Climate change is coming for World Cup skiing, creating slushy slopes on competition days. CC-licensed photo by Manuel Bierbauer on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Surely not again. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Did climate change help this skier achieve the impossible? • WIRED
Charlie Metcalfe:
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After a big mistake on his first run, Daniel Yule assumed he was out of the men’s slalom at this season’s Alpine Ski World Cup. “I’d already packed my bags, and I was ready to go back to the hotel,” he said in a TV interview after last weekend’s event in Chamonix, France.
Instead, his time was just good enough to scrape into the second round. From there, in last place, the Swiss skier went on to win the entire event. Never before in 58 years of the competition had someone risen from such a low position to claim the trophy in a single run. It was a testament to Yule’s skiing—but also to the unignorable reality of climate change.
The temperature that day in Chamonix had risen to an extraordinary 12ºC (54ºF)—far higher than the average maximum in February of –1ºC. Competition rules stipulate that slalom skiers perform their second run in reverse order of their rank after the first—meaning that Yule, in last place, would go first on the second run on an unbroken piste. His competitors would be following on a slope rapidly melting under the midday sun, carved up by those before them, and the winner would be whoever clocked the lowest aggregate time across their two runs. “I was definitely lucky,” Yule said.
Slalom skiing demands that competitors navigate their way around a series of gates as they descend. Turning, therefore, is the defining factor of a race. When skiers perform first, like Yule in his second run, they’re able to choose where they turn around each gate. As they do this, the pressure of their skis creates ruts in the snow. Anybody who follows is then, to an extent, forced into these ruts, and as they deepen, it becomes harder for subsequent skiers to follow lines that suit their own style.
…Europe experienced its second-warmest year on record in 2023, and the Alps are warming 2.5 times faster than the rest of the planet according to the European Environment Agency. According to an analysis published last year, the average temperature in the Alps has risen by 0.5ºC every decade over the past 30 years.
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Warm-weather activities are also having to consider excessive temperatures during the summer.
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Special report: Apple Inc. secures iWork.ai domain, a strategic move in the AI landscape • BuyAiDomains.com
Geoff Lyman:
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we’ve uncovered that Apple Inc. has recently acquired the domain name iWork.ai. A WHOIS lookup confirmed Apple Inc., Cupertino, as the new owner, signaling a bold move by the tech behemoth.
Apple’s iWork suite, known for its seamless web-based services facilitating document sharing and collaboration, is on the brink of a revolutionary transformation. Originally launched as iWork.com in January 2009 and later phased out in 2012 in favor of iCloud, iWork’s pivot towards AI integration marks Apple’s foray into the competitive AI arena. This shift is not just a resurgence of a service but a strategic response to rivals like Microsoft, who have been leading in AI and business integrations:
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I checked this, and a WHOIS on iwork.ai indeed shows it as being registered to Apple. Intriguing move: is Apple going to push an LLM into Pages, or Numbers, or Keynote? Any of them would make some sense. (For completeness, none of Numbers.ai, Pages.ai or Keynote.ai shows up at present as being registered to Apple. Though they are registered.)
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A crowd destroyed a driverless Waymo car in San Francisco – The Verge
Wes Davis:
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A person jumped on the hood of a Waymo driverless taxi and smashed its windshield in San Francisco’s Chinatown last night around 9PM PT, generating applause before a crowd formed around the car and covered it in spray paint, breaking its windows, and ultimately set it on fire. The fire department arrived minutes later, according to a report in The Autopian, but by then flames had already fully engulfed the car.
At the moment, no outlets seem to have reported a motive for the attack. Waymo representative Sandy Karp told The Verge via email that the fully autonomous car “was not transporting any riders” when it was attacked and fireworks were tossed inside the car, sparking the flames. Public Information Officer Robert Rueca of San Francisco’s police department confirmed in an email to The Verge that police responded at “approximately” 8:50PM PT to find the car already on fire, adding that there were “no reports of injuries.”
…The fire takes place against the backdrop of simmering tension between San Francisco residents and automated vehicle operators. The California DMV suspended Waymo rival Cruise’s robotaxi operations after one of its cars struck and dragged a pedestrian last year, and prior to that, automated taxis had caused chaos in the city, blocking traffic or crashing into a fire truck. Just last week, a Waymo car struck a cyclist who had reportedly been following behind a truck turning across its path.
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Might be able to glimpse some semblance of a motive stemming from the latter event.
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‘Our kids are suffering’: calls for ban on social media to protect under-16s • The Guardian
Heather Stewart:
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Despite the acknowledged dangers, few experts and campaigners the Guardian spoke to believed an outright ban on social media use by under-16s was workable, or even desirable – though all are united in believing tech firms must do more.
“The people we really want to be taking responsibility for children being safe online are the tech companies,” said Rani Govender, the senior policy officer at the NSPCC.
“We completely recognise why so many parents and families are worried about this, but we think it keeps coming back to: how can we make these apps, these games, these sites, safer by design for children?”
She pointed to the importance of implementing requirements in the Online Safety Act for firms to take a tougher approach to enforcing minimum age limits for creating social media accounts, which are widely flouted.
The media regulator Ofcom is in the process of publishing codes of conduct that will set out in detail firms’ responsibilities on this and other issues.
…Just this week, academic research suggested the video-sharing app TikTok would serve up increasingly misogynistic content to boys who sought content about loneliness, or asked questions about masculinity.
…Andy Burrows is adviser to the Molly Rose Foundation, set up in Molly Russell’s memory to campaign for change. He warned against the temptation to shut off social media altogether for children who need to learn to navigate the online world.
“The idea of pulling up the drawbridge may seem a superficially attractive and easy solution, but I think it comes with potential unintended consequences, and in particular it risks delaying and perhaps even intensifying the risks that young people will face when they do go online,” he said.
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“Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement • Anil Dash
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here’s the thing: being able to say, “wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement. Because what it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that’s supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that’s not owned by any one company, that can’t be controlled by any one company, and that allows people to have ownership over their work and their relationship with their audience.
Podcasting as a technology grew out of the early era of the social web, when the norms of technology creators were that they were expected to create open systems, which interoperated with tools by other creators and even other companies. This was based on the successes of earlier generations of the internet, like email and even the web itself. Podcasting was basically the last such invention to become mainstream, with millions of people listening every day, and countless people able to create in the medium. And of course, it creates tons of oppportunities for businesses too, whether it’s people making amazing podcasts like Roman Mars does, or giants like Apple or Spotify building businesses around the medium.
Contrast this to other media formats online, like YouTube or Tiktok or Twitch, which don’t rely on open systems, and are wholly owned by individual tech companies. On those platforms, creators are constantly chasing the latest algorithmic shifts, and are subject to the whims of advertising algorithms that are completely opaque. If a creator gets fed up enough to want to leave a platform, they’re stuck — those viewers or listeners are tied to the company that hosts the content.
…What podcasting holds in the promise of its open format is the proof that an open web can still thrive and be relevant, that it can inspire new systems that are similarly open to take root and grow. Even the biggest companies in the world can’t displace these kinds of systems once they find their audiences. And that’s not to say that there aren’t shortcomings or problems with these systems, too. But, for example, when someone makes a podcast that’s about encouraging hate, there’s no one centralized system that can automatically suggest it to an audience and push them down a path of further radicalization.
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200-foot radio station tower stolen without a trace in Alabama, silencing small town’s voice • Associated Press
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The theft of a giant radio tower has silenced what used to be the voice of a small Alabama town and the surrounding county, the radio station’s general manager said.
A thief or thieves made off with the 200-foot (61-meter) tower, shutting down WJLX radio in Jasper, Alabama. So far, no arrests have been made.
“The slogan of our station is the sound of Walker County, and right now with our station down, the community has lost its sound and lost its voice,” WJLX General Manager Brett Elmore told The Associated Press. “This hurts, and it hurts our community.”
The theft was discovered Feb. 2, when a maintenance crew arrived in the wooded area where the tower once stood and found it gone. They also found that every piece of broadcasting equipment stored in a nearby building had also been stolen.
“To break into my building and steal all my equipment, and the tower?” Elmore said. “Hell, leave me the tower — that’s the most expensive thing to replace.”
Elmore said he suspects that the tower’s guy wire was cut first, which would have brought the structure to the ground. Then he believes it was cut into smaller pieces and hauled away. “Some pretty simple tools you could get from Home Depot could cut this up in no time,” he said.
The station had no insurance on the tower or the equipment, and he estimates that it will take $60,000 to $100,000 to rebuild. “We’re a small market, and we don’t have that kind of money,” he said.
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It’s like an unpleasant future is here, but, happily, not evenly distributed.
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Is the media prepared for an extinction-level event? • The New Yorker
Clare Malone:
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One school of thought holds that outlets should focus largely on improving the user experience of their existing subscribers. Making a site’s home page more personalized is one example. The former L.A. Times executive likened it to what Netflix does for its customers; outlets could help people sift through reams of stories, and find the ones they’ll be most interested in. Of course, that kind of increased algorithmic discretion would raise journalistic alarm bells, particularly at newspapers, where the editorial judgment of what makes the front page is core to newsroom culture. The Times has recently pushed for shorter articles, which is meant to “meet our readers where they are”—as is, presumably, its rolling blog-like coverage of major events. These formats also dumb the product down a bit. Then again, it wasn’t so long ago that journalists doing ad reads on podcasts was uncharted territory. Norms change, particularly when business is bad. “Netflix spends a billion dollars in R. & D.,” the former executive told me, largely on data scientists, engineers, and designers who help users discover content they’ll love. Newsrooms might also need to approach the problem in a more methodical, tech-driven manner.
Which brings us back to the spectre of A.I. Large language models have trawled through the vast archives of sites and trained themselves not just on reported information but on the original work of critics and the pithy takes of bloggers. Aggregation can already be easily automated. A.I. might soon be able to write a decent movie review or a piece of compelling fiction, and cheaply animate companion graphics for a TV news segment; it can do a passing job of many of these tasks already. But AI won’t be able to report out a scoop. Reporting still has singular value if outlets can figure out the right way to wring it out.
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The question of how the hell you make money from media is more and more urgent. Next link: how not to do it.
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The Messenger, and why American media companies need better owners • The Washington Post
Erik Wemple:
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behind-the-scenes tensions at the Messenger speak to complications in execution. “Jimmy [Finkelstein, the chief executive and founder of the Messenger] was spending time fuming and sort of tone-policing, what headlines would say, what the mix was on the homepage,” said Marc Caputo, a former member of the Messenger’s politics team, on a podcast with fellow former colleagues. “But you’re a businessman. Focus on the f—ing business!”
Former journalists at the Messenger tell me that Finkelstein was constantly pushing for this story or that story to be added to or removed from the homepage, usually in the interest of achieving the balance that was so key to the site’s identity. “One of his obsessions was the homepage and making sure it wasn’t too anti-Trump,” said one former reporter.
Another said this: “Jimmy’s idea of objective news is news without context.” And context is seldom friendly to former president Donald Trump. With any luck, the Messenger’s downfall will end the faux-visionary chatter about centrist news, an unattainable ideal that breaks down whenever its propagators are forced to identify what constitutes centrism. And as for the audience for down-the-middle news — sure, most people want unbiased coverage, but they also want free coverage. Who’s to say the non-paywalled site wasn’t just attracting extremist cheapskates?
An old pal of Trump’s, Finkelstein would often urge action on his political hobbyhorses, including the possibility that former first lady Michelle Obama would swoop in and secure the Democratic presidential nomination.
The Messenger’s rank-and-file staffers insist that they teamed up like an offensive line to block Finkelstein’s forays and prevent them from steering the site’s offerings. At least one of the founder’s blitzes broke through, however, as when a top editor directed colleagues last November not to allow any more coverage of Trump’s civil fraud trial in New York to “slip” onto the homepage. A spokesperson for the Messenger told the news site Semafor that the messages in question were being “misinterpreted.”
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“An old pal of Trump’s”. In the literal and metaphorical sense: Finkelstein is 75, Trump 77. Wemple’s wider point, that there are some crummy media owners in the US, might not be news, but it’s a problem.
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The Norwegian sovereign wealth fund’s $92mn Excel error • FT Alphaville
Robin Wigglestowrth:
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Here’s an NBIM employee called “Simon” recounting the debacle to the report’s author, Tone Danielsen. Alphaville’s emphasis below:
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Last year (spring 2022) we had an off-site. One of our workshops was on “Mistakes and how to deal with them”. We wrote post-it notes, classifying them into different categories from harmless to no-goes. One of my post-it notes, I remember it vividly, read: Miscalculation of the Ministry of Finance benchmark. I placed it in the category unforgivable.
When I wrote that note, I honestly couldn’t even dare to think about the consequences . . . And less than a year later, I did exactly that. My worst nightmare. It was a manual mistake. My mistake. I used the wrong date, December 1st instead of November 1st which is clearly stated in our mandate.
The mistake was not revealed until months later, by the Ministry of Finance. They reported back that the numbers did not add up. I did all the numbers once more, and the cause of the mistake was identified. I immediately reported to Patrick [Global Head] and Dag [Chief]. I openly express that this was my mistake, and mine alone. I felt miserable and was ready to take the consequences — whatever they might be.
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We’ve all made Excel mistakes – the report only references “gigantic spreadsheets”, which we assume has to mean Microsoft’s finest product – but this must surely be the most consequential misdated cell in history.
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Misdated cell, sure, but there have ben some pretty consequential errors around Excel renaming genes.
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How to cut glass underwater with scissors: the Rehbinder effect explained • HotDailys
Abigail Smith:
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The Rehbinder effect, named after the Soviet chemist Pavel Rehbinder, is the reduction of the strength and cohesion of solid materials when they are in contact with certain liquids or gases. This effect occurs because the liquid or gas molecules adsorb onto the surface of the solid, creating a thin layer that lowers the surface energy and the interatomic bonds. As a result, the solid becomes more brittle and easier to fracture.
One of the most striking demonstrations of the Rehbinder effect is cutting glass underwater with a scissors. Glass is normally a very hard and strong material, but when it is submerged in water, it becomes much weaker and more susceptible to cracking. This is because water molecules adhere to the glass surface, weakening the bonds between the glass atoms. By applying a small force with a scissors, one can create a crack that propagates through the glass, cutting it into pieces.
The Rehbinder effect is not limited to glass and water, but can occur with various combinations of solids and liquids or gases. For example, metals can be cut with a knife when they are immersed in mercury, and rocks can be broken with a hammer when they are wetted with ethanol. The Rehbinder effect can also be influenced by factors such as temperature, pressure, pH, and electric fields.
The effect has fantastic practical implications for various fields of science and engineering. For example, it can be used to improve the machining and processing of materials, like cutting, drilling, and polishing. It can also help control the fracture and failure of materials, by preventing cracks from spreading or inducing cracks for controlled demolition. Additionally, the Rehbinder effect can be used to alter the properties and functions of materials, such as changing electrical conductivity, optical transparency, or magnetic behavior.
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I was today years old when I came across this, and if you knew it earlier then I’m impressed.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 