The price of LEDs has fallen exponentially, and they have cut lighting costs enormously, creating new possibilities for displays. CC-licensed photo by Yves Sorge on Flickr.
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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. Bright and early. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Scientists resort to once-unthinkable solutions to cool the planet • WSJ
Eric Niiler:
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Dumping chemicals in the ocean? Spraying saltwater into clouds? Injecting reflective particles into the sky? Scientists are resorting to once unthinkable techniques to cool the planet because global efforts to check greenhouse gas emissions are failing.
These geoengineering approaches were once considered taboo by scientists and regulators who feared that tinkering with the environment could have unintended consequences, but now researchers are receiving taxpayer funds and private investments to get out of the lab and test these methods outdoors.
The shift reflects growing concern that efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions aren’t moving fast enough to prevent the destructive effects of heat waves, storms and floods made worse by climate change. Geoengineering isn’t a substitute for reducing emissions, according to scientists and business leaders involved in the projects. Rather, it is a way to slow climate warming in the next few years while buying time to switch to a carbon-free economy in the longer term.
Three field experiments are under way in the US and overseas. This month, researchers aboard a ship off the northeastern coast of Australia near the Whitsunday Islands are spraying a briny mixture through high-pressure nozzles into the air in an attempt to brighten low-altitude clouds that form over the ocean.
…In Israel, a startup called Stardust Solutions has begun testing a system to disperse a cloud of tiny reflective particles about 60,000 feet in altitude, reflecting sunlight away from Earth to cool the atmosphere in a concept known as solar radiation management, or SRM.
…In Massachusetts, researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution plan to pour 6,000 gallons of a liquid solution of sodium hydroxide, a component of lye, into the ocean 10 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard this summer. They hope the chemical base will act like a big tablet of Tums, lowering the acidity of a patch of surface water and absorbing 20 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, storing it safely in the ocean.
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This is increasingly going to be where organisations and then governments look for the solution: first private organisations try it, then governments do it on a bigger scale, then a billionaire does it on a huge scale because he (you know it’ll be a he) can.
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Is geothermal about to become the solar of the 2020s? • Heatmap News
Matthew Zeitlin:
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Fervo is a buzzy, well-funded, and well-connected startup out of Houston that drills wells to produce enhanced geothermal energy, a clean source of power derived from heat beneath the Earth’s surface. But whereas traditional geothermal means tapping into hot water or steam underground, Fervo drills as deep as 9,000 feet [2,700m] down to access hot rocks, which are far more ubiquitous, and then pumps water into them, potentially unlocking many more areas for this kind of power generation.
This week’s announcement follows a pilot project last year where the company was actually able to produce electricity. Now the challenge is producing that electricity at scale — and that requires drilling faster.
Already its new timeline is translating in dramatic cost reductions, the company says, from $9.4m to $4.8m per well. For its Utah site, where it might need to drill 29 wells, back-of-the-envelope math suggests that could translate into up to $130m in savings.
“The biggest expense in drilling is time it takes to drill. The easiest way to reduce drilling costs is to drill faster,” Fervo’s co-founder and chief executive Tim Latimer told me.
Latimer’s big idea behind Fervo is not just a conceptual one about how to generate geothermal power in areas that don’t produce steam or very hot water on their own, but also about how to apply the steady improvement and cost reductions seen in the oil and gas industry to non-carbon emitting power generation that can be available 24 hours a day.
“Oil and gas drilling has become incredibly much more efficient. That’s what drove the shale revolution. We were excited about 45-day wells and now you’ll see fields where people drill wells in 10 days or less,” Latimer told me.
…The idea is that there can be a “learning curve” with drilling geothermal wells, dropping costs over time. “We think geothermal will be on the end of that spectrum like solar or LEDs or battery that benefits from a learning curve because we figured out a way to standardize,” Latimer said. “Fervo is a learning curve company.”
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This would be good; very good.
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Apple fans are starting to return their Vision Pros • The Verge
Victoria Song:
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For some Apple Vision Pro buyers, the honeymoon is already over.
It’s no coincidence that there’s been an uptick on social media of Vision Pro owners saying they’re returning their $3,500 headsets in the past few days. Apple allows you to return any product within 14 days of purchase — and for the first wave of Vision Pro buyers, we’re right about at that point.
Comfort is among the most cited reasons for returns. People have said the headset gives them headaches and triggers motion sickness. The weight of the device, and the fact that most of it is front-loaded, has been another complaint. Parker Ortolani, The Verge’s product manager, told me that he thought using the device led to a burst blood vessel in his eye. At least one other person noted they had a similar experience with redness. (To be fair, VR headset users have anecdotally reported dry eyes and redness for years.)
“Despite being as magical to use as I’d hoped, it was simply way too uncomfortable to wear even for short periods of time both due to the weight and the strap designs. I wanted to use it, but dreaded putting it on,” says Ortolani, who also posted about returning the device.
“It’s just too expensive and unwieldy to even try to get used to the constant headaches and eye strain I was experiencing. I’ll be back for the next one.”
This isn’t surprising. Every human body is unique, which is a problem when you’re scaling wearable production for the mass market. Comfort is inevitably sacrificed — and it affects people disproportionately.
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Anecdata, but could be indicative. We’d really need to know how many headsets have been sold, and how many are being returned. And we’re unlikely to find that out soon, if ever.
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Zuckerberg says Quest 3 is ‘the better product’ vs. Apple’s Vision Pro • The Verge
Alex Heath:
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In a video posted to his Instagram account on Tuesday, Zuckerberg gives his official verdict on the Vision Pro versus his company’s latest Quest 3 headset: “I don’t just think that Quest is the better value, I think Quest is the better product, period.”
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Ballmer on the original iPhone, in 2007: “500 dollars? Fully subsidized? With a plan? I say that is the most expensive phone in the workld. And it doesn’t appeal to business users because it doesn’t have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine. We have our strategy. We are very happy with the Windows Phone devices in the market today. You can get a Motorola Q series device for $99. It is a very capable machine, can do music, internet and more.”
CmdrTaco on the iPod, 2001: “No wireless. Less [storage] space than a Nomad. Lame.”
Plenty of people have bet against Apple down the years, especially on being cheaper than its products. So, what *was* the storage capacity of a Nomad? Anyone? Bueller?
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iOS 17.4 nerfs web apps in the EU • MacRumors
Hartley Charlton:
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As first flagged by security researcher Tommy Mysk and Open Web Advocacy, the second beta release of iOS 17.4 seems to introduce changes that put web apps at a significant disadvantage in Europe. The new beta version of iOS prevents these apps from launching in their own top-level window that takes up the entire screen, relegating them instead to open within Safari, a change that significantly impacts their user experience and functionality. The move effectively demotes PWAs to mere website shortcuts.
Now, when a user in Europe taps a web app icon, they will see a system message asking if they wish to open it in Safari or cancel. The message adds that the web app “will open in your default browser from now on.” When opened in Safari, the web app opens like a bookmark, with no dedicated windowing, notifications, or long-term local storage. Users have seen issues with existing web apps such as data loss, since the Safari version can no longer access local data, as well as broken notifications.
Progressive Web Apps are designed to offer a user experience comparable to that of native apps using web technologies, with the potential for users to add them directly to their home screen with no need for an app store. The latest change is particularly controversial because historically [from 2007-2008 – Overspill Ed.] Apple has suggested that developers who are unwilling to comply with its App Store guidelines could instead focus on web apps. Now, the company’s recent adjustments appear to contradict this stance by limiting the capabilities of PWAs and their ability to compete with native applications in iOS, raising questions about its commitment to supporting web technologies as a viable alternative to the App Store .
…Apple’s decision to alter the functionality of PWAs specifically in the EU could be interpreted as an attempt to navigate the regulatory landscape imposed by the DMA, but it may simply want to prevent users in Europe from using web apps with alternative browser engines. The company has not yet commented on its motivations.
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I’d never used a PWA (I suppose? How would I distinguish it from an app?) but the possibility that Apple is trying to prevent nefarious goings-on via alternative browser engines seems strong.
Financial rationale for investing in fossil fuel industry continues to unravel • IEEFA
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In 2023, the fossil fuel sector once again lost ground compared to the market as a whole. As oil majors report a 30% decline in annual profits and the sector posts an annual loss of almost 5%, a new report by the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) finds that it wasn’t just a bad year to invest in fossil fuels—but a bad decade.
Fossil fuel stocks have dragged down stock market returns over the last 10 years, according to a new IEEFA report, Passive investing in a warming world. This pattern broadly holds despite the fossil fuel sector’s profits in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, fossil-free equity indices are gaining market adoption and proving to be better investments. As the long-term outlook for fossil fuels remains negative, a broader market evolution away from carbon continues, and investors should take note.
“The era of stable, blue-chip returns from the fossil fuel sector is long gone,” said Dan Cohn, IEEFA energy finance analyst and co-author of the report.
…The report identifies a counterintuitive opportunity for institutional investors who invest in passively managed equity strategies, which attempt to replicate index returns rather than beat them. Although conventional wisdom holds that excluding any stocks reduces returns from passive portfolios, the opposite has been true in the specific case of fossil fuels during the past decade—limiting fossil fuel exposure has improved returns.
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In other words, create a funds index which specifically excludes fossil fuel companies and you’ll beat the market.
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AI could actually help rebuild the middle class • Noēma
David Autor:
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The utopian vision of our Information Age was that computers would flatten economic hierarchies by democratizing information. In 2005, Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, told the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman that “today, the most profound thing to me is the fact that a 14-year-old in Romania or Bangalore or the [former] Soviet Union or Vietnam has all the information, all the tools, all the software easily available to apply knowledge however they want.”
But the opposite of this vision has transpired.
Information, it turns out, is merely an input for a more consequential economic function, decision-making, which is the province of elite experts — typically the minority of U.S. adults who hold college or graduate degrees. By making information and calculation cheap and abundant, computerization catalyzed an unprecedented concentration of decision-making power, and accompanying resources, among elite experts.
Simultaneously, it automated away a broad middle-skill stratum of jobs in administrative support, clerical and blue-collar production occupations. Meanwhile, lacking better opportunities, 60% of adults without a bachelor’s degree have been relegated to non-expert, low-paid service jobs.
The unique opportunity that AI offers humanity is to push back against the process started by computerization — to extend the relevance, reach and value of human expertise for a larger set of workers. Because artificial intelligence can weave information and rules with acquired experience to support decision-making, it can enable a larger set of workers equipped with necessary foundational training to perform higher-stakes decision-making tasks currently arrogated to elite experts, such as doctors, lawyers, software engineers and college professors. In essence, AI — used well — can assist with restoring the middle-skill, middle-class heart of the U.S. labor market that has been hollowed out by automation and globalization.
While one may worry that AI will simply render expertise redundant and experts superfluous, history and economic logic suggest otherwise. AI is a tool, like a calculator or a chainsaw, and tools generally aren’t substitutes for expertise but rather levers for its application.
By shortening the distance from intention to result, tools enable workers with proper training and judgment to accomplish tasks that were previously time-consuming, failure-prone or infeasible. Conversely, tools are useless at best — and hazardous at worst — to those lacking relevant training and experience. A pneumatic nail gun is an indispensable time-saver for a roofer and a looming impalement hazard for a home hobbyist.
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One of the best lines is early on: “All the people who will turn 30 in the year 2053 have already been born and we cannot make more of them.”
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Early adopters of Microsoft’s AI bot wonder if it’s worth the money • WSJ
Tom Dotan:
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Microsoft’s new artificial-intelligence assistant for its bestselling software has been in the hands of testers for more than six months and their reviews are in: useful, but often doesn’t live up to its price.
The company is hoping for one of its biggest hits in decades with Copilot for Microsoft 365, an AI upgrade that plugs into Word, Outlook and Teams. It uses the same technology as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and can summarize emails, generate text and create documents based on natural language prompts.
Companies involved in testing say their employees have been clamoring to test the tool—at least initially. So far, the shortcomings with software including Excel and PowerPoint and its tendency to make mistakes have given some testers pause about whether, at $30 a head per month, it is worth the price.
“I wouldn’t say we’re ready to spend $30 per user for every user in the company,” said Sharon Mandell, the chief information officer at networking hardware company Juniper Networks, which has been testing Copilot since November.
Microsoft has said that early demand from users is unprecedented and the companies testing it have found it valuable. The company hasn’t shared specifics about sign-ups.
…“It has allowed people to say, ‘You know what, there is already 10 other people on the call. I’m going to skip this one. I’m going to catch up in the morning by reading the digest and skipping to the parts of the meeting I really needed to hear,’” said Art Hu, the global chief information officer at Lenovo.
In other areas, testers say the tech has fallen short: Copilot for Microsoft 365, including other generative AI tools, sometimes hallucinated, meaning it fabricated responses. Users said Copilot, at times, would make mistakes on meeting summaries. At one ad agency, a Copilot-generated summary of a meeting once said that “Bob” spoke about “product strategy.”
The problem was that no one named Bob was on the call and no one spoke about product strategy, an executive at the company said.
In other programs—particularly the ones that handle numbers—hallucinations are more problematic. Testers said Excel was one of the programs on which they were less likely to use the AI assistant because asking it to crunch numbers sometimes generated mistakes.
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The election in India is playing out on YouTube • Rest of World
Yashraj Sharma:
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On September 27, 2023, YouTube celebrated the 15th anniversary of its presence in India. The event started with a video address by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who said YouTube could “awaken the nation” and “initiate a movement.” He called himself a YouTuber in his speech, ending with the quintessential influencer sign-off: “Subscribe to my channel and hit the bell icon to receive all my updates.”
Being influential on YouTube is essential for Modi as India gears up for general elections later this year, where the 73-year-old is seeking a third consecutive term. The Google-owned video-sharing platform has emerged as a strong tool for political messaging in the country, partly due to its large user base: YouTube has 467 million users, while Facebook has 314 million and X (previously Twitter) has 27 million, according to digital insights platform DataReportal.
As many as 87% of YouTube users in India rely on the platform during national news events, according to a 2021 Oxford Economics research report commissioned by YouTube.
The 2024 general election will be a “YouTube election,” especially in “urban areas,” Apar Gupta, tech lawyer and co-founder of digital rights advocacy group Internet Freedom Foundation, told Rest of World.
“YouTube is where [the] voter is consuming content. They might not read a newspaper but they are watching YouTube,” Ruchira Chaturvedi, national convenor for social media and digital communications at the Indian National Congress — the country’s main opposition party — told Rest of World.
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Scary thought. Though the broadcast TV stations aren’t particularly better. But at least they’re not algorithmically biased.
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LEDs change everything • The Atlantic
Annie Lowrey:
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Virtually nothing has gotten better and cheaper faster over the past 30 years than LEDs. From 2010 to 2019 alone, LEDs went from accounting for 1% of the global lighting market to nearly 50%, while their cost has declined “exponentially,” as much as 44% a year, one government report found. And as LEDs have improved, so, too, have any number of technologies reliant on or related to them: tablets, at-home-hair-removal devices, televisions, smartphones, light-up toys, cameras.
LEDs have also transformed cultural events involving creative lighting. They’re why stadium shows and EDM festivals look so freaking awesome, to fangirl for a minute, and why even many just-getting-started bands have pretty neat light displays. They’re why so many parks and zoos are lit up like Burning Man at night. They’re an integral element of today’s underground-dance-party revival, and why our cities are all of a sudden studded with rave caves.
…The programmability of these lights is the main characteristic that distinguishes them from incandescents before them: You could point a spotlight around and put filters on top of it, but you couldn’t do anything like what LEDs do, at least not easily. Anthony Rowe and Liam Birtles are members of the British collective Squidsoup, whose 2013 work Submergence is one of the most famous (and most copied) immersive digital artworks. The idea, Rowe told me, was to “explode” a screen, allowing a viewer to float among its pixels. In their new collaboration with the electronic musician Four Tet, hundreds of people dance while heaven-lit by thousands of suspended LED lights that somehow seem to be both a synaesthetic representation of the music and capable of bouncing along with the crowd.
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Easily overlooked how LEDs have totally altered power demands in offices and, especially, homes, where you might have 1kW of lightbulbs just for a standard house. Now you can get the same amount of lighting using less than 100W total. Over the course of humanity’s existence, the cost of light when it’s dark has plummeted.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 