy of Art in the 1950s, where he had been awarded a prestigious prize. Though a gifted draughtsman, he was a surprising choice, because the art of the day was all about high concepts, not realistic depictions. Drawing was an unfashionable business, so how had a mere draughtsman won the prize?

Hebborn explained that, one day, a drunken porter at the Royal Academy was looking for a quiet spot to sleep in the basement and had fashioned a screen made of some of the pictures stored down there. One of those was the only surviving large drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, known as the Burlington House Cartoon, after the Royal Academy’s headquarters. Unfortunately, the porter stacked the Da Vinci against a leaking radiator. By the next morning, the picture had been thoroughly steamed. Only the faintest outline of the sketch remained.

In a panic, the porter summoned the president of the Royal Academy, who summoned the keeper of pictures, who summoned the chief restorer of the National Gallery, who announced that the picture couldn’t be restored, it could only be redrawn. At which point, they sent for star student Eric Hebborn, who wielded his chalk and charcoal in a flawless recreation of the lost original.

Or so Hebborn claimed, noting that it seemed curious that the Royal Academy sold the drawing soon afterwards, and spent some of the money on . . . upgrading its radiators. It was an astonishing story and very hard to check. The drawing was indeed sold to the National Gallery. But one day, in 1987, a man walked into the National Gallery wearing a long coat, paused in front of the drawing, pulled out a shotgun and blasted the artwork. The man, who wanted to make a statement about the social conditions in Britain, was arrested and later confined to an asylum. The National Gallery had the drawing restored, with tiny fragments of paper being painstakingly glued back together. That restoration would have concealed Hebborn’s handiwork, if Hebborn ever touched the cartoon. So — did he?

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*Dirty Harry voice* Well DID HE, PUNK? This is in fact a long piece on the nature of fakery.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Voyager spacecraft has suffered the same fate as HAL: gone mad in the vastness of space. CC-licensed photo by Tutoriales CIS on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. Major Tom too? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Why The New York Times might win its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI • Ars Technica

Timothy Lee and James Grimmelmann:

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This article is written by two authors. One of us is a journalist who has been on the copyright beat for nearly 20 years. The other is a law professor who has taught dozens of courses on IP and Internet law. We’re pretty sure we understand how copyright works. And we’re here to warn the AI community that it needs to take these lawsuits seriously.

In its blog post responding to the Times lawsuit, OpenAI wrote that “training AI models using publicly available Internet materials is fair use, as supported by long-standing and widely accepted precedents.”

The most important of these precedents is a 2015 decision that allowed Google to scan millions of copyrighted books to create a search engine. We expect OpenAI to argue that the Google ruling allows OpenAI to use copyrighted documents to train its generative models. Stability AI and Anthropic will undoubtedly make similar arguments as they face copyright lawsuits of their own.

These defendants could win in court—but they could lose, too. As we’ll see, AI companies are on shakier legal ground than Google was in its book search case. And the courts don’t always side with technology companies in cases where companies make copies to build their systems. The story of MP3.com illustrates the kind of legal peril AI companies could face in the coming years.

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Well, they make an argument. Perhaps Mike Masnick (see below) will be along in a week or so to tell us how wrong they are, because credentials aren’t necessarily what wins legal arguments; the precision of your argument is.
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Has Wired given up on fact checking, given its facts-optional screed against Section 230 that gets almost everything wrong? • Techdirt

Mike Masnick:

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let’s return to this article. The title is “The One Internet Hack That Could Save Everything.” With the provocative subhed: “It’s so simple: Axe 26 words from the Communications Decency Act. Welcome to a world without Section 230.”

Now, we’ve spent the better part of the last 25 years debunking nonsense about Section 230, but this may be the worst piece we’ve ever seen on this topic. It does not understand how Section 230 works. It does not understand how the First Amendment works. It’s not clear it understands how the internet works.
But also, it’s just not well written. I was completely confused about the point that the article is trying to make, and it was only on the third reading that I finally understood the extraordinarily wrong point that is at the heart of the article: that if you got rid of Section 230, websites would have to moderate based on the First Amendment — but also they would magically get rid of harassment and other bad content, but be forced to leave up the good content. It’s magic fairytale thinking that has nothing to do with reality. There’s also some nonsense about privacy and copyright that have nothing to do with Section 230 at all, but the authors seem wholly unaware of that fairly basic fact.

I’m going to skip over the first section of the article, because it’s just confused babble, and move onto some really weird claims about Section 230. Specifically, that it somehow created a business model.

… Literally none of that makes sense, nor is any citation or explanation given for what is entirely a “vibes” based argument. Section 230 has nothing to do with the advertising market directly. Advertising existed prior to Section 230 and has been a way to subsidize content going back centuries. It’s unclear how the authors think Section 230 is somehow responsible for internet advertising as a business model, and the article does nothing to clarify why that would be the case. Because it’s just wrong. There is no way to support it.

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I’m glad that Mike Masnick has decided to go into detail about that terrible, terrible S230 article, because if he had thought it had any merit I’d be seriously worried that I’d lost my bearings. Generally, if I find myself disagreeing with Masnick, I consider my position carefully because there’s a high probability it’s me that’s wrong.
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Google’s retiring of Internet archiving tool draws ire of China researchers • Al Jazeera

Erin Hale:

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Late last year, Google began quietly removing links to cached pages from its search results, a function that had allowed Internet users to view old versions of web pages.

Danny Sullivan, Google’s public liaison for search, confirmed earlier this month that the function had been discontinued. “It was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it,” Sullivan said in a post on X earlier this month.

Although originally introduced to improve internet performance, Google’s cache function had the unintended effect of boosting transparency and became an invaluable resource for researchers.

Academics, journalists and others used cached pages to view past incarnations of websites and deleted content – a particularly useful tool for China’s internet, which Beijing carefully edits to avoid embarrassment and ward off potential dissent.

“The loss of the Google cache function will be a blow to China researchers who have long leaned on this function to preserve access to information that may later be removed, particularly in research citations,” Kendra Schaefer, the head of tech policy research at Trivium China, told Al Jazeera.

A Google spokesperson confirmed the change to Al Jazeera. “Google’s cached page feature was born over two decades ago, at a time when pages might not be dependably available. The web – and web serving as a whole – has greatly improved since then, making the need for cached pages less necessary,” the spokesperson said by email.

China’s “Great Firewall” means that popular sites from Wikipedia to Facebook are inaccessible without a virtual private network, while its government censors trawl the web for sensitive content to remove.

…There are alternatives to Google’s cached pages, namely the non-profit Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

But Google’s removal of cached links makes it harder to know what is missing in the first place, said Dakota Cary, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub.

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The lonely, lonely death of Voyager • Crooked Timber

Doug Muir:

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We thought we knew how [the spacecraft] Voyager would end.  The power would gradually, inevitably, run down.  The instruments would shut off, one by one.  The signal would get fainter.  Eventually either the last instrument would fail for lack of power, or the signal would be lost.

We didn’t expect that it would go mad.

In December 2023, Voyager started sending back gibberish instead of data.  A software glitch, though perhaps caused by an underlying hardware problem; a cosmic ray strike, or a side effect of the low temperatures, or just aging equipment randomly causing some bits to flip.

The problem was, the gibberish was coming from the flight direction software — the operating system, as it were.  And no copy of that operating system remained in existence on Earth.

(This is a problem NASA long since solved.  These days, every space probe that launches, leaves a perfect duplicate back on Earth.  Remember in “The Martian”, how they had another copy of Pathfinder sitting under a tarp in a warehouse?  That’s accurate.  It’s been standard practice for 30 years.  But back in 1977, nobody had thought of that yet.)

Voyager Mission Control used to be a couple of big rooms full of busy people, computers, giant screens.  Now it’s a single room in a small office building in the San Gabriel Valley, in between a dog training school and a McDonalds.  The Mission Control team is a handful of people, none of them young, several well past retirement age. 

And they’re trying to fix the problem.  But right now, it doesn’t look good.  You can’t just download a new OS from 15 billion kilometers away.  (For starters, there isn’t the bandwidth.)  They would have to figure out the problem, figure out if a workaround is possible, and then apply it… all with a round-trip time of 45 hours for every communication with a probe that is flying away from us at a million miles a day.  They’re trying, but nobody likes their odds.

So at some point — not tomorrow, not next week, but at some point in the next few months — they’ll probably have to admit defeat.  And then they’ll declare Voyager 1 officially over, dead and done, the end of a long song.

And that’s all.

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The EU is formalizing rules for taking CO2 out of the atmosphere • The Verge

Justine Calma:

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The European Council and European Parliament reached a provisional agreement on Tuesday to create the first-of-its-kind certification framework for carbon removal technologies. The new climate tech has yet to prove itself at scale, but the EU is already folding it into its plan to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Net zero implies that the bloc would resort to capturing any remaining CO2 emissions that it hasn’t been able to prevent, either by harnessing the natural ability of plants to absorb carbon dioxide or by building technologies that filter CO2 out of the air or seawater.

There are inherent risks to that net-zero strategy — which is why rules like the ones laid out today are so important. They’ll dictate what counts as carbon removal, hopefully sifting out shoddy projects that don’t meaningfully fight climate change. Lax rules — or no rules at all — could give companies a way to keep polluting while misleadingly promising to draw down those emissions later. If those promises fall through, or the technologies they rely on fail, then it leaves behind all of that pollution that could have been prevented in the first place by opting for clean energy instead of carbon removal.

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Formalisation is good: there have been plenty of “set-aside” projects which are anything but in reality. Strong certification is really needed.
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‘Apple Ring’ allegedly in development to rival Samsung Galaxy Ring • MacRumors

Tim Hardwick:

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Apple has toyed with the idea of a ring wearable for several years, as indicated by several patents, but with Samsung preparing to bring its own product to market, the time could be ripe for Apple to follow it with something that embodies CEO Tim Cook’s mantra, “be best, not first.”

According to the Electronic Times, Apple has been paying close attention to the market for signs that a smart ring would be a popular, less intrusive alternative to a watch, that can be worn for longer and is easier to sleep with.

Apple is said to be seriously weighing up the idea as a viable expansion of its wearables lineup, and has been increasingly applying for patents related to an NFC-enabled finger-worn device as it coordinates the timing of the release.

“It seems likely that commercialization is imminent,” said an industry insider quoted in the machine-translated report.

The rumor comes as Samsung prepares to unveil a Galaxy Ring at its second Galaxy Unpacked 2024 event, which is likely to take place in the second half of July. The Korean firm teased the product’s existence at the end of its first Unpacked event in January, and it is now expected to enter mass production in the second half of the year.

Besides its rumored ability to measure blood flow, the Galaxy Ring is also expected to feature ECG monitoring, sleep tracking, and functionalities for controlling other devices and making wireless payments remotely. The device is expected to come in several sizes.

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My reading is this is that Samsung really hopes Apple is developing a ring, because that would validate the ring that it is making. In – surprise! – several sizes.
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Fake funeral live stream scams are all over Facebook • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

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Facebook is awash with scams that direct visitors to fake live streams of funeral services, preying on relatives and friends of the deceased when they might be at their most vulnerable, 404 Media has found. The scams involve pulling details of real deceased people from legitimate funeral services pages and then making copycat announcements, before pushing victims to a site that asks for their credit card information allegedly in order to watch the funeral of their loved one.

The scams cause “panic on the day where you shouldn’t be thinking of that,” the cousin of one recently deceased person, whose name and photo were recently used in a scam, told 404 Media. 404 Media is not publishing his name or that of the deceased relative for privacy reasons. The relative described the scam as “disgusting.”

In that specific case, a Facebook account pointed visitors to a tinyurl link. “Please Like,Share Your Family and Friends,” a post on the Facebook account read, next to a photo of the deceased. “You will get the link once the registration is complete.I introduced this rule only for scams.thank you.” 

That link then went to a website claiming to host a livestream of the deceased’s funeral service, complete with a video player that takes a few seconds to load. “WATCH LIVE NOW,” a button underneath the player reads. On other nearly identical scam sites 404 Media found, clicking such a link directs visitors to enter their credit card information, presumably the point at which the scammers extract value from their unsuspecting victims.

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Facebook has become a place to find all the scammers’ marks in the world in one convenient location.

In passing, 404 Media – set up by journalists laid off by Vice/Motherboard when it hit hard times – gets better and better (because they were and are damn good journalists), and requires email registration on the basis that it lets them stay in touch directly with readers. It’s a smart move, in these times when sites are so plentiful and hard to tell apart.
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Jezebel’s new owner has a request for advertisers: please stop hurting journalism • Check My Ads

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Josh Jackson was shocked when he found out what term, if used in the music publication he co-founded, could automatically strip an article of ad revenue.

It was the word “song.”

That was just one of more than 4,000 “negative keywords” a major advertiser looking to run ads on Paste Magazine, Jackson’s website, included in a brand safety spreadsheet it shared with him.

And now that his magazine resurrected the iconic feminist media outlet Jezebel last November, essential journalism going unfunded because of brand safety concerns has become a more urgent issue. Jezebel has even launched a subscription option to help fund its reporting, filling in a revenue gap created by brand safety tech.

“We’ve been doing this a long time, but hadn’t really felt the effects of brand safety until we purchased Jezebel,” Jackson told Check My Ads. “(We) very quickly got into the deep end on everything brand safety related and it’s just been blowing my mind to see.”

Jackson — or anyone who cares about quality journalism — should find this brand safety technology mind-blowing (and not in a good way).

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Since you wonder: “Check My Ads Institute is an independent watchdog reshaping the digital adtech industry from within its ranks — and building a new sustainable standard in digital advertising.” Interesting lineup of staff and directors, including Jean Donovan, who was recently “let go” from Harvard, allegedly after pressure from Facebook.
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Walmart acquiring smart TV maker Vizio for $2.3bn to bulk up advertising business • Variety

Todd Spangler:

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The companies announced Tuesday that they have entered into an agreement for Walmart to acquire Vizio, a leading seller of value-priced TV sets and connected TV ads in the US. The deal would make Walmart a significant player in connected TV advertising, competing with players including Roku, Amazon, Google/YouTube and Samsung Ads.

The combination promises to accelerate Walmart’s US. advertising business, called Walmart Connect, by bringing together Vizio’s advertising business business with Walmart’s reach and resources. Walmart Connect revenue increased 22% year over year for the quarter ended Jan. 31 (but the company did not report dollar figures). Globally, Walmart’s ad revenue grew by 28% to $3.4 billion for its 2024 fiscal year ended in January. According to Walmart, the deal for Vizio also will let the retailer “connect with and serve its customers in new ways” including through “innovative television and in-home entertainment and media experiences.”

“Put simply, the deal would combine an emerging retail media/direct response powerhouse [in Walmart], with [Vizio’s] vertically integrated, connected TV/branding advertising business (including data) to create a full-funnel offering for advertisers,” New Street Research analyst Dan Salmon wrote in a note. For Walmart, the deal “would have the added benefit of creating an offering that is more attractive to non-endemic advertisers (i.e. beyond third-party sellers transacting on Walmart Marketplace)” to those that don’t sell through Walmart but want to reach viewers on Vizio TVs.

The deal is subject to regulatory approvals and other closing conditions. Vizio’s board has unanimously approved the transaction, and shareholders owning 89% of the voting shares in the company have also OK’d the deal. According to Vizio, no other stockholder approval is required to complete the transaction.

Irvine, Calif.-based Vizio was founded in 2002. Today, Vizio counts more than 500 direct advertiser customers, including “many of the Fortune 500.”

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Advertising! Everyone’s advertising everything to everyone all at once all the time! Advertising! Give me more! (Ignoring Vizio having been successfully sued for unannounced tracking between 2014 and 2017. All in the name of advertising! It was necessary!)
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Finally, scientists uncover the genetic basis of fingerprints • The Scientist Magazine®

James Gaines:

»

[The] story begins in the outer layer of body tissue, called the epithelium. [At the University of Edinburgh, Denis] Headon’s team ultimately found that fingerprints start out looking very similar to hair follicles: Both begin as small discs of cells on the epithelium, and in both cases, the cells turn on genes for a suite of proteins including EDAR and WNT—which are respectively related to how epithelial cells and cells in general migrate, differentiate, and mature. However, hair follicles go on to recruit cells from layers below the epithelium, forming a deep tube where hair will eventually grow. Slight differences in gene expression prevent this recruitment step from happening in fingerprints.

Those same differences in gene expression also seem to set up a Turing pattern, named for the English mathematician Alan Turing who first hypothesized its existence. Back in 1952, Turing suggested that natural biological patterns like stripes or spots could form in the presence of two molecules: a slow-moving activator and a fast-moving inhibitor. The activator would do three things: 1) tell cells to do something, such as make colored pigment; 2) tell cells to make more activator; and 3) tell cells to start making its inhibitor. Meanwhile, the inhibitor tells the cell to slow down activator production (and thus, ultimately, to make less of itself). This means that the activator and inhibitor are always made in overall proportion to each other, and the whole system can propagate from even a single initiation point.

…Some of the team’s colleagues—Benjamin Walker, Adam Townsend, and Andrew Krause—created an online simulator called VisualPDE where folks can experiment with Turing patterns and initiation sites. VisualPDE’s simulation is not unique to fingerprints but can illustrate how small changes can create unique patterns.

Rasmussen says he’d be interested in seeing if scientists could reprogram the process, creating hair follicles or prints where there had been none before. That’s the hope, Headon says: that somewhere down the road this work could lead to therapies for congenital conditions or medical regeneration.

«

Definitely recommend having a play with VisualPDE. This story came out a year ago, but still fun.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: if there’s ever an independently verified piece of information about Neuralink, rather than tweets from Musk, I’ll link to it.

The possible trajectories of billiards (and snooker and pool) balls has enthralled mathematicians for years. CC-licensed photo by Brian DeMaio on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. Break! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

‘They lied’: plastics producers deceived public about recycling, report reveals • The Guardian

Dharna Noor:

»

The industry has known for decades about these existential challenges, but obscured that information in its marketing campaigns, the report shows.

The research draws on previous investigations as well as newly revealed internal documents illustrating the extent of this decades-long campaign. Industry insiders over the past several decades have variously referred to plastic recycling as “uneconomical”, said it “cannot be considered a permanent solid waste solution”, and said it “cannot go on indefinitely”, the revelations show.

The authors say the evidence demonstrates that oil and petrochemical companies, as well as their trade associations, may have broken laws designed to protect the public from misleading marketing and pollution.

In the 1950s, plastic producers came up with an idea to ensure a continually growing market for their products: disposability. “They knew if they focused on single-use [plastics] people would buy and buy and buy,” said Davis Allen, investigative researcher at the CCI and the report’s lead author. At a 1956 industry conference, the Society of the Plastics Industry, a trade group, told producers to focus on “low cost, big volume” and “expendability” and to aim for materials to end up “in the garbage wagon”.

The Society of Plastics is now known as the Plastics Industry Association. “As is typical, instead of working together towards actual solutions to address plastic waste, groups like CCI choose to level political attacks instead of constructive solutions,” Matt Seaholm, president and CEO of the trade group, said in an emailed response to the report.

Over the following decades, the industry told the public that plastics can easily be tossed into landfills or burned in garbage incinerators. But in the 1980s, as municipalities began considering bans on grocery bags and other plastic products, the industry began promoting a new solution: recycling.

The industry has long known that plastics recycling is not economically or practically viable, the report shows. An internal 1986 report from the trade association the Vinyl Institute noted that “recycling cannot be considered a permanent solid waste solution [to plastics], as it merely prolongs the time until an item is disposed of”.

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Not really the message you want to get ahead of sorting the bins for recycling now is it.
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EU accuses TikTok of failing to stop kids pretending to be adults • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

The European Commission (EC) is concerned that TikTok isn’t doing enough to protect kids, alleging that the short-video app may be sending kids down rabbit holes of harmful content while making it easy for kids to pretend to be adults and avoid the protective content filters that do exist.

The allegations came Monday when the EC announced a formal investigation into how TikTok may be breaching the Digital Services Act (DSA) “in areas linked to the protection of minors, advertising transparency, data access for researchers, as well as the risk management of addictive design and harmful content.”

“We must spare no effort to protect our children,” Thierry Breton, European Commissioner for Internal Market, said in the press release, reiterating that the “protection of minors is a top enforcement priority for the DSA.”

This makes TikTok the second platform investigated for possible DSA breaches after X (aka Twitter) came under fire last December. Both are being scrutinized after submitting transparency reports in September that the EC said failed to satisfy the DSA’s strict standards on predictable things like not providing enough advertising transparency or data access for researchers.

But while X is additionally being investigated over alleged dark patterns and disinformation—following accusations last October that X wasn’t stopping the spread of Israel/Hamas disinformation—it’s TikTok’s young user base that appears to be the focus of the EC’s probe into its platform.

…Likely over the coming months, the EC will request more information from TikTok, picking apart its DSA transparency report. The probe could require interviews with TikTok staff or inspections of TikTok’s offices.

«

Once the EU gets its teeth into you, it really bites.
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The epidemic of fraudulent DMCA takedowns • Tax Policy

Dan Neidle:

»

I wrote recently about a fraudulent attempt to use US copyright law to take down an article I’d written which was critical of a fake PR firm, “Mogul Press”. I was shocked to see how they did this: they copied my text into a fake website, then filed a takedown notice at Google claiming my article had copied theirs.

The notice was sent by “LMG Media Group” in the UAE. I don’t believe it exists – but Google rather brilliantly accepts takedown notices without checking if the person filing it exists.

Another identical notice was sent by “Lamar Media Corporation” in the US, which also doesn’t appear to exist. The intended effect is to remove my article from Google searches. Note the unusual wording of the two notices [pictured in the article]: “completely infringing” (which reads like someone without legal training trying to sound like a lawyer).

I wondered if there had been any other similar takedowns, and so searched for other occurrences of that unusual phrase. This search of the Lumen database finds 180 just from “Media Corporation” entities. Each one has identical text, and is sent by a fake company whose name appears to have been randomly generated. Forbidden Stories and rest of world published investigations into Eliminalia, a Spanish company that monetised this practice at scale, using the exact same technique of creating backdated copies and then fraudulently claiming the copy is the original. And Mashable reported on another fraudulent takedown attempt in 2022.

I don’t know if what I’m seeing is Eliminalia, or someone else with a similar business model who was hired by Mogul Press.

There’s this, trying to take down a report of a solicitor failing to appeal a striking-off [graphic in article]. And this, trying to take down another report of that same event [ditto].

With a duplicate from another made-up company (“Ventuky Media Corporation”), and another from “Bryan Media Corporation”, and another from “Yan Media Corporation”, and another from “Richards Media Corporation”, and another from “Venkata Media Corporation”. There are many more.

The fraudulent companies set up automated systems that can file zillions of complaints instantly. The victim, however, is unlikely to have any automated way to file counter-notices… they’ll have to do so individually. It’s also widely believed that the more reports Google receives, the greater the chance it downgrades the target website in its ranking.

«

As he points out, this would be quite easy to prevent if Google were to demand more information about the claimant, including some sort of proof of ID and/or IP ownership, and also some sort of payment (in escrow if necessary, with false claims forfeited).
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Ozempic is taking off with the world’s largest obese population. (It isn’t the US) • WSJ

Dave Sebastian:

»

China has more obese people than anywhere else in the world, and they are increasingly turning to weight-loss drugs to solve the problem.

That is fueling a gray market of drug sellers and buyers, who have little trouble getting around China’s rules on the use of Ozempic. 

Ozempic isn’t available for weight loss in the country, instead being reserved for the treatment of Type 2 diabetes. But users on e-commerce platforms are able to buy the shots, colloquially known as “miracle drugs,” simply by declaring they have been diagnosed with diabetes—without providing proof. 

They aren’t getting a bad deal. On JD.com, a dosage of Ozempic retails for around $139. That is higher than its cost on the country’s national-insurance plan but much cheaper than the $970 some users pay in the US each month. JD.com didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The gray market for Ozempic highlights a conundrum facing China’s government: how to tackle the world’s biggest obesity problem. 

There are about 200 million obese adults in China, and an additional 400 million who are overweight, according to estimates by Jefferies based on official data. China will have another 100 million people with obesity in just over a decade, the investment banking firm predicts, despite the country’s declining population.

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After years of avoiding extradition, Julian Assange’s appeal is likely his last chance. Here’s how it might unfold (and how we got here) • The Conversation

Holly Cullen is an adjunct professor at the University of Western Australia:

»

On February 20 and 21, Julian Assange will ask the High Court of England and Wales to reverse a decision from June last year allowing the United Kingdom to extradite him to the United States.

There he faces multiple counts of computer misuse and espionage stemming from his work with WikiLeaks, publishing sensitive US government documents provided by Chelsea Manning. The US government has repeatedly claimed that Assange’s actions risked its national security.

This is the final avenue of appeal in the UK, although Stella Assange, Julian’s wife, has indicated he would seek an order from the European Court of Human Rights if he loses the application for appeal. The European Court, an international court that hears cases under the European Convention on Human Rights, can issue orders that are binding on convention member states. In 2022, an order from the court stopped the UK sending asylum seekers to Rwanda pending a full review of the relevant legislation.

The extradition process has been running for nearly five years. Over such a long time, it’s easy to lose track of the sequence of events that led to this. Here’s how we got here, and what might happen next.

«

His best chance is if his defence can successfully argue that the US is, in effect, not a safe place to which to extradite somebody.
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How Google is killing independent sites like ours • HouseFresh

Gisele Navarro and Dany Ashton:

»

Google regularly launches updates to its algorithm to continuously improve search results quality. Think of these updates as a refresh of the system where rankings change: some websites see an improvement while others see a decline.

At HouseFresh, we keep an eye on Google’s news and documentation because these updates can literally make or break our website. That said, we don’t write for Google’s robots and always make editorial decisions with our readers in mind.

We know that at the end of the day, Google will reward us if our readers find our articles useful. Or that’s what we thought.

You might have noticed that no matter what you google, there’s always a selection of the same publishers showing up at the top of the results. What do BuzzFeed, Rolling Stone, Forbes, Popular Science, and Better Homes & Gardens have in common? 

They all know which are the best air purifiers for pet hair. Another thing they’ve got in common is that they all also seem to know the best cooling sheets for hot sleepers.

You could play this game yourself. Other searches you could try are: best gifts for mom, best home saunas, best beard products, best gifts for teens, best cocktail kits… the list goes on.

The problem is, for the most part, these publishers recommend products without firsthand testing and simply paraphrase marketing materials and Amazon listing information.

In the last year, we have waited patiently for the many, many, MANY Google algorithm updates to impact these results. 

We were hopeful when Google introduced its reviews system with the Products Review Update back in 2021. It seemed they were finally doing something about one of the worst aspects of the modern internet: searching for information about products only to have to wade through countless reviews from people who had never even seen the thing.

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Well, ’twas ever thus. The big publications would “review” things and get the attention; smaller outlets would struggle to get noticed.
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Subprime intelligence • Where’s Your Ed At

Ed Zitron:

»

These models are not saying “I shall now draw a monkey,” they are saying “I have been asked for something called a monkey, I will now draw on my dataset to generate what is most likely a monkey.” These things are not “learning,” or “understanding,” or even “intelligent” — they’re giant math machines that, while impressive at first, can never assail the limits of a technology that doesn’t actually know anything. 

Despite what fantasists may tell you, these are not “kinks” to work out of artificial intelligence models — these are the hard limits, the restraints that come when you try to mimic knowledge with mathematics. You cannot “fix” hallucinations (the times when a model authoritatively tells you something that isn’t true, or creates a picture of something that isn’t right), because these models are predicting things based off of tags in a dataset, which it might be able to do well but can never do so flawlessly or reliably.

…I believe artificial intelligence companies deeply underestimate how perfect the things around us are, and how deeply we base our understanding and acceptance of the world on knowledge and context. People generally have four fingers and a thumb on each hand, hammers have a handle made of wood and a head made of metal, and monkeys have two legs and two arms. The text on the sign of a store generally has a name and a series of words that describe it, or perhaps its address and phone number.

…there are no essential artificial intelligence use cases, and no killer apps outside of non-generative assistants like Alexa that are now having generative AI forced into them for no apparent reason. I consider myself relatively tuned into the tech ecosystem, and I read every single tech publication regularly, yet I’m struggling to point to anything that generative AI has done other than reignite the flames of venture capital. There are cool little app integrations, interesting things like live translation in Samsung devices, but these are features, not applications. And if there are true industry-changing possibilities waiting for us on the other side, I am yet to hear them outside of the fan fiction of Silicon Valley hucksters.

This entire hype cycle feels specious, though not quite as specious as the metaverse or cryptocurrency boom.

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The mysterious math of billiards tables • Quanta Magazine

David Richeson:

»

In Disney’s 1959 film Donald in Mathmagic Land, Donald Duck, inspired by the narrator’s descriptions of the geometry of billiards, energetically strikes the cue ball, sending it ricocheting around the table before it finally hits the intended balls. Donald asks, “How do you like that for mathematics?”

Because rectangular billiard tables have four walls meeting at right angles, billiard trajectories like Donald’s are predictable and well understood — even if they’re difficult to carry out in practice. However, research mathematicians still cannot answer basic questions about the possible trajectories of billiard balls on tables in the shape of other polygons (shapes with flat sides). Even triangles, the simplest of polygons, still hold mysteries.

«

Of course mathematicians are not satisfied with rectangular billiard tables, so they extend the question of “where will the ball go?” to tables of any and all shapes. But not for nothing is the World Snooker Finals known by many as the Geometry Championships.
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‘Not letting me on Snapchat was the best thing my mum ever did for me’: how to talk to your kids about social media • The Guardian

Annalisa Barbieri:

»

“People do not communicate with authenticity and vulnerability on social media,” explains the ACP registered child and adolescent psychotherapist Ryan Lowe. “As a result, young people have really contorted pictures of what the lives of others are like. Lives on social media are always either exaggeratedly wonderful or exaggeratedly awful, traumatic and extreme. This leaves them trying to form an identity in a hall of mirrors with all the reflections of themselves and others being completely distorted. It takes a strong adolescent to be able to filter the noise of social media out and find an authentic way of developing.”

The specialists also taught me how important it was to model the sort of behaviour you want back from your children. In other words: do as I do, not as I say.

Everything in our house is a discussion. (“My advice,” Prof Peter Fonagy, CEO of the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families, once told me, “is to reach a reasoned democratic agreement with your child, in discussion with them.”)

I would never ask my children to do anything I wasn’t prepared to do myself (with some exceptions). I would always ask for their consent, where appropriate, from when they were small (eg: “Can I use your colouring pens?”; “Can I get you undressed for a bath?”), and – crucially – I’d listen to them if they said no. And I would never say no for the sake of it just because I was the adult. I would give reasons. But – and this is important – their father and I have always been the adults. Sure, they could negotiate, but someone had to take final responsibility, and that person, where social media was concerned, was me. (Their father, my partner, didn’t want her to have social media either, but wasn’t sure how to navigate these tricky waters.)

«

Annalisa really is one of the smartest people around – as much as anything because she is so good at listening to what people are saying, and not forcing her ideas on others.
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Science journal published ‘ridiculous’ graphic of rat with big penis after asking AI for a picture • Daily Telegraph

Sarah Knapton:

»

It might be considered an AI cock-up on a massive scale.

A scientific paper purporting to show the signalling pathway of sperm stem cells has met with widespread ridicule after it depicted a rodent with an anatomically eye-watering appendage and four giant testicles.

The creature, labelled “rat”, was also sitting upright in the manner of a squirrel, while the graphic was littered with nonsensical words such as “dissilced”, “testtomcels” and “senctolic”.

A cut-away image showed “sterrn cells” in a Petri dish being picked up with a spoon.

It appeared in the journal Frontiers in Cell and Development Biology this week alongside several other absurd graphics that had been generated by the AI tool Midjourney.

They included a multicoloured JAK-STAT signalling pathway diagram which experts likened to “some crazy level of Candy Crush” and said was not grounded in “any known biology”.

The paper, written by researchers at the Honghui Hospital in China, has since been retracted by the journal, which issued an apology and said it was working to “correct the record”.

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How, you might wonder, could any journal possibly pass such work for publication? Because Frontiers, where it appeared, is a pay-for-publication journal. The illustration really have to be seen to be believed, though.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Introducing AI systems for tennis line calling has had unexpected effects on umpires’ tendency to wrongly call serves out. CC-licensed photo by Brianna Laugher on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. New calls please. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Air Canada told it is responsible for errors by its website chatbot • Vancouver Sun

Susan Lazaruk:

»

An Air Canada passenger from B.C. [British Columbia] has won his fight after the airline refused him a retroactive discount, claiming it wasn’t responsible for promising the refund because it was made in error by the airline’s online chatbot.

Artificial intelligence law experts say it’s a sign of disputes to come if companies don’t ensure accuracy when increasingly relying on artificial intelligence to deal with customers.

Jake Moffatt booked a flight to Toronto with Air Canada to attend his grandmother’s funeral in 2022 using the website’s chatbot, which advised him he could pay full fare and apply for a bereavement fare later, according to the decision by B.C. civil resolution tribunal.

But an Air Canada employee later told him that he couldn’t apply for the discount after the flight.

“Air Canada says it cannot be held liable for the information provided by the chatbot,” said tribunal member Christopher Rivers in his written reasons for decision posted online. It “suggests the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions,” he said Rivers. “This is a remarkable submission.”

When Moffatt asked Air Canada’s automated response system about reduced fares for those travelling because of a death in the immediate family, the chatbot answered he should submit his claim within 90 days to get a refund.

His total fare for the return trip was $1,640, and he was told the bereavement fare would be about $760 in total, a $880 difference, he told the tribunal. He later submitted a request for the partial refund and included a screenshot of the chatbot conversation, the tribunal said.

…The airline argued it could not be held liable for information provided by one of its agents, servants or representatives, including a chatbot, Rivers said, adding it didn’t say why it believed that.

«

As someone pointed out on Twitter: the point at which personhood is claimed for an AI isn’t when it’s conscious, it’s when an airline needs to get out of paying a refund.
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The effect of front-end vehicle height on pedestrian death risk • ScienceDirect

Justin Tyndall is at the University of Hawaii department of economics:

»

Pedestrian deaths in the US have risen in recent years. Concurrently, US vehicles have increased in size, which may pose a safety risk for pedestrians. In particular, the increased height of vehicle front-ends may present a danger for pedestrians in a crash, as the point of vehicle contact is more likely to occur at the pedestrian’s chest or head.

I merge US crash data with a public data set on vehicle dimensions to test for the impact of vehicle height on the likelihood that a struck pedestrian dies. After controlling for crash characteristics, I estimate a 10 cm increase in the vehicle’s front-end height is associated with a 22% increase in fatality risk. I estimate that a cap on front-end vehicle heights of 1.25 m would reduce annual US pedestrian deaths by 509.

«

Reminds me strongly of the UK’s (and Europe’s) efforts to limit the use of bull bars on the front of cars because they caused extra fatalities and worsened injuries. The Independent campaigned very hard on this in the late 1990s, with some success. Lives were saved.
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EU to hit Apple with first ever fine in €500m music streaming penalty • Financial Times

Javier Espinoza:

»

Brussels is to impose its first ever fine on tech giant Apple for allegedly breaking EU law over access to its music streaming services, according to five people with direct knowledge of the long-running investigation.

The fine, which is in the region of €500m and is expected to be announced early next month, is the culmination of a European Commission antitrust probe into whether Apple has used its own platform to favour its services over those of competitors.

The probe is investigating whether Apple blocked apps from informing iPhone users of cheaper alternatives to access music subscriptions outside the App Store. It was launched after music-streaming app Spotify made a formal complaint to regulators in 2019.

The Commission will say Apple’s actions are illegal and go against the bloc’s rules that enforce competition in the single market, the people familiar with the case told the Financial Times. It will ban Apple’s practice of blocking music services from letting users outside its App Store switch to cheaper alternatives.

Brussels will accuse Apple of abusing its powerful position and imposing anti-competitive trading practices on rivals, the people said, adding that the EU would say the tech giant’s terms were “unfair trading conditions”.

It is one of the most significant financial penalties levied by the EU on big tech companies. A series of fines against Google levied over several years and amounting to about €8bn are being contested in court.

«

True, it’s the first fine from the EU on antitrust, but back in 2011/2012 Apple was in hot water with the EU antitrust group over cartel pricing of its iBooks. That was settled by letting Amazon sell at the cartel prices for two years.
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What tennis reveals about AI’s impact on human behaviour • The Economist

»

Car drivers, financial traders and air-traffic controllers already routinely see their decisions overruled by AI systems put in place to rapidly correct poor judgment. Doctors, judges and even soldiers could be next.

Much of this correction happens out of the public eye, thwarting would-be analysts. But, says [behavioural economist at Northwestern University, David] Almog, “tennis is one of the most visible settings where final decision rights are granted to AI.” That is why, together with colleagues in America and Australia, he has looked at whether tennis umpires and line judges correctly called balls in or out during nearly 100,000 points played in some 700 matches across the world, both before and after the introduction of the Hawk-Eye ball-tracking system in 2006.

The Hawk-Eye system, now used at most elite tournaments, uses between six and ten cameras positioned around the court to create a three-dimensional representation of the ball’s trajectory. This can then be presented on a screen visible to players, spectators and officials—as well as TV viewers. Players can use it to appeal human decisions, with the AI’s verdict considered final. Bad calls from line judges and umpires are now often overturned.

The latest analysis from Mr Almog and his colleagues, published as a preprint last month, showed that Hawk-Eye oversight has prompted human officials to up their game and make 8% less mistakes than before it was introduced. …But when the researchers looked at serves in particular, and especially in cases where the served ball landed within 20mm either side of a line, they were surprised to see the error rate soar. The umpires and line judges, it turned out, had switched strategy. Before Hawk-Eye, they were more likely to call a serve out when it was in. But afterwards, they were even more likely to wave through balls that were actually out.

«

Because, Almog suggests, umpires want to avoid being shown – on a giant screen! – to have interrupted the point wrongly. (He didn’t actually talk to the umpires, but any change would have been unconscious.)

The article makes more general points about humans v AI – but now, bigger tournaments have ELC (electronic line calling) where there isn’t any review: the machines call it, and that’s that.
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Switzerland proposes an UN expert group on solar geoengineering • Climate Change News

Matteo Civillini:

»

Switzerland wants to advance global talks on whether controversial solar geoengineering techniques should be used to compensate for climate change by cooling down the earth.

It is proposing to create the first United Nations expert group to “examine risks and opportunities” of solar radiation management (SRM), a suite of largely untested technologies aimed at dimming the sun.

The panel would be made up of experts appointed by member states of the UN’s environment programme (Unep) and representatives of international scientific bodies, according to a draft resolution submitted by Switzerland and seen by Climate Home.

Governments will negotiate and vote on the proposal at Unep’s meeting due to start at the end of February in Nairobi, Kenya. It has been formally endorsed by Senegal, Georgia, Monaco and Guinea.

A Swiss government spokesperson told Climate Home that SRM is “a new topic on the political agenda” and Switzerland is “committed to ensuring that states are informed about these technologies, in particular about possible risks and cross-border effects”.

Solar geoengineering is a deeply contested topic and scientists are divided over whether it should be explored at all as a potential solution.

Ines Camilloni, a climatology professor at the University of Buenos Aires, welcomed Switzerland’s proposal, saying the UN “is in a good position to facilitate equitable, transparent, and inclusive discussions”.

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As I previously said: first it’s tried by small groups, then it gets government money, then someone ridiculously rich goes and does it on their own. Examples: aircraft, cars, rockets.
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AI and Japan as a safe space • Pure Invention

Matt Alt:

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OpenAI chose to give their new system a Japanese name. Sora means “sky” in Japanese. Its creators chose it, they told the New York Times, because it “evokes the idea of limitless creative potential.”

Limitless it may be, but many of the videos OpenAI released to demonstrate the technology are steeped the imagery of one country, and that’s Japan. The Twitter announcement showcases a drone-like shot of a Tokyo street. Other samples included a night scene in Shibuya (linked to at the top of this post), a scene of rooftops speeding by the window of a Japanese commuter train, and a cute character raking stones in a Zen rock garden. The Sora website is topped by a video of origami birds nesting in a tree.

At first glance the videos impress. But similar to the case of the AI kimono I wrote about last year, those who know Japan will find themselves quickly sliding into the uncanny valley of gibberish street signs and snow on the ground in cherry blossom season and all of the other assorted janky weirdness that comes with generative AI. That weirdness isn’t a bug, but a sort of feature. Because this isn’t really Japan dreamed by a machine — it’s Japan dreamed by a machine that’s been trained on foreign fantasies of Japan. (The baked-in Orientalism of American AI is one of many reasons domestic Japanese startups are scrambling to conjure up their own.)

Far more interesting is the question of why OpenAI chose so many Japanese things (or more precisely, Japanese seeming things) to introduce Sora to the world.

…“Made in Japan” was a joke in the immediate postwar era, and then something akin to a threat in the Eighties. Today it is a badge of authenticity, deployed anywhere status needs to be conferred to a quotidian item: Japanese denim, Japanese whiskey, Japanese cleaning magic, Japanese Breakfast (okay, so that last one’s an indie-pop band.)

Japan may not confer any cool factor in the AI sphere, but it possesses undeniable cool factor in the real world. It’s also safe, in all senses of the word. It’s seen as free from crime and societal strife. It isn’t percieved as a threat, or even involved in touchy geopolitical issues.

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The majority of traffic from Elon Musk’s X may have been fake during the Super Bowl, report suggests • Mashable

Matt Binder:

»

Super Bowl 2024 shattered records, with the NFL championship broadcast on CBS becoming the most-watched televised event in US history.

Also riding high from the big game? Elon Musk’s X. The company formerly known as Twitter published its own press release, lauding Super Bowl LVIII as one of the biggest events ever on the social media platform with more than 10 billion impressions and over 1 billion video views.

However, it appears that a significant portion of that traffic on X could be fake, according to data provided to Mashable by CHEQ, a leading cybersecurity firm that tracks bots and fake users.

According to CHEQ, a whopping 75.85% of traffic from X to its advertising clients’ websites during the weekend of the Super Bowl was fake.

“I’ve never seen anything even remotely close to 50 percent, not to mention 76 percent,” CHEQ founder and CEO Guy Tytunovich told Mashable regarding X’s fake traffic data. “I’m amazed…I’ve never, ever, ever, ever seen anything even remotely close.”

CHEQ’s data for this report is based on 144,000 visits to its clients’ sites that came from X during Super Bowl weekend, from Friday, Feb. 9 up until the end of Super Bowl Sunday on Feb. 11. The data was collected from across CHEQ’s 15,000 total clients. It’s a small portion of the relevant data, and it’s not scientifically sampled, but it nonetheless suggests a dramatic trend.

CHEQ monitors bots and fake users across the internet in order to minimize online ad fraud for its clients. Tytunovich’s company accomplishes this by tracking how visitors from different sources, such as X, interact with a client’s page after they click one of their links. The company can also tell when a bot is passing itself off as a real user, such as when a fraudulent user is faking what type of operating system they are using to view a website.

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Just as relevant is that the proportion of bot traffic from other platforms, such as Facebook and TikTok, is in the low single digits. Seems Elon hasn’t got a handle on the bot problem at all. As any eX-Twitter user could tell you.
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Zero plans for public onshore windfarms submitted last year in England • The Guardian

Fiona Harvey:

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No new proposals for general-use windfarms were submitted for planning permission in England last year, despite the government’s much-vaunted relaxation of planning restrictions.

Only seven applications were submitted for onshore wind turbines for the whole of 2023 in England, new data from the government has shown, and all of those developments were for the replacement of existing turbines or for private sites, where the energy produced is destined for a particular consumer, such as a business.

The number was even lower than the 10 applications submitted in 2022, when the de facto ban was still in force.

Four onshore wind developments were granted planning permission in England last year from prior applications, all of which were either turbine replacements or for private use, and work began on one 4MW project in Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire, which had received permission the year before.

Last September, ministers announced changes to the restrictive regulations that had in effect ruled out onshore wind turbine construction in England since 2015, brought in by David Cameron to appease rightwing Conservatives.

Rishi Sunak agreed to amend the regulations last year under pressure from his backbenchers who were concerned about the impact of the ban on energy prices. But campaigners pointed out that the relaxation of the ban was only partial, and warned it was likely to be ineffective.

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And lo, the campaigners were correct. How unsurprising.
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Welding method drastically cuts time to make mini nuclear reactors • The Times

Emma Powell:

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One of Britain’s oldest steelmakers has developed a manufacturing technique that it claims could drastically reduce the time and cost to produce small modular reactor (SMR) nuclear power stations, which have been proposed as one way to bridge the nation’s energy gap.

Sheffield Forgemasters has become the first to use the so-called electron beam welding method to produce one of the core parts of a small modular reactor (SMR) at scale.

Nuclear pressure vessels are thick steel containers that hold nuclear fuel when the reactors operate and provide one of several barriers that keep radioactive material out of the environment.

Electron beam welding works by firing electrons at an extremely high speed to join two pieces of metal together. The main difference to traditional welding methods is that no third-party material is introduced to make the join.

Using traditional techniques, the welding process alone can take at least 120 to 150 days. This new method can reduce the time to about two hours, according to Jesus Talamantes-Silva, director of research at Sheffield Forgemasters, drastically accelerating the manufacturing of SMRs. “That’s how disruptive this technology is,” he said.

The technique is already being used in the automotive and aerospace industries to produce smaller, relatively low-value components. Forgemasters is the first to use the welding technology to build a full-scale SMR pressure vessel, which weighs about 57 tonnes, has a diameter of three metres and walls with a thickness of 200 millimetres.

Unlike conventional plants, SMRs can be factory built. The government wants to open up far more areas as potential sites, replacing rules that allow nuclear power stations only in eight named locations, as it attempts to reach a target of 24 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2050, from 6GW at present.

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If only there were a similar way to speed up the approval process by the same proportion.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new bill in California bans “hidden fees” that are added when a bill is totalled. So upfront prices will rise, unsurprisingly. CC-licensed photo by Christian Newton on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

OpenAI introduces Sora, its text-to-video AI model • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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OpenAI is launching a new video-generation model, and it’s called Sora. The AI company says Sora “can create realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions.” The text-to-video model allows users to create photorealistic videos up to a minute long — all based on prompts they’ve written.

Sora is capable of creating “complex scenes with multiple characters, specific types of motion, and accurate details of the subject and background,” according to OpenAI’s introductory blog post. The company also notes that the model can understand how objects “exist in the physical world,” as well as “accurately interpret props and generate compelling characters that express vibrant emotions.”

Prompt: A stylish woman walks down a Tokyo street filled with warm glowing neon and animated city signage. She wears a black leather jacket, a long red dress, and black boots, and carries a black purse. She wears sunglasses and red lipstick. She walks confidently and casually. The street is damp and reflective, creating a mirror effect of the colorful lights. Many pedestrians walk about.

The model can also generate a video based on a still image, as well as fill in missing frames on an existing video or extend it. The Sora-generated demos included in OpenAI’s blog post include an aerial scene of California during the gold rush, a video that looks as if it were shot from the inside of a Tokyo train, and others. Many have some telltale signs of AI — like a suspiciously moving floor in a video of a museum — and OpenAI says the model “may struggle with accurately simulating the physics of a complex scene,” but the results are overall pretty impressive.

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This is really amazing. Sam Altman was accepting suggestions on eX-Twitter, and then returning the outputs. Also amazing.
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How I fell for an Amazon scam call and handed over $50,000 • The Cut

Charlotte Cowles:

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On a Tuesday evening this past October, I put $50,000 in cash in a shoe box, taped it shut as instructed, and carried it to the sidewalk in front of my apartment, my phone clasped to my ear. “Don’t let anyone hurt me,” I told the man on the line, feeling pathetic.

“You won’t be hurt,” he answered. “Just keep doing exactly as I say.”

Three minutes later, a white Mercedes SUV pulled up to the curb. “The back window will open,” said the man on the phone. “Do not look at the driver or talk to him. Put the box through the window, say ‘thank you,’ and go back inside.”

The man on the phone knew my home address, my Social Security number, the names of my family members, and that my 2-year-old son was playing in our living room. He told me my home was being watched, my laptop had been hacked, and we were in imminent danger. “I can help you, but only if you cooperate,” he said. His first orders: I could not tell anyone about our conversation, not even my spouse, or talk to the police or a lawyer.

Now I know this was all a scam — a cruel and violating one but painfully obvious in retrospect. Here’s what I can’t figure out: Why didn’t I just hang up and call 911? Why didn’t I text my husband, or my brother (a lawyer), or my best friend (also a lawyer), or my parents, or one of the many other people who would have helped me? Why did I hand over all that money — the contents of my savings account, strictly for emergencies — without a bigger fight?

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Yes, it was a big fat scam. Also: Cowles is the personal finance columnist for NY Mag. Somehow I’m not sure I would follow her personal finance advice that closely after this.
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Apple confirms iOS 17.4 removes Home Screen web apps in the EU: here’s why • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

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Last week, iPhone users in the European Union noticed that they were no longer able to install and run web apps on their iPhone’s Home Screen in iOS 17.4. Apple has added a number of features over the years to improve support for progressive web apps on iPhone. For example, iOS 16.4 allowed PWAs to deliver push notifications with icon badges.

One change in iOS 17.4 is that the iPhone now supports alternative browser engines in the EU. This allows companies to build browsers that don’t use Apple’s WebKit engine for the first time. Apple says that this change, required by the Digital Markets Act, is why it has been forced to remove Home Screen web apps support in the European Union.

Apple explains that it would have to build an “entirely new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS” to address the “complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps using alternative browser engines.”

This work “was not practical to undertake given the other demands of the DMA and the very low user adoption of Home Screen web apps,” Apple explains. “And so, to comply with the DMA’s requirements, we had to remove the Home Screen web apps feature in the EU.”

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All the EU’s fault. Well of course it is.
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The puzzling testimony of Craig Wright, self-styled inventor of bitcoin • WIRED

Condé Nast:

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Among various acts of alleged forgery, [opposing barrister Jonathan] Hough charged that [Craig] Wright backdated documents to make them seem like precursors to the original 2008 Bitcoin white paper; manipulated email communications in support of his claim to be Nakamoto; inserted material post-factum into his academic papers to imply he conceived of Bitcoin long before its release; and used ChatGPT to help create additional forgeries after experts cast doubt over existing materials. The specific discrepancies identified by Hough included anachronistic use of fonts, metadata that implied computer clocks had been manipulated, internal time stamps that contradicted the outward-facing dating of documents, and more.

Hough gave the appearance of trying to construct an exhaustive catalog of discrete pieces of evidence that, combined, painted a picture of fraud “on an industrial scale,” as he put it in his opening arguments.

In some respects, the cross-examination process was less about Wright’s responses, says Lindsay Gledhill, IP partner at law firm Harper James, and more about the performance of Hough. It was “about the barrister’s grinding, relentless list of detail on detail,” she says.

For every anomaly presented by [opposing client] COPA, Wright supplied an explanation. He claimed, variously, that a printing error had caused a misalignment of pixels that gave the appearance of tampering; the complexity of the IT systems used in the editing and storage of documents was not reflected in the testing conducted by the experts; and that his documents may have been altered by staff members in whose custody they had been left. In instances where Wright agreed that a document was inauthentic, he said he had fallen victim to cybersecurity breaches, had never intended to rely on them to support his claim, or implied that documents had been planted by adversaries to undermine him.

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The trial continues: there are two weeks more of evidence. It’s a judge, not a jury trial.
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A new law banning ‘hidden fees’ takes aim at restaurant service charges • Los Angeles Times

Stephanie Breijo:

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On July 1, Senate Bill 478, which Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law in October, is set to prohibit “junk fees” across a wide swath of businesses, including online ticket sales, hotels, restaurants, bars and delivery apps.

Sens. Bill Dodd (D-Napa) and Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), who co-wrote the bill, say it will offer greater protections for consumers.

“These deceptive fees prevent us from knowing how much we will be charged at the outset,” Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, who co-sponsored the measure, said in a statement the day it was signed. “They are bad for consumers and bad for competition. … With the signing of SB478, California now has the most effective piece of legislation in the nation to tackle this problem. The price Californians see will be the price they pay.”

Many owners of restaurants and bars rely on now-ubiquitous surcharges to offer employee benefits such as healthcare and higher wages and often note surcharges on menus; some are listed as “elective,” left to the discretion of the diner. As implementation of the law looms, some now say the consequences could be disastrous and “upend” the industry.

The restaurants will need to factor surcharge fees into menu prices, as opposed to simply advertising them at the end of a bill, state officials said.

“At this point, we are going to have to raise our prices a big chunk,” said James Beard Award-winning restaurateur Caroline Styne, co-owner and wine director of the Lucques Group of restaurants and wine director of Hollywood Bowl Food & Wine.

For instance, the famous Ode to Zuni roast chicken with fennel panzanella at A.O.C. is currently priced at $39 and will likely rise to $49 once the law goes into effect, she said.

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The prices aren’t changing though, are they? It’s just that the charges aren’t being hidden until people come to pay.
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Pakistani content moderators are exhausted and stuck • Rest of World

Zuha Siddiqui:

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It was August 2020, Pakistan was under a Covid-19 lockdown, and Asif, who had just graduated with a master’s degree in project management, was struggling to find a job. At the same time, Chinese video-sharing apps like TikTok and Bigo Live were desperately scouting for content moderators in Pakistan. The platforms wanted to hire locally to appease the government, which had accused them of circulating “obscene” and “unlawful” content.

Through LinkedIn, Asif landed a job as a content moderator at Bigo Live. “I didn’t think much of it at the time, because I just wanted a job,” he told Rest of World, requesting a pseudonym because he feared reprisal for breaking a nondisclosure agreement with his employer.

But the stopgap job has now become his career — one he never wanted, and which he is unable to exit despite attempts.

“Everyone who works in this field is there because they have no choice. It’s something you end up in, and then you are just stuck,” said Asif, who moved to Malaysia in April 2023 to work at Accenture, TikTok’s content moderation contractor in South Asia. “No one wants to be a content moderator forever.”

Over a dozen Pakistani professionals who worked in content moderation jobs as a temporary resort due to a lack of employment options told Rest of World they were stuck in a career that was unfulfilling — one that felt like working at a “sweatshop,” because their experience was not transferable. They have degrees in project management, environmental science, engineering, and business administration, and believe that working as content moderators has stunted their careers. 

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The most thankless job; the dead-end career. And no matter how good AI gets, it’s impossible to see it completely wiping out the need for humans to make these decisions.
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Zoe Schiffer’s ‘Extremely Hardcore’ shows how Elon Musk broke Twitter • The Washington Post

Quinta Jurecic:

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Musk’s gravitational self-regard tends to collapse all reporting on him into a character study of his whims. Schiffer does her best to escape that orbit, focusing instead on the experiences of the Twitter employees whose lives were almost unilaterally upended by the takeover. Musk is, quite simply, a terrible boss. He makes unreasonable demands, refuses to listen to advice and puts his current and former employees in danger with alarming regularity by unleashing armies of his followers to harass those who cross him. In perhaps the best-known instance, Yoel Roth, who formerly led the company’s now-decimated efforts to make the platform’s users safe from hate speech and harassment, received waves of death threats after Musk outrageously implied that he was sympathetic to paedophiles.

…What matters is money, and Musk has been allowed to acquire enough of it that he appears to be able to do whatever he likes. Even in the instances in “Extremely Hardcore” when Musk is shown being briefly held to account, it’s almost always the influence of money that has led to his comeuppance. His desire to turn Twitter into a playground for the worst parts of human nature has been mitigated only by the squeamishness of advertisers who don’t want their products displayed alongside posts by neo-Nazis. When he was forced to go through with the purchase, it was because of a body of corporate law that privileges the interests of shareholders above all else — an outcome, law professor Ann Lipton has argued, that is “objectively ludicrous” in the case of a platform like Twitter with such “immense social importance.”

Perhaps, then, it shouldn’t be a surprise that so much of Musk’s focus since acquiring the company has been on attacking the few gadflies that remain.

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Yes but look if he wasn’t doing this he’d be firing space cannons into the atmosphere to try to promote global cooling which would inevitably go wrong even though he’d been told it was a bad idea.
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NHS nurses being investigated for ‘industrial-scale’ qualifications fraud • The Guardian

Denis Campbell:

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More than 700 nurses are caught up in a potential scandal, which a former head of the Royal College of Nursing said could put NHS patients at risk.

The scam allegedly involves proxies impersonating nurses and taking a key test in Nigeria, which must be passed for them to become registered and allowed to work in the UK.

“It’s very, very worrying if … there’s an organisation that’s involving themselves in fraudulent activity, enabling nurses to bypass these tests, or if they are using surrogates to do exams for them because the implication is that we end up in the UK with nurses who aren’t competent,” said Peter Carter, the ex-chief executive of the RCN and ex-chair of three NHS trusts, calling it an “industrial-scale fraud”.

He praised the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) for taking action against those involved “to protect the quality of care and patient safety and the reputation of nurses”.

Nurses coming to work in the UK must be properly qualified, given nurses’ role in administering drugs and intravenous infusions and responding to emergencies such as a cardiac arrest, Carter added.

Forty-eight of the nurses are already working as nurses in the NHS because the NMC is unable to rescind their admission to its register, which anyone wanting to work as a nurse or midwife in Britain has to be, unless directed to do so by an independent panel at a hearing. In the meantime, it has told them to retake the test to prove their skills are good enough to meet its standards but cannot suspend them.

The 48 are due to face individual hearings, starting in March, at which they will be asked to explain how they apparently took and passed the computer-based test (CBT) of numeracy and clinical knowledge taken at the Yunnik test centre in the city of Ibadan. At the hearings, a panel may direct the NMC to remove individuals from the register.

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Along the lines of the HVAC article from earlier this week: junk qualifications in professional spaces. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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This iOS trojan is harvesting facial-recognition data • PC Mag Australia

Michael Kan:

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A cybersecurity company has spotted what might be the first iOS Trojan that’s designed to steal facial-recognition data from users. 

The iOS malware, dubbed GoldPickaxe, has been targeting users in Thailand and possibly Vietnam, according to Group-IB, a cybersecurity provider based in Singapore. 

The malware will harvest biometric data, likely because banks and government agencies in Southeast Asia have been adopting facial-recognition scans to unlock customer access. 

“To exploit the stolen biometric data, the threat actor utilizes AI face-swapping services to create deepfakes by replacing their faces with those of the victims,” Group-IB says in the report. “This method could be used by cybercriminals to gain unauthorized access to the victim’s banking account—a new fraud technique, previously unseen by Group-IB researchers.”

(Credit: Group-IB)
The company has so far observed GoldPickaxe disguising itself as Thai government service apps, and then requesting that users take a photo of their ID card and undergo a facial scan.

An Android version was also uncovered with even more capabilities. However, the malware isn’t circulating on official app stores. Nor does it exploit any iOS vulnerabilities. Instead, the creators of the malware have been tricking victims into installing the malicious app and then granting all the necessary configurations, including powerful device permissions via Apple’s TestFlight or Mobile Device Management profile system.

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Apple phone phishing scams getting better • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

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A new phone-based phishing scam that spoofs Apple Inc. is likely to fool quite a few people. It starts with an automated call that display’s Apple’s logo, address and real phone number, warning about a data breach at the company. The scary part is that if the recipient is an iPhone user who then requests a call back from Apple’s legitimate customer support Web page, the fake call gets indexed in the iPhone’s “recent calls” list as a previous call from the legitimate Apple Support line.

Jody Westby is the CEO of Global Cyber Risk LLC, a security consulting firm based in Washington, D.C. Westby said earlier today she received an automated call on her iPhone warning that multiple servers containing Apple user IDs had been compromised (the same scammers had called her at 4:34 p.m. the day before, but she didn’t answer that call). The message said she needed to call a 1-866 number before doing anything else with her phone.

…KrebsOnSecurity called the number that the scam message asked Westby to contact (866-277-7794). An automated system answered and said I’d reached Apple Support, and that my expected wait time was about one minute and thirty seconds. About a minute later, a man with an Indian accent answered and inquired as to the reason for my call.

Playing the part of someone who had received the scam call, I told him I’d been alerted about a breach at Apple and that I needed to call this number. After asking me to hold for a brief moment, our call was disconnected.

No doubt this is just another scheme to separate the unwary from their personal and financial details, and to extract some kind of payment (for supposed tech support services or some such). But it is remarkable that Apple’s own devices (or AT&T, which sold her the phone) can’t tell the difference between a call from Apple and someone trying to spoof Apple.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified