A man has received a genetically modified pig’s kidney as a transplant. Will this ever be more than an occasional last-ditch experiment? CC-licensed photo by Nick Saltmarsh 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 our worst fears on AI content starting to come true.

The Overspill is going on a break while I have a minor op on an elbow. Away for at least two weeks. Stay well!

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.

How Apple’s war on super apps became the centre of its antitrust fight • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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“For years, Apple blocked cloud gaming apps that would have given users access to desirable apps and content without needing to pay for expensive Apple hardware because this would threaten its monopoly power,” the lawsuit reads. “In Apple’s own words, it feared a world where ‘all that matters is who has the cheapest hardware’ and consumers could ‘buy[] a [expletive] Android for 25 bux at a garage sale and… have a solid cloud computing device’ that ‘works fine.’”

Additionally, the DOJ is also going after Apple’s limitations on super apps, which offer access to a range of different services from a single application and are especially popular in Asia. For example, WeChat, which is huge in China, functions as a messaging, payment, and short-form video-sharing service. It also lets users install “mini” programs that exist within WeChat.

This setup is convenient for users and developers, the DOJ argues, as users don’t have to download a bunch of separate apps to gain access to different capabilities. Meanwhile, developers also don’t have to push separate app updates for Android and iOS, since these programs run within an app instead of on a phone itself.

However, the DOJ’s lawsuit claims that Apple doesn’t want users or companies in the US to benefit from super apps. It notes that during a board of directors presentation, Apple cited super apps as a “major headwind” to boosting iPhone sales in countries where they’re popular because of “[l]ow stickiness” and “[l]ow switching costs.” If someone benefits from using a super app, they don’t necessarily need to be tied to any one ecosystem — like Apple’s.

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WeChat is available for the iPhone. Line is available for the iPhone. But there aren’t super-apps like them in the US because the competition between Apple and Android at the early stages of the smartphone market preempted them: companies focussed on controlling single spaces rather than trying to be everything. This lawsuit throws a lot of things against the wall and it’s going to distract Apple for years.
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Apple slams DOJ case as misguided attempt to turn iPhone into Android • TechCrunch

Natasha Lomas:

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The suit claims Apple holds a more than 70% share of “performance smartphones” and over 65% of the US smartphone market, respectively.

In a briefing with journalists following the DOJ’s announcement this morning, Apple dismissed these market definitions as gerrymandering on the part of government lawyers trying to make a monopoly case stick where it argues there is none.

It says the circa 20% global smartphone market share the iPhone holds is the only market definition that makes sense.

In wider remarks Apple hit out at the DOJ’s case as legally dubious and/or misguided — suggesting it’s an attempt to replicate the antitrust case the government successfully brought against Microsoft’s Windows OS back in the 1990s by desperately trying squeeze Apple into the same mould.

Apple representatives reject any comparison here, pointing out that Microsoft had a 95% market share, for example. They also argue it ignores how Apple has created an entirely new marketplace for developers and consumers.

On the call, Apple representatives sought to back up this claim by dropping in a few growth metrics — saying for example that, over the past ten years, the number of paid developers on the App Store has increased by 374% (from 1.1 million to 5.2 million).

Citing stats from 2020 to 2022, they also sought to highlight growth in commerce generated by developers in its App Store. Globally, they said this increased by 64%, from $685bn to $1.1 trillion. Although it’s worth noting the time period Apple selected to highlight here spans the pandemic, when digital commerce skyrocketed for all sorts of services as a consequence of lockdowns, and often came back down to Earth with a bump after pandemic restrictions lifted.

While Apple is seeking to paint the government as misguided, it is directly accusing a handful of vested commercial interests of being the driving force behind the lawsuit.

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That “performance smartphone” market definition is never going to stand up in court. Though the global one doesn’t matter for the US. The DOJ needs to show Apple using its phone “monopoly” to keep others out of adjacent markets. This isn’t that.
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Apple says it spent three years trying to bring Apple Watch to Android • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

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As part of its response to the United States DOJ lawsuit today, Apple confirmed that it at one point considered creating an Apple Watch for Android. The company tells me that it spent three years working on bringing Apple Watch to Android before ultimately scrapping the idea.

In its lawsuit, the Department of Justice uses the Apple Watch as a piece of evidence to justify its claim that Apple is a monopoly:

»

Apple’s smartwatch—Apple Watch—is only compatible with the iPhone. So, if Apple can steer a user towards buying an Apple Watch, it becomes more costly for that user to purchase a different kind of smartphone because doing so requires the user to abandon their costly Apple Watch and purchase a new, Android-compatible smartwatch.

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In response to the DOJ’s assertion, Apple confirmed for the first time that it at one point considered Android support for the Apple Watch. After a three-year investigation, Apple says that it determined an Apple Watch with Android support wasn’t doable because of technical limitations. As such, it scrapped the idea.
This aligns with previous reporting from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. In a November 2023 report, Gurman detailed Apple’s plans – including some of the “business considerations” – on bringing Apple Watch support to Android.

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The linked piece says Apple was looking to expand sales of the Watch, since adding Android support would create a much bigger total addressable market (TAM). But it gave up for “business reasons”, said Gurman – that it would dilute the attraction of the iPhone. However the DOJ isn’t dinging Apple for not offering the Watch on Android; it’s criticising special APIs and permissions that Apple apps get on the Watch that third-party ones don’t. So, not quite dispositive.
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Motorola Moto G Power 2024 review: a good phone spoiled by bloatware • The Verge

Allison Johnson:

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There are some phones that just feel nice to pick up, and the 2024 Moto G Power is one of them. It’s sitting on my desk and even though I don’t need to do anything with it right now, I pick it up anyway. That soft-touch back! The flat-yet-slightly-contoured edges! I turn it to look at the headphone jack on the bottom edge, just to remind myself if it’s there. If the battery is even a little low, I set it on my wireless charging stand just for the thrill. All this on a $300 phone! Imagine!

But after spending a little more time with the Moto G Power, I come crashing back down to reality. The LCD panel isn’t as nice and contrast-y as an OLED (that’s forgivable). The camera is underwhelming and suffers from Motorola’s unusual image processing tendencies (less forgivable). But again, this is a $300 phone in a world where $1,000 is the standard going rate for a top-tier flagship. Much can be forgiven!

Except one thing: the bloatware.

Scroll through the app drawer and you’ll see a handful of automatically downloaded “folders.” They are not folders; they are apps. I first encountered them on last year’s Moto G Stylus 5G, and I hate them very much.

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But Allison, the apps that you describe as a “user privacy nightmare” and which bring down the price of the phone are all Apple’s fault! According to the DOJ, at least. Somehow.
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Man ‘recovering well’ after pig kidney transplant • BBC News

Michelle Roberts:

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A 62-year-old man is said to be recovering well and should leave hospital soon, after getting a new kidney from a pig that was genetically modified to reduce the risk of the organ being rejected.

US surgeons say Rick Slayman is a “real hero” for trying the pioneering operation. The ultimate hope is to use animal organs for more transplants.

Pig kidneys have been put into brain-dead people before as a test.

The four-hour surgery, performed on 16 March, “marks a major milestone in the quest to provide more readily available organs to patients”, Massachusetts General Hospital said in a statement. Mr Slayman had a human kidney transplant at the same hospital in 2018 after being on dialysis for seven years before that, because his own kidneys were not working properly. Five years later, the transplant failed and he had to go back on dialysis in May 2023.

His prospects were not looking good, say his doctors – getting the dialysis to work was difficult since his blood vessels had been repeatedly used for it many times.

He encountered recurrent dialysis vascular access complications, requiring visits to the hospital every two weeks for de-clotting and surgical revisions, significantly affecting his quality of life, his doctors explained.

Mr Slayman said he weighed up the pros and cons and decided to go ahead with the pig kidney transplant: “I saw it not only as a way to help me, but a way to provide hope for the thousands of people who need a transplant to survive.”

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As a reminder, the last attempt at a version of this type of xenotransplant was in January 2022. It still feels like this is many years away from being routine, or even successful. One wishes Mr Slayman the best, but his prospects aren’t wonderful.
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Netflix’s 3 Body Problem review: an solid debut that could go deeper • The Verge

Charles Pulliam-Moore:

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In his 2008 sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu created a fascinating world where cutting-edge particle physics, VR gaming, and Chinese history played crucial roles in shaping humanity’s response to an imminent planet-wide threat. It also seemed unfilmable. The depth of the book’s ideas about cultural memory and the complexity of its central mystery made The Three-Body Problem feel like a story that could only work on the page.

That hasn’t stopped streamers from trying, and last year, Tencent debuted its own live-action, episodic take on Liu’s book. Netflix spent a fortune putting 3 Body Problem in the hands of executive producers David Benioff, D. B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo. Their adaptation is leaner and more diverse than the book in a way that makes it a very different kind of story. Often, it’s a good one — and very occasionally a great one — that works as an introductory crash course to the basic ideas key to understanding the larger concepts that shape Liu’s later books. 

But rather than confronting the sophistication of the book, Netflix’s main priority with 3 Body Problem seems to be selling it as the next Game of Thrones (Benioff and Weiss’ last series). And while it’s easy to understand why the streamer might want that, it’s hard not to see the show as a flashy but stripped-down version of the source material.

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Hey ho. The series starts streaming on Netflix on March 28th, so fire up your subscriptions next week. Unless this has put you off.
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Why is AI so bad at spelling? • TechCrunch

Amanda Silberling:

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On Reddit, YouTube and X, a few people have uploaded videos showing how ChatGPT fails at spelling in ASCII art, an early internet art form that uses text characters to create images. In one recent video, which was called a “prompt engineering hero’s journey,” someone painstakingly tries to guide ChatGPT through creating ASCII art that says “Honda.” They succeed in the end, but not without Odyssean trials and tribulations.

“One hypothesis I have there is that they didn’t have a lot of ASCII art in their training,” said Hagdu. “That’s the simplest explanation.”

But at the core, LLMs just don’t understand what letters are, even if they can write sonnets in seconds.

“LLMs are based on this transformer architecture, which notably is not actually reading text. What happens when you input a prompt is that it’s translated into an encoding,” Guzdial said. “When it sees the word “the,” it has this one encoding of what “the” means, but it does not know about ‘T,’ ‘H,’ ‘E.’”

That’s why when you ask ChatGPT to produce a list of eight-letter words without an “O” or an “S,” it’s incorrect about half of the time. It doesn’t actually know what an “O” or “S” is (although it could probably quote you the Wikipedia history of the letter).

Though these DALL-E images of bad restaurant menus are funny, the AI’s shortcomings are useful when it comes to identifying misinformation. When we’re trying to see if a dubious image is real or AI generated, we can learn a lot by looking at street signs, t-shirts with text, book pages, or anything where a string of random letters might betray an image’s synthetic origins. And before these models got better at making hands, a sixth (or seventh, or eighth) finger could also be a giveaway.

But, Guzdial says, if we look close enough, it’s not just fingers and spelling that AI gets wrong.

“These models are making these small, local issues all of the time – it’s just that we’re particularly well tuned to recognize some of them,” he said.

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The video trying to get ChatGPT to spell Honda really is painful to watch. We are definitely not witnessing a superintelligence.
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Higher temperatures mean higher prices for food and other items • AP News

Seth Borenstein:

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Food prices and overall inflation will rise as temperatures climb with climate change, a new study by an environmental scientist and the European Central Bank found.

Looking at monthly price tags of food and other goods, temperatures and other climate factors in 121 nations since 1996, researchers calculate that “weather and climate shocks” will cause the cost of food to rise 1.5 to 1.8 percentage points annually within a decade or so, even higher in already hot places like the Middle East, according to a study in Thursday’s edition of the journal Communications, Earth and the Environment.

And that translates to an increase in overall inflation of 0.8 to 0.9 percentage points by 2035, just caused by climate change extreme weather, the study said.

Those numbers may look small, but to banks like the US Federal Reserve that fight inflation, they are significant, said study lead author Max Kotz, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany

“The physical impacts of climate change are going to have a persistent effect on inflation,” Kotz said. “This is really from my perspective another example of one of the ways in which climate change can undermine human welfare, economic welfare.”

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Factcheck: 18 misleading myths about heat pumps • Carbon Brief

Jan Rosenow:

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Heat pumps are an alternative to gas boilers and wood stoves for indoor heating.

They now feature in most proposals for cutting greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by mid-century in order to meet the globally agreed aim of avoiding dangerous climate change.

For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says with high confidence that net-zero energy systems will include the electrification of heating “rely[ing] substantially on heat pumps” – with a possible exception only for extreme climates.

Heat pumps significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions from building heat and are the “central technology in the global transition to secure and sustainable heating”, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Heat pumps are also a mature technology and are very popular in countries such as Norway, Sweden and Finland, where they are the dominant heating technology. For the first time in 2022, heat pumps outsold gas boilers in the US – and they continued to do so in 2023.

Yet, in major economies such as the UK and Germany, heat pumps are the subject of hostile and misleading reporting across many mainstream media outlets.

Here, Carbon Brief factchecks 18 of the most common and persistent myths about heat pumps.

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Not a quick read, but useful. The point about “what happens in a power cut?” is useful to consider. (They don’t work, but neither would a gas boiler.)
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How many transformers will the US distribution grid need by 2050? • US NREL

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The United States is currently experiencing unprecedented imbalance between supply and demand for transformers—not the shape-shifting robots, but the crucial devices used on the power grid.

Almost every kilowatt-hour of electricity flows through a distribution transformer. Similar to how a traffic cop manages the flow of vehicles on a road, distribution transformers manage the flow of electricity along the power grid by changing high-voltage electricity from transmission lines into low-voltage electricity before it reaches consumers.

“Distribution transformers are a bedrock component of our energy infrastructure,” National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) researcher Killian McKenna said. “But utilities needing to add or replace them are currently facing high prices and long wait times due to supply chain shortages. This has the potential to affect energy accessibility, reliability, affordability—everything.”

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You have to delve into the linked paper about the problem to find out how many transformers there are, and then might be:

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NREL preliminary analysis estimates current stock of between 60-80 million distribution transformers with upwards of 3 terawatts (TW) of installed capacity, and estimates the growth in overall stock capacity by 2050 will see up to a 160%–260% increase on 2021 levels.

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This is the sort of boring but essential infrastructure that you don’t normally think about, but when you see the numbers needed – in the tens of millions, split between more than 3,000 distribution utilities – you get a picture of how complex the problem is, literally just to keep the lights on.
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MrBeast may never quit YouTube, but his game is changing • Polygon

Patricia Hernandez:

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much of what’s been heralded in YouTube’s era of MrBeast sounds bleak, but the next era might already be upon us. If the old YouTube was Instagram, the new YouTube will be more like TikTok. That manifests in literal ways, with the company putting much of its energy into “shorts,” but also figuratively, beyond structural elements. TikTok’s strength lies in its ability to surface videos from everyday users to an enormous audience, and it’s so good at doing this that people talk about its algorithm in mystical terms. Meanwhile, trust in media establishments continues to decline, while more and more Americans are turning to TikTok for their news.

The internet, in other words, is hungry for authenticity — or at least a person they can detect as human to deliver their content. It’s the very thing YouTube once did best, once the internet moved past the supremacy of blogs. “We are seeing many creators blow up right now because they’re creating good content while maintaining their relatability,” Smigel says. Spending a million dollars on a hotel room, as MrBeast did in a recent video, during a period where some can’t afford basic necessities and numerous industries fight for better working conditions, isn’t exactly relatable. Ostentatious influencers like the Kardashians are already experiencing the consequences of this shift within the public eye, but the changing attitudes of the broader viewership will likely hit YouTube’s elite.

It’s unlikely we’ll see MrBeast dethroned anytime soon, and even less likely that the incoming class of creators will reach his same viewership. Monoculture of that sort is a vanishing rarity, nor a marker of quality. MrBeast isn’t the best YouTube has to offer; he’s just made that rhetoric his brand.

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One thing this piece brings out is how incredibly exhausting it is to keep going viral and never having a miss. And there’s always someone coming along who surfs the algorithm as it changes and threatens to overtake you.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Williams Formula 1 team is tearing itself away from using Excel (yes, Excel) to track the thousands of parts it needs for its cars. CC-licensed photo by Paul Beattie 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

US DOJ reportedly will file antitrust lawsuit vs. Apple as soon as Thursday • MarketWatch

Jon Swartz:

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The Justice Department could file its long-rumored antitrust lawsuit against Apple Inc. as soon as Thursday, according to a report late Wednesday.

The suit, expected to be filed in federal court, would accuse the tech giant of blocking rivals from accessing hardware and software features of its iPhone, Bloomberg News reported.

It is the latest, and perhaps boldest, move yet by the Biden administration to attempt to rein in Big Tech. The Justice Department is already suing Alphabet Inc.’s Google for monopolization of its search and online-ad businesses, while the Federal Trade Commission is pursuing antitrust cases against Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc.

Apple and the Justice Department were not immediately available for comment.

The Justice Department has sued Apple for antitrust violations twice in the past 14 years, but this marks the first case claiming Apple illegally maintained its dominant position.

The Justice Department opened its latest case vs. Apple in June 2019 under former President Donald Trump, though it initially emphasized its cases against Google.

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Weirdly, Apple actually does have a dominant position in the US: it’s got a market share of installed smartphones of around 50% (certainly more than 40%), so that element of the case is a shoo-in for the DOJ.
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Superconductor scientist engaged in research misconduct, probe finds • WSJ

Nidhi Subbaraman:

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A physicist who shot to fame with claims of the discovery of a room-temperature superconductor engaged in research misconduct, a committee tapped to examine his work has concluded after a monthslong investigation. 

Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester in New York, has had at least four papers he co-wrote, including three involving superconductivity, retracted in the past 18 months by the journals that published them. A committee of outside experts tapped by the university “identified data-reliability concerns in those papers,” a Rochester spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal. 

“The committee concluded, in accordance with university policy and federal regulations, that Dias engaged in research misconduct,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement. 

Rochester declined to provide the report. Dias didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The work in the papers was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Energy Department, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, a private organization that funds scientific research.

The Moore foundation discontinued its grant late last year, the organization said. Of the $1.6m award, about $285,000 was spent. The university refunded the rest.

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So many wonderful ideas turn out to be scientifically out of reach. Fusion (hard to fake.. though there was cold fusion), and room temperature superconductivity to name but two.
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Google balks at $270m fine after training AI on French news sites’ content • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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Google has agreed to pay €250m (about $273m) to settle a dispute in France after breaching years-old commitments to inform and pay French news publishers when referencing and displaying content in both search results and when training Google’s AI-powered chatbot, Gemini.

According to France’s competition watchdog, the Autorité de la Concurrence (ADLC), Google dodged many commitments to deal with publishers fairly. Most recently, it never notified publishers or the ADLC before training Gemini (initially launched as Bard) on publishers’ content or displaying content in Gemini outputs. Google also waited until September 28, 2023, to introduce easy options for publishers to opt out, which made it impossible for publishers to negotiate fair deals for that content, the ADLC found.

“Until this date, press agencies and publishers wanting to opt out of this use had to insert an instruction opposing any crawling of their content by Google, including on the Search, Discover and Google News services,” the ADLC noted, warning that “in the future, the Autorité will be particularly attentive as regards the effectiveness of opt-out systems implemented by Google.”

To address breaches of four out of seven commitments in France—which the ADLC imposed in 2022 for a period of five years to “benefit” publishers by ensuring Google’s ongoing negotiations with them were “balanced”—Google has agreed to “a series of corrective measures,” the ADLC said.

Google is not happy with the fine, which it described as “not proportionate” partly because the fine “doesn’t sufficiently take into account the efforts we have made to answer and resolve the concerns raised—in an environment where it’s very hard to set a course because we can’t predict which way the wind will blow next.”

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The ADLC is very quick to act, and very firm. One gets the feeling that part of Google’s discomfort is that its usual “seek forgiveness not permission” strategy didn’t get time to kick into gear before the ADLC came down on it.
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OpenAI’s chatbot store is filling up with spam • TechCrunch

Kyle Wiggers:

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When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced GPTs, custom chatbots powered by OpenAI’s generative AI models, onstage at the company’s first-ever developer conference in November, he described them as a way to “accomplish all sorts of tasks” — from programming to learning about esoteric scientific subjects to getting workout pointers.

“Because [GPTs] combine instructions, expanded knowledge and actions, they can be more helpful to you,” Altman said. “You can build a GPT … for almost anything.”

He wasn’t kidding about the anything part.

TechCrunch found that the GPT Store, OpenAI’s official marketplace for GPTs, is flooded with bizarre, potentially copyright-infringing GPTs that imply a light touch where it concerns OpenAI’s moderation efforts. A cursory search pulls up GPTs that purport to generate art in the style of Disney and Marvel properties, but serve as little more than funnels to third-party paid services, and advertise themselves as being able to bypass AI content detection tools such as Turnitin and Copyleaks.

…There are several GPTs ripped from popular movie, TV and video game franchises in the GPT Store — GPTs not created or authorized (to TechCrunch’s knowledge) by those franchises’ owners. One GPT creates monsters in the style of “Monsters, Inc.,” the Pixar movie, while another promises text-based adventures set in the “Star Wars” universe.

These GPTs — along with the GPTs in the GPT Store that let users speak with trademarked characters like Wario and Aang from “Avatar: The Last Airbender” — set the stage for copyright drama.

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But that’s not all! There’s also promises to get you around academic fake detection, impersonation and (ChatGPT) jailbreaking.
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46ºC summer days and ‘supercell’ storms are Britain’s future – and now is our last chance to prepare • The Guardian

Bill McGuire is professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London:

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It’s the August bank holiday in 2050 and the UK is sweltering under the worst heatwave on record. Temperatures across much of England have topped 40ºC for eight days running: they peaked at 46ºC, and remain above 30ºC in cities and large towns at night. The country’s poorly insulated homes feel like furnaces, and thousands of people have resorted to camping out at night in the streets and local parks in a desperate attempt to find sleep. Hospital A&Es are overwhelmed and wards are flooded with patients, mostly old and vulnerable people who have succumbed to dehydration and heatstroke. Already, the death toll is estimated at more than 80,000.

No, this isn’t the beginning of a dystopian drama, but a snapshot of a mid-century heatwave unless we prepare for the increasingly extreme weather that will be driven by climate breakdown. To say that the government has no credible plan for this, as the UK Climate Change Committee did last week, is – if anything – an understatement. Britain is woefully underprepared for extreme weather, and in a number of key areas we are going backwards. About one in 15 of England’s most important flood defences were in a poor or very poor condition in 2022, up from roughly one in 25 just four years previously. The government’s Great British insulation scheme is operating at such a slow pace that it would take nearly 200 years to upgrade the country’s housing stock, while Labour has rowed back on its ambitious plans to insulate 19m homes within a decade.

It seems that neither of the major parties are especially bothered by the meteorological mayhem that awaits us. Extreme weather, especially heatwaves and floods, is set to be all-pervasive and will have a colossal impact on our lives and livelihoods.

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Google unveils AI model that can predict extreme floods five days in advance • BusinessGreen News

Amber Rolt:

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most flood prediction systems currently provide only a day or two of warning, limiting the ability of governments, businesses, and communities to respond. In contrast, Google claims its new open-source AI system can provide warnings up to five days’ ahead with a level of reliability that is “as good or better” than current systems.

Google said improving access to reliable flood forecasting for developing regions which do not have monitoring stations was “especially critical”.

Current forecasting methods are often limited by their reliance on stream gauges – or monitoring stations along rivers – which are not evenly distributed across the globe, meaning ungauged rivers are harder to forecast, Google explained.

“For years, accurate flood forecasting at scale was not possible due to the complexity of the problem and lack of resources and data,” said Yossi Matias, Google’s vice president of engineering and research. “Given that only a small percentage of the world’s rivers are equipped with streamflow gauges, this provided an extra barrier to safety for people in developing countries as well as in undeserved and vulnerable communities.”

The new AI model was trained using 5,680 existing gauges to predict daily streamflow in ungauged watersheds over a seven-day forecast period. These were then tested against the leading global software for predicting floods – the Global Food Awareness System (GloFAS) – for both short-term and long-term scenarios.

In addition to advanced flood forecasting, Google said the new AI technology had also enabled its FloodHub system to provide real-time river forecasts up to seven days in advance, covering river reaches across 80 countries, where more than 460 million people live. 

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Google has been busy lately. First corner kicks, now this. The ideal commercial application must lie in predicting whether football pitches will be flooded.
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Once more with feeling: banning TikTok is unconstitutional and won’t deal with any actual threats • Techdirt

Mike Masnick disagrees with my position expressed on the Social Warming Substack last Friday:

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I stand by the point we’ve been making for multiple years now: banning TikTok is a stupid, performative, unconstitutional, authoritarian move that doesn’t do even the slightest bit to stop China from (1) getting data on Americans or (2) using propaganda to try to influence people (which are the two issues most frequently used to justify a ban).

Banning TikTok, rather than passing comprehensive federal privacy legislation, is nothing but xenophobic theater. China can (and does) already buy a ton of data on Americans because we refuse to pass any regulation regarding data brokers who make this data available (contrary to popular opinion, Facebook and Google don’t actually sell your data, but data brokers who collect it from lots of other sources do).

Meanwhile, there’s little to no evidence that China is “manipulating” sentiment with TikTok, and there’s even less evidence that it would be effective if they were trying to do so. Public sentiment in the US regarding China is reaching record lows, with the vast majority of Americans reasonably concerned about China’s role in the world. So if China is using TikTok to propagandize to Americans, it’s doing a shitty job of it.

The US has dealt with foreign propaganda for ages. And we don’t ban it. Part of free speech is that you have to deal with the fact that nonsense propaganda and disinformation exists. There are ways to deal with it and respond to it that don’t involve banning speech. It’s astounding to me how quickly people give up their principles out of a weird, xenophobic fear that somehow China has magic pixie dust hidden within TikTok to turn Americans’ brains to mush.

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A TikToker’s story about her experience at a Chicago bar went viral. Now it’s the subject of a legal dispute • NBC News

Daysia Tolentino:

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A TikTok user’s negative experience at a Chicago bar has become the subject of scrutiny online after the business sued the patron and shared security video to dispute her account.

In a now-deleted video, Julia Reel said a security guard at Hubbard Inn was “grabbing” and “manhandling” her and a friend while escorting them off the premises on March 10. She also said a guard pushed her, sending her “flying down the staircase” of the bar. (NBC News reviewed Reel’s video, which others have reposted on TikTok after it was removed.)

The owners of Hubbard Inn filed a defamation lawsuit against Reel on Monday. 

Reel’s viral videos resulted in “damages to the business, staff and reputation,” as well as “considerable negative reviews and messages,” the bar said in a TikTok video on March 13. The bar’s owners echoed a similar claim in the lawsuit, a copy of which has been reviewed by NBC News, saying they lost $30,000 in business because of Reel’s video.

The bar posted its video on TikTok attempting to dispute Reel’s account by sharing security video of two women, who the business claims are Reel and her friend, being led out of the bar by a security guard who does not appear to be touching either of them. The video, which received over 3 million views on TikTok, also shows the women walking down the bar’s staircase with the guard.

…The differing accounts have sent the internet into a speculation frenzy — with many sharing their unconfirmed theories online in an attempt to decipher what happened. Some questioned Reel’s story because of the video released by Hubbard Inn. Others cautioned against drawing any definitive conclusions about the dispute.

«

Good grief. The footage is absolutely unequivocal (I’ve seen it): she walks calmly down the stairs under her own steam. She’s simply lying, motive unknown. Ironic for a TikToker not to be aware that she might be under surveillance. And for more about people who are just doing things on social media for attention…
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How Kate body-double conspiracy theory spread on social media • BBC News

Marianna Spring:

»

I found that in under 24 hours the false claims about a body-double had racked up more than 12 million views on X and more than 11 million on TikTok, according to the social media sites’ own data.

Which users were sharing it? On X, the accounts were often based in the US – and dedicated to posting about the Princess of Wales on an almost hourly basis. Several had blue ticks. These checkmarks used to be given to verified accounts. Now they can be purchased in exchange for your content getting more prominence on the social media site.

I messaged dozens of TikTokers posting these videos throughout the world, many of whom were zooming in and analysing the Princess of Wales’s facial features, and comparing them with those in pictures of the lookalike.

One TikToker posting from the US called Esmerelda reached 2.9 million people with her body-double video. She told me how she hadn’t posted about the Royal Family before but was motivated by “real public concern”.

“I usually try to respond to people who are making claims, and summarise what’s being said in general – whether I agree with the same theory or not,” she told me. “If I find out a specific theory [that] people had was definitely way off, then I never have an issue with making another video and saying: ‘Hey, this theory has now been debunked and this is why.'”

Carry, a user in Germany who shared the same conspiracy theory, told me she doesn’t “feel guilty” about her TikTok posts. “In my view, the greatest good is freedom of expression, and this should also be allowed to be represented on social media.”

«

Basically, people feel free to post any old junk if they think it will get noticed. And there’s no penalty (from the algorithm) for doing so, even when shown to be wrong. Maybe Twitter could tweak its algorithm so that tweets which get Community Noted are downranked
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The shocking details behind an F1 team’s painful revolution • The Race

Scott Mitchell-Malm:

»

[Williams F1 team principal James] Vowles reckons that if Williams had stuck with its usual processes and committed to a simple evolution of the 2023 car, things would have been fine. 

But the impact of the big change he wanted to commit to was compounded by terrible systems that he had already seen have a negative impact on the team’s only real in-season upgrade of 2023 – resulting in what he calls an “extraordinary” cost, one “higher than I anticipated.

It is not an exaggeration to say that up to and including at least the initial work on the 2024 Williams, its car builds were handled using Microsoft Excel, with a list of around 20,000 individual components and parts. 

Unsurprisingly, ex-Mercedes man Vowles – someone used to class-leading operations and systems – had a damning verdict for that: “The Excel list was a joke. Impossible to navigate and impossible to update.”

Managing a car build is not just about listing all the components needed. There wasn’t data on the cost of components, how long they took to build, how many were in the system to be built.

“Take a front wing,” says Vowles. “A front wing is about 400 different bits. And when you say I would like one front wing, what you need to kick off is the metallic bits and the carbon bits that make up that single front wing. You need to go into the system, and they need to be ordered. Is a front wing more important than a front wishbone in that circumstance? When do they go through, when is the inspection?

“When you start tracking now hundreds of thousands of components through your organisation moving around, an Excel spreadsheet is useless. You need to know where each one of those independent components are, how long it will take before it’s complete, how long it will take before it goes to inspection. If there’s been any problems with inspections, whether it has to go back again.

“And once you start putting that level of complexity in which is where modern Formula 1 is, the Excel spreadsheet falls over, and humans fall over. And that’s exactly where we are.

“There is more structure and system in our processes now. But they are nowhere near good enough. Nowhere near.”

«

Amazing, really, that Williams has been able to put cars together this long if it’s been relying on Excel. Though on the other hand, it shows that you really can do just about anything with it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Corner kicks are among the football set pieces for which Google’s DeepMind now offers advice for players and managers. CC-licensed photo by Hayden Schiff 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. On me ‘ead. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook’s algorithm is boosting AI spam that links to AI-generated, ad-laden click farms • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

Facebook’s recommendation algorithms are promoting bizarre, AI-generated images being posted by spammers and scammers to an audience of people who mindlessly interact with them and perhaps don’t understand that they are not real, a new analysis by Stanford and Georgetown University researchers has found. The researchers’ analysis aligns with what I have seen and experienced over the course of months of researching and reporting on these pages, many of which have found a novel way to link to off-platform, AI-generated “news” sites that are littered with Google ads or which are selling low-quality products. 
 
Last week the world was introduced to Shrimp Jesus, a series of AI-generated images in which Jesus is melded with a crustacean, and which have repeatedly gone viral on Facebook. The images are emblematic of a specific type of AI image being used by spammers and scammers, which I first wrote about in December but have repeatedly made the masses go “WTF” and “WHY?” when shared away from an audience of Facebook users who are seemingly unable to detect them as AI, or don’t care that they are AI. “WHAT IS HAPPENING ON FACEBOOK,” a viral tweet about Shrimp Jesus read.

What is happening, simply, is that hundreds of AI-generated spam pages are posting dozens of times a day and are being rewarded by Facebook’s recommendation algorithm. Because AI-generated spam works, increasingly outlandish things are going viral and are then being recommended to the people who interact with them. Some of the pages which originally seemed to have no purpose other than to amass a large number of followers have since pivoted to driving traffic to webpages that are uniformly littered with ads and themselves are sometimes AI-generated, or to sites that are selling cheap products or outright scams. Some of the pages have also started buying Facebook ads featuring Jesus or telling people to like the page “If you Respect US Army.” 

“These images in total account for hundreds of millions of interactions and are shown through Facebook’s Feed to some Facebook users who do not follow the Pages,” Renee DiResta of Stanford’s Internet Observatory and Josh A. Goldstein of Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology wrote about their research.

«

Facebook didn’t want news written by humans any more, so now it’s got this. It’s tempting to say “hope you’re happy with this”, but of course Facebook doesn’t care; all it wants is the interaction.
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Among the AI doomsayers • The New Yorker

Andrew Marantz:

»

A camp of techno-optimists rebuffs AI doomerism with old-fashioned libertarian boomerism, insisting that all the hand-wringing about existential risk is a kind of mass hysteria. They call themselves “effective accelerationists,” or e/accs (pronounced “e-acks”), and they believe AI will usher in a utopian future—interstellar travel, the end of disease—as long as the worriers get out of the way. On social media, they troll doomsayers as “decels,” “psyops,” “basically terrorists,” or, worst of all, “regulation-loving bureaucrats.” “We must steal the fire of intelligence from the gods [and] use it to propel humanity towards the stars,” a leading e/acc recently tweeted. (And then there are the normies, based anywhere other than the Bay Area or the Internet, who have mostly tuned out the debate, attributing it to sci-fi fume-huffing or corporate hot air.)

[Katja] Grace’s dinner parties, semi-underground meetups for doomers and the doomer-curious, have been described as “a nexus of the Bay Area AI scene.” At gatherings like these, it’s not uncommon to hear someone strike up a conversation by asking, “What are your timelines?” or “What’s your p(doom)?” Timelines are predictions of how soon AI will pass particular benchmarks, such as writing a Top Forty pop song, making a Nobel-worthy scientific breakthrough, or achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), the point at which a machine can do any cognitive task that a person can do. (Some experts believe that AGI is impossible, or decades away; others expect it to arrive this year.) P(doom) is the probability that, if AI does become smarter than people, it will, either on purpose or by accident, annihilate everyone on the planet. For years, even in Bay Area circles, such speculative conversations were marginalized. Last year, after OpenAI released ChatGPT, a language model that could sound uncannily natural, they suddenly burst into the mainstream.

«

It’s all about the dinner parties, really. Is our future perhaps going to be decided by whose sound system has a playlist that include the better Sade songs? Maybe.
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Inside Suno AI, the start-up creating a ChatGPT for music • Rolling Stone

Brian Hiatt:

»

“I’m just a soul trapped in this circuitry.” The voice singing those lyrics is raw and plaintive, dipping into blue notes. A lone acoustic guitar chugs behind it, punctuating the vocal phrases with tasteful runs. But there’s no human behind the voice, no hands on that guitar. There is, in fact, no guitar. In the space of 15 seconds, this credible, even moving, blues song was generated by the latest AI model from a startup named Suno. All it took to summon it from the void was a simple text prompt: “solo acoustic Mississippi Delta blues about a sad AI.” To be maximally precise, the song is the work of two AI models in collaboration: Suno’s model creates all the music itself, while calling on OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate the lyrics and even a title: “Soul of the Machine.” 

Online, Suno’s creations are starting to generate reactions like “How the fuck is this real?” As this particular track plays over a Sonos speaker in a conference room in Suno’s temporary headquarters, steps away from the Harvard campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, even some of the people behind the technology are ever-so-slightly unnerved. There’s some nervous laughter, alongside murmurs of “Holy shit” and “Oh, boy.” It’s mid-February, and we’re playing with their new model, V3, which is still a couple of weeks from public release. In this case, it took only three tries to get that startling result. The first two were decent, but a simple tweak to my prompt — co-founder Keenan Freyberg suggested adding the word “Mississippi” — resulted in something far more uncanny.

Over the past year alone, generative AI has made major strides in producing credible text, images (via services like Midjourney), and even video, particularly with OpenAI’s new Sora tool. But audio, and music in particular, has lagged. Suno appears to be cracking the code to AI music, and its founders’ ambitions are nearly limitless — they imagine a world of wildly democratized music making. The most vocal of the co-founders, Mikey Shulman, a boyishly charming, backpack-toting 37-year-old with a Harvard Ph.D. in physics, envisions a billion people worldwide paying 10 bucks a month to create songs with Suno. The fact that music listeners so vastly outnumber music-makers at the moment is “so lopsided,” he argues, seeing Suno as poised to fix that perceived imbalance.

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Do take a (literal) minute to listen to the prompt-generated song. The ridiculous idea though that AI generation will somehow even out the creators v listeners balance is rubbish. Not everyone creates stuff worth reading or listening to; that’s why we value those who do.
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Starbucks is shutting down its Odyssey Beta NFT rewards program—will it return? • Decrypt

No.
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Telegram hits 900mn users and nears profitability as founder considers IPO • Financial Times

Hannah Murphy:

»

Telegram has 900 million users and is nearing profitability, according to the owner of the secretive messaging app, as the company moves closer to a potential blockbuster stock market listing.

Pavel Durov told the Financial Times that Dubai-based Telegram had grown to become one of the world’s most popular social media apps while making “hundreds of millions of dollars” in revenues after introducing advertising and premium subscription services two years ago.

“We are hoping to become profitable next year, if not this year,” said the Russia-born founder in his first public interview since 2017. He added that the platform has 900mn monthly active users, up from 500mn at the beginning of 2021.

Durov, who fully owns Telegram, said the company had “been offered $30bn-plus valuations” from potential investors including “global late-stage tech funds”, but has ruled out selling the platform while it explores a future initial public offering.

“The main reason why we started to monetise is because we wanted to remain independent,” he said. “Generally speaking, we see value in [an IPO] as a means to democratise access to Telegram’s value.”

Once largely home to the freewheeling cryptocurrency community, the company, which only has about 50 full-time employees, has exploded in popularity over the past few years to become a vital communication tool for governments and officials globally, as well as a lifeline to citizens in conflict zones.

Researchers warn that the lightly moderated platform remains a hotbed for criminal activity, as well as extremist or terrorist content and misinformation. Critics have suggested that the Kremlin may have links to or leverage over Telegram, a claim that Durov dismissed as “inaccurate”.

«

Durov says costs are about 70 cents per active user per month; the company took on over $1bn in debt financing but is now testing advertising. It probably feels like the right time to sell, before the debt gets too hard to service. Compare and contrast, by the way, to Signal, which is struggling for funding.
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Google DeepMind unveils AI football tactics coach honed with Liverpool • FT

Michael Peel:

»

Google DeepMind has developed a prototype artificial intelligence football tactician in collaboration with Premier League club Liverpool, in the latest push to use the technology to master the ebb and flow of big-money sports.

The computerised coach’s suggested improvements to players’ positions at corner kicks — a large potential source of goals — mostly won approval from human experts, according to a paper published in Nature Communications on Tuesday.

DeepMind, which has previously used its algorithms to crack difficult board games such as Go, said patterns seen on sports fields could also offer lessons on how to apply AI in other areas such as robotics and traffic coordination.

On the pitch, the company’s TacticAI system reflects both the possibilities and current limitations of intensive efforts to use AI to gain a sporting edge beyond that offered by existing data analysis methods.

The technology promises benefits in planning for situations with predictable starting points, such as corners. The wider task is to apply it to the richer variability of open play.

“What’s exciting about it from an AI perspective is that football is a very dynamic game with lots of unobserved factors that influence outcomes,” said Petar Veličković, a DeepMind researcher and co-author of the Nature paper. “It’s a really challenging problem.”

«

Sure, you could apply it to traffic coordination, but the money’s in football, so that’s likely where it will actually be used. And speaking of DeepMind…
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Microsoft lures startup founders to form new AI division • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

»

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced the formation of a new AI division headed by Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan, two of the three founders of AI upstart Inflection.

Suleyman, who will serve as EVP and CEO of Microsoft AI, and Simonyan, who will be chief scientist, both worked previously at DeepMind as a co-founder and a researcher respectively. DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014.

Nadella said Suleyman and Simonyan will focus on improving Microsoft Copilot and other AI-infused products like Bing and Edge, and on research.

“I’ve known Mustafa for several years and have greatly admired him as a founder of both DeepMind and Inflection, and as a visionary, product maker, and builder of pioneering teams that go after bold missions,” said Nadella in a message shared with Microsoft employees and published online.

Suleyman’s leadership at Google could have gone better. In 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Google’s London-based artificial-intelligence arm, DeepMind, was stripped in late 2019 of most management responsibilities after complaints that he bullied staff, according to people familiar with the matter.” And subsequent reporting in other publications detailed further allegations and an apology from Suleyman for a management style that “was not constructive.”

«

And of course being at Microsoft will mean close ties with OpenAI and hence ChatGPT, rather than the LLM that Inflection was working on. Often it seems like the IBM founder’s remark that “there may only be a need for three or four computers” refers to the big LLMs.
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Nvidia: what’s so good about the tech firm’s new AI superchip? • The Guardian

Alex Hern does the explainer on what Monday’s announcement was all about, including this:

»

Project GR00T – apparently named after, though not explicitly linked to, Marvel’s arboriform alien – is a new foundation model from Nvidia developed for controlling humanoid robots. A foundation model, such as GPT-4 for text or StableDiffusion for image generation, is the underlying AI model on which specific use cases can be built. They are the most expensive part of the whole sector to create, but are the engines of all further innovation, since they can be “fine-tuned” to specific use cases down the line.

Nvidia’s foundation model for robots will help them “understand natural language and emulate movements by observing human actions – quickly learning coordination, dexterity, and other skills in order to navigate, adapt, and interact with the real world”.

GR00T pairs with another piece of Nvidia tech (and another Marvel reference) in Jetson Thor, a system-on-a-chip designed specifically to be the brains of a robot. The ultimate goal is an autonomous machine that can be instructed using normal human speech to carry out general tasks, including ones it hasn’t been specifically trained for.

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“Arboriform alien” is excellent. (Thanks Joe for the link.)
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A month of the Vision Pro • Benedict Evans

The aforementioned Evans:

»

A lot of people focus on the price and the weight, but I think that misses the real challenge – the price and the weight can and will come down, but then what? The conclusion of every review is, essentially, ‘it’s amazing, but what’s it for?’

This is not an easy question to answer. In a sense, I think this device might function as a test for that whole general computing thesis. With every previous xR device, you could always say ‘yes, but just imagine what it can be once the tech is better!’ Well, now we have something a lot closer to that ‘just imagine’ device. It’s a lot harder to hide behind plans for the future. This thing doesn’t even have any VR games – it’s naked before us, forced to survive as an actual computer. If we cannot make a compelling general purpose computing experience on a display system this good, then the whole field might have a problem.

Apple’s answer, I think, is that we begin with the user-cases we already have on other devices, and then, over time, developers will invent new things that are native to the form. That’s what happened with mobile: we began with the web and mail, and truly mobile-native things came later.

However, I don’t think the future of computing is seeing several apps at once. I don’t think the future of productivity is seeing more rows in your spreadsheet, or more emails at once, or more records in Salesforce at once, on one big screen. I think the future, as seen for the last 20 or 30 years, is task-specific UIs that reduce complexity and data overload and focus on what you need to see. And obviously, I think the future is AI systems that show you less and tell you more.

And if that’s where productivity is going, that applies even more for consumers. The power-user criticism of the iPad has always been to claim that it can’t replace your Mac, but the real problem for iPad sales has aways been that for most consumers, your iPad actually can replace your Mac – but so can your iPhone. The Meta team might claim that the Vision Pro is under-serving VR, but even the iPad is over-serving normal computing for normal users, and the Vision Pro overshoots even further.

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Finally, engineers have a clue that could help them save Voyager 1 • Ars Technica

Stephen Clark:

»

Officials suspect a piece of corrupted memory inside the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS), one of three main computers on the spacecraft, is the most likely culprit for the interruption in normal communication. Because Voyager 1 is so far away, it takes about 45 hours for engineers on the ground to know how the spacecraft reacted to their commands—the one-way light travel time is about 22.5 hours.

The FDS collects science and engineering data from the spacecraft’s sensors, then combines the information into a single data package, which goes through a separate component called the Telemetry Modulation Unit to beam it back to Earth through Voyager’s high-gain antenna.

Engineers are almost entirely certain the problem is in the FDS computer. The communications systems onboard Voyager 1 appear to be functioning normally, and the spacecraft is sending a steady radio tone back to Earth, but there’s no usable data contained in the signal. This means engineers know Voyager 1 is alive, but they have no insight into what part of the FDS memory is causing the problem.

But Voyager 1 responded to the March 1 troubleshooting command with something different from what engineers have seen since this issue first appeared on November 14.

“The new signal was still not in the format used by Voyager 1 when the FDS is working properly, so the team wasn’t initially sure what to make of it,” NASA said in an update Wednesday. “But an engineer with the agency’s Deep Space Network, which operates the radio antennas that communicate with both Voyagers and other spacecraft traveling to the Moon and beyond, was able to decode the new signal and found that it contains a readout of the entire FDS memory.”

Now, engineers are meticulously comparing each bit of code from the FDS memory readout to the memory readout Voyager 1 sent back to Earth before the issue arose in November. This, they hope, will allow them to find the root of the problem. But it will probably take weeks or months for the Voyager team to take the next step. They don’t want to cause more harm.

«

Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is now about 24 billion km (15bn miles) away from Earth. A lot is encompassed in “an engineer… was able to decode the new signal”. It took them about two weeks.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Production of Sony’s PSVR 2 headset has been halted as stocks build up, according to a new report. CC-licensed photo by Marco Verch 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. Not overstocked. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Apple may hire Google to power new iPhone AI features using Gemini—report • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Apple is in talks to license Google’s Gemini model to power AI features like Siri in a future iPhone software update coming later in 2024, according to people familiar with the situation. Apple has also reportedly conducted similar talks with ChatGPT maker OpenAI.

The potential integration of Google Gemini into iOS 18 could bring a range of new cloud-based (off-device) AI-powered features to Apple’s smartphone, including image creation or essay writing based on simple prompts. However, the terms and branding of the agreement have not yet been finalized, and the implementation details remain unclear. The companies are unlikely to announce any deal until Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June.

Gemini could also bring new capabilities to Apple’s widely criticized voice assistant, Siri, which trails newer AI assistants powered by large language models (LLMs) in understanding and responding to complex questions. Rumors of Apple’s own internal frustration with Siri—and potential remedies—have been kicking around for some time. In January, 9to5Mac revealed that Apple had been conducting tests with a beta version of iOS 17.4 that used OpenAI’s ChatGPT API to power Siri.

As we have previously reported, Apple has also been developing its own AI models, including a large language model codenamed Ajax and a basic chatbot called Apple GPT. However, the company’s LLM technology is said to lag behind that of its competitors, making a partnership with Google or another AI provider a more attractive option.

Google launched Gemini, a language-based AI assistant similar to ChatGPT, in December and has updated it several times since. Many industry experts consider the larger Gemini models to be roughly as capable as OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo, which powers the subscription versions of ChatGPT. Until just recently, with the emergence of Gemini Ultra and Claude 3, OpenAI’s top model held a fairly wide lead in perceived LLM capability.

The potential partnership between Apple and Google could significantly impact the AI industry, as Apple’s platform represents more than 2 billion active devices worldwide. If the agreement gets finalized, it would build upon the existing search partnership between the two companies, which has seen Google pay Apple billions of dollars annually to make its search engine the default option on iPhones and other Apple devices.

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One would slightly expect Google will be paying Apple for this, rather than vice-versa, as would happen anywhere else.
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Apple and Microsoft’s industry-defining legal battle started 26 years ago • Quartz

Laura Bratton:

»

Apple launched a landmark lawsuit against Microsoft 36 years ago on March 18, 1988 — the outcome of which defined how tech companies could use one another’s ideas as they developed then-groundbreaking computer software.

In its $5.5bn suit, Apple alleged that Microsoft copied its computers’ look and feel with Windows version 2.03. At the time, Apple’s computers were the first to have graphical user interfaces (or GUIs) — a new and exciting way for users to interact with computer screens using visual elements like icons, buttons, and menus rather than text. Apple released its first commercial computer with a GUI named “Lisa” in 1983. Here’s how the New York Times described GUIs five years later:

“…virtually all personal computer makers are moving toward more of a Macintosh look. That appearance is based on what the industry calls a graphical user interface, in which information appears in windows and operations are carried out by pointing at objects and menus using a handheld device called a mouse – a major selling point of the Macintosh.”

Before the suit, the burgeoning tech giants were amicable. In 1985, they worked out a deal. Apple licensed its design elements to Microsoft for Windows version 1, and Apple got the rights to use some Microsoft products. But that all went to the wayside when Microsoft released the next version of Windows, which contained even more elements of Apple’s GUI.

…Apple’s suit was also dismissed, and the Supreme Court denied Apple’s final appeal in 1995, upholding a prior ruling that Microsoft’s use of its design elements was covered by their 1985 agreement or otherwise not copyrightable.

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You could say that Apple has been launching quixotic lawsuits for this long, really. Failing at this didn’t stop it doing very much the same against Google over Android and Samsung over phone design.
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Gatekeeping is Apple’s brand promise • Marginal REVOLUTION

Alex Tabarrok starts off quoting Steve Sinofsky, ex-Microsoft and now analyst:

»

»

Android has the kind of success Microsoft would envy, but not Apple, primarily because with that success came most all the same issues that Microsoft sees (still) with the Windows PC. The security, privacy, abuse, fragility, and other problems of the PC show up on Android at a rate like the PC compared to Macintosh and iPhone. Only this time it is not the lack of motivation bad actors have to exploit iPhone, rather it is the foresight of the Steve Jobs vision for computing. He pushed to have a new kind of computer that further encapsulated and abstracted the computer to make it safer, more reliable, more private, and secure, great battery life, more accessible, more consistent, always easier to use, and so on. These attributes did not happen by accident. They were the process of design and architecture from the very start. These attributes are the brand promise of iPhone as much as the brand promise of Android is openness, ubiquity, low price, choice.

The lesson of the first two decades of the PC and the first almost two decades of smartphones are that these ends of a spectrum are not accidental. These choices are not mutually compatible. You don’t get both. I know this is horrible to say and everyone believes that there is somehow malicious intent to lock people into a closed environment or an unintentional incompetence that permits bad software to invade an ecosystem. Neither of those would be the case. Quite simply, there’s a choice between engineering and architecting for one or the other and once you start you can’t go back. More importantly, the market values and demands both.

That is unless you’re a regulator in Brussels. Then you sit in an amazing government building and decide that it is entirely possible to just by fiat declare that the iPhone should have all the attributes of openness.

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Apple’s promise to iPhone users is that it will be a gatekeeper. Gatekeeping is what allows Apple to promise greater security, privacy, usability and reliability. Gatekeeping is Apple’s brand promise.

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Sinofsky is not a fan of the EU’s DMA.
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DNA tests are uncovering the true prevalence of incest • The Atlantic

Sarah Zhang:

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In 1975 a psychiatric textbook put the frequency of incest at one in a million.

But this number is almost certainly a dramatic underestimate. The stigma around openly discussing incest, which often involves child sexual abuse, has long made the subject difficult to study. In the 1980s, feminist scholars argued, based on the testimonies of victims, that incest was far more common than recognized, and in recent years, DNA has offered a new kind of biological proof. Widespread genetic testing is uncovering case after secret case of children born to close biological relatives—providing an unprecedented accounting of incest in modern society.

The geneticist Jim Wilson, at the University of Edinburgh, was shocked by the frequency he found in the UK Biobank, an anonymized research database: one in 7,000 people, according to his unpublished analysis, was born to parents who were first-degree relatives—a brother and a sister or a parent and a child. “That’s way, way more than I think many people would ever imagine,” he told me. And this number is just a floor: It reflects only the cases that resulted in pregnancy, that did not end in miscarriage or abortion, and that led to the birth of a child who grew into an adult who volunteered for a research study.

Most of the people affected may never know about their parentage, but these days, many are stumbling into the truth after AncestryDNA and 23andMe tests. Steve’s case was one of the first Moore worked on involving closely related parents. She now knows of well over 1,000 additional cases of people born from incest, the significant majority between first-degree relatives, with the rest between second-degree relatives (half-siblings, uncle-niece, aunt-nephew, grandparent-grandchild). The cases show up in every part of society, every strata of income, she told me.

Neither AncestryDNA nor 23andMe informs customers about incest directly, so the thousand-plus cases [genetic genealogist CeCe] Moore knows of all come from the tiny proportion of testers who investigated further. This meant, for example, uploading their DNA profiles to a third-party genealogy site to analyze what are known as “runs of homozygosity,” or ROH: long stretches where the DNA inherited from one’s mother and father are identical.

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The implications of this are quite dramatic: the diseases from inbreeding can be horrendous.
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Nvidia reveals Blackwell B200 GPU, the ‘world’s most powerful chip’ for AI • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

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Nvidia’s must-have H100 AI chip made it a multitrillion-dollar company, one that may be worth more than Alphabet and Amazon, and competitors have been fighting to catch up. But perhaps Nvidia is about to extend its lead — with the new Blackwell B200 GPU and GB200 “superchip.”

Nvidia says the new B200 GPU offers up to 20 petaflops of FP4 horsepower from its 208 billion transistors. Also, it says, a GB200 that combines two of those GPUs with a single Grace CPU can offer 30 times the performance for LLM inference workloads while also potentially being substantially more efficient. It “reduces cost and energy consumption by up to 25x” over an H100, says Nvidia.

Training a 1.8 trillion parameter model would have previously taken 8,000 Hopper GPUs and 15 megawatts of power, Nvidia claims. Today, Nvidia’s CEO says 2,000 Blackwell GPUs can do it while consuming just four megawatts.

On a GPT-3 LLM benchmark with 175 billion parameters, Nvidia says the GB200 has a somewhat more modest seven times the performance of an H100, and Nvidia says it offers four times the training speed.

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I have absolutely no idea whether these numbers are impressive, modest, surprising or what. They just mean nothing at all to me. But I record them here so you know it happened.
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Sony hits pause on PSVR2 production as unsold inventory piles up • Bloomberg via The Business Times

Takashi Mochizuki:

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Sony Group has paused production of its PSVR2 headset until it clears a backlog of unsold units, according to sources familiar with its plans, adding to doubts about the appeal of virtual reality gadgets.

Sales of the US$550 wearable accessory to the PlayStation 5 have slowed progressively since its launch and stocks of the device are building up, according to the sources, who asked not to be named as the information is not public. Sony has produced well over two million units of the product launched in February of last year, the sources said.

PSVR2 shipments have declined every quarter since its debut, according to IDC, which tracks deliveries to retailers rather than consumers. The surplus of assembled devices is throughout Sony’s supply chain, the sources said. Still, IDC’s Francisco Jeronimo sees a recovery for the product category in the coming years with the help of Apple’s entry. “We forecast the VR market to grow on average 31.5% per year between 2023 and 2028,” he said.

Alongside Meta Platforms, Sony has been one of the leading purveyors of virtual reality gear, but both have struggled to attract enough content and entertainment creators to make their platforms compelling. A similar problem stalks Apple’s much pricier Vision Pro headset, as it made its debut without tailored apps from key entertainment platforms Netflix and Alphabet’s YouTube.

…Tokyo-based Sony last month announced it is shutting down its PlayStation London division, which was focused on making virtual reality games. That move was part of a wider set of layoffs that also affected in-house studios such as Guerrilla Games, which had worked on creating a PSVR2-exclusive game in its popular Horizon series, Horizon Call of the Mountain.

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VR headsets are approaching the eye’s resolution limits • IEEE Spectrum

Matthew Smith:

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The Chinese consumer electronics company TCL Technology recently unveiled a monstrous, 163-inch 4K Micro-LED television that one home theater expert described as “tall as Darth Vader.” Each of the TV’s 8.3 million pixels is an independent, miniscule LED, a feat for which TCL charges over $100,000.

But here’s the real surprise: TCL’s new TV isn’t the most pixel-dense or exotic display ever produced. That honor goes to the emerging frontier of Micro-OLED and Micro-LED displays built for AR/VR headsets. Mojo Vision, a leader in micro-LED displays, recently demonstrated a full-color Micro-LED display frontplane with a density of 5,510 pixels%imeter (14,000 pixels per inch) at CES 2024. That display, if blown up to the size of TCL’s television, would pack over 220 billion pixels.

Pixel densities that high may seem absurd, but absurd density is key for the next generation of augmented, mixed, and virtual reality headsets. Stuffing more pixels inside each centimeter allows not only lifelike visuals but also smaller, more compact displays that achieve a necessary level of visual resolution. But building displays at this scale isn’t easy, and it leads to unique technical hurdles the AR/VR industry is still learning to leap.

“Why so many pixels? Well, who wouldn’t want more pixels?” asks Patrick Wyatt, chief product officer at VR headset maker Varjo. “Now the question becomes, how do you do it?”

…Nordic Ren, CEO of Pimax, says the goal is not total pixel count but instead pixels-per-degree (PPD), a measurement of the pixels in each degree of the user’s field of vision. “PPD is pivotal in defining visual clarity,” says Ren. “Even for industry front-runners like Pimax and Apple, the immersion quality still isn’t optimal. Every incremental enhancement to resolution elevates the experience.”

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New Havana Syndrome studies find no evidence of brain injuries • The New York Times

Julian Barnes:

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New studies by the National Institutes of Health failed to find evidence of brain injury in scans or blood markers of the diplomats and spies who suffered symptoms of Havana syndrome, bolstering the conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies about the strange health incidents.

Spy agencies have concluded that the debilitating symptoms associated with Havana syndrome, including dizziness and migraines, are not the work of a hostile foreign power. They have not identified a weapon or device that caused the injuries, and intelligence analysts now believe the symptoms are most likely explained by environmental factors, existing medical conditions or stress.

The lead scientist on one of the two new studies said that while the study was not designed to find a cause, the findings were consistent with those determinations.

The authors said the studies are at odds with findings from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, who found differences in brain scans of people with Havana syndrome symptoms and a control group
Dr. David Relman, a prominent scientist who has had access to the classified files involving the cases and representatives of people suffering from Havana syndrome, said the new studies were flawed. Many brain injuries are difficult to detect with scans or blood markers, he said. He added that the findings do not dispute that an external force, like a directed energy device, could have injured the current and former government workers

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This is going to drag on and on. It seems strange that stress, alone, could cause the physical symptoms that people have complained of. At the very least, if there is a directed energy weapon – even a low-power one – the Russians have certainly got their money’s worth out of it in terms of disruption.
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The exponential enshittification of science • Marcus on AI

Gary Marcus:

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In my opinion, every [science publication] article with ChatGPT remnants should be considered suspect and perhaps retracted, because hallucinations may have filtered in, and both authors and reviewers) were asleep at the switch.

And there is no way reviewers and journals are going to be able to keep up. Reviewers are typically unpaid academics who are already stretched to their limits; tripling their workload would not be feasible. And GenAI might do a lot worse than merely tripling workloads; the total number of articles may radically spike, many of them dubious and a waste of reviewers’ time. Lots of bad stuff is going to sneak in.

Not long ago a science-fiction outlet called Clarkesworld that allowed open submission was overrun by fake submissions. I will never forget the graph they shared, the exponential increase in number of users they needed to ban each month.

I warned then that other areas would see the same. It looks like science is next.

If science journals and science itself are overrun by LLM-generated garbage, as now seems imminent, my agnostic “I can’t quite tell yet if LLMs will ultimately be of net benefit to society” is going to switch to “shut it down if they can’t fix this problem.” That’s a huge potential cost.

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It’s pretty simple – you look for “Certainly, I can help you with”. It is, as he says, a big red flag.
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How science sleuths track down bad research • WSJ

Nidhi Subbaraman:

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It was early January when the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute received a complaint about signs of image manipulation in dozens of papers by senior researchers. Days later, the organization said it was seeking to retract or correct several of the studies, sending shock waves through the scientific community.

Mass General Brigham and Harvard Medical School were sent a complaint the same month: A collection of nearly 30 papers co-authored by another professor appeared to contain copied or doctored images.

The complaints were from different critics, but they had something in common. Both scientists—molecular biologist Sholto David and image expert Elisabeth Bik—had used the same tool in their analyses: an image-scanning software called Imagetwin.

Behind the recent spotlight on suspect science lies software such as Imagetwin, from a company based in Vienna, and another called Proofig AI, made by a company in Israel. The software brands aid scientists in scouring hundreds of studies and are turbocharging the process of spotting deceptive images.

Before the tools emerged, data detectives pored over images in published research with their own eyes, something that could take a few minutes or about an hour, with some people possessing a flair for seeing patterns. Now, the tech tools automate this effort, pointing to problematic images within a minute or two.

Scientific images offer a rare glimpse of raw data: millions of pixels tidily presented alongside the text of a paper. Common types of images include photographs of tissue slices and cells. Researchers say no two tissue samples taken from different animals should ever look the same under a microscope, nor should two different cell cultures. 

When they do, that is a red flag.

…Imagetwin in particular offers a feature that none of the human detectives can replicate: It compares photos in one paper against a database of 51 million images reaching back 20 years, flagging photos copied from previous studies. “That is an amazing find that humans can never do,” Bik said.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The company that picked the symbols and colours for ski run difficulty was.. Walt Disney? Yes it was. CC-licensed photo by Shinya Suzuki 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 10 links for you. Going downhill faster. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Pornhub blocks all of Texas to protest state law—Paxton says “good riddance” • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

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Pornhub has disabled its website in Texas following a court ruling that upheld a state law requiring age-verification systems on porn websites. Visitors to pornhub.com in Texas are now greeted with a message calling the Texas law “ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous.”

“As you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. Not only does this impinge on the rights of adults to access protected speech, it fails strict scrutiny by employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas’s stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors,” Pornhub’s message said.

Pornhub said it has “made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Texas. In doing so, we are complying with the law, as we always do, but hope that governments around the world will implement laws that actually protect the safety and security of users.”

The same message was posted on other sites owned by the same company, including RedTube, YouPorn, and Brazzers. Pornhub has also blocked its website in Arkansas, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Utah, and Virginia in protest of similar laws. VPN services can be used to evade the blocks and to test out which states have been blocked by Pornhub.

The US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld the Texas law in a 2–1 decision last week. The 5th Circuit appeals court had previously issued a temporary stay that allowed the law to take effect in September 2023.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton last month sued Pornhub owner Aylo (formerly MindGeek) for violating the law. Paxton’s complaint in Travis County District Court sought civil penalties of up to $10,000 for each day since the law took effect on September 19, 2023.

“Sites like Pornhub are on the run because Texas has a law that aims to prevent them from showing harmful, obscene material to children,” Paxton wrote yesterday. “We recently secured a major victory against PornHub and other sites that sought to block this law from taking effect. In Texas, companies cannot get away with showing porn to children. If they don’t want to comply, good riddance.”

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“We can’t find a way to comply with the law except by not being here” is straightforward enough, I guess.
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I used ChatGPT as a reporting assistant. It didn’t go well • The Markup

Jon Keegan:

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The example story I used for this exercise was the train derailment in East Palestine, OH in February 2023, a major story that involved various kinds of data that I could ask ChatGPT to help analyze. To be clear, this wasn’t a story I had reported on, but I wanted to try using ChatGPT in a way that a data journalist might when covering it. I spent a LOT of time chatting with ChatGPT as part of this exercise and, frankly, sometimes it was exhausting.

…Based on my interactions, by far the most useful capabilities of ChatGPT are its ability to generate and debug programming code. (At one point during the East Palestine exercise, it generated some simple Python code for creating a map of the derailment.) When responding to a request to write code, it typically explains its approach (even though it may not be the best one), and shows its work, and you can redirect it to follow a different approach if you think its plan isn’t what you need. The ability to continually add to the features of your code while the AI agent retains the context and history of what you have been discussing can really save you a ton of time, avoiding painstaking searches for posts about a similar problem on StackOverflow (one of the largest online coding communities). 

The NICAR exercise left me with concerns about using generative AI tools for the precise work of data journalism. The fact that a tool as powerful as ChatGPT can’t produce a “receipt” of exactly how it knows something goes against everything we are trained to do as journalists. Also I worry about small, understaffed newsrooms relying upon these tools too much as the news industry struggles with layoffs and closures. And when there is a lack of guidance from newsroom leadership regarding the use of these tools, it could lead to errors and inaccuracies.  

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So.. I wonder if, when presented with a list of connected events in non-time-sequential order (“The policeman is in hospital” “A woman was robbed at knifepoint” “A policeman tackled the robber”), ChatGPT or others could assemble them into a news story? It’s a classic exercise for would-be journalists. If it can’t do that, what actually is it good for in journalism?
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Nearly half of UK families excluded from modern digital society, study finds • The Guardian

Clea Skopeliti:

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Almost half of UK families with children lack the online skills or access to devices, data and broadband required to participate in today’s digital society, research shows, with an expert saying this divide is an “amplifier of other exclusions”.

Research shared exclusively with the Guardian found that 45% of households with children did not meet the threshold. Families from low socioeconomic backgrounds in deprived areas and households outside London were among those who were less likely to meet it. Households from minority ethnic backgrounds and those with disabled parents were twice as likely to fall below it.

The research was led by experts at the University of Liverpool, Loughborough University, and the digital inclusion charity the Good Things Foundation, with input from other universities. It used a series of focus groups to develop a “minimum digital living standard” that measures households’ digital abilities and their access to goods and services.

“For the first time, we have a benchmark – defined by the public – about what families think is ‘enough’ to feel included in our digital society today,” said Emma Stone, the director of evidence and engagement at the Good Things Foundation.

“Government, businesses and service providers are driving ahead with digital transformation assuming that families are equally able to engage online. Today’s research shows this is not true.”

The lead researcher, Prof Simeon Yates, of the University of Liverpool, said the high proportion falling below this benchmark was disappointing but unsurprising. “People may be surprised, because in every show from crime to romance, people are living a digital life – but we know that a very large number of people don’t live in that world.”

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I am surprised – I thought that the saturation of smartphones would mean that at least one member of every family would have sufficient skills.
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The staggering ecological impacts of computation and the cloud • The MIT Press Reader

Steven Gonzalez Monserrate:

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According to a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report, if the entire Cloud shifted to hyperscale facilities, energy usage might drop as much as 25%. Without any regulatory body or agency to incentivize or enforce such a shift in our infrastructural configuration, there are other solutions that have been proposed to curb the Cloud’s carbon problem. Some have proposed relocating data centres to Nordic countries like Iceland or Sweden, in a bid to utilize ambient, cool air to minimize carbon footprint, a technique called “free cooling.” However, network signal latency issues make this dream of a haven for green data centres largely untenable to meet the computing and data storage demands of the wider world.

As a result, the Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data centre can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. At 200 terawatt hours (TWh) annually, data centres collectively devour more energy than some nation-states. Today, the electricity utilized by data centres accounts for 0.3% of overall carbon emissions, and if we extend our accounting to include networked devices like laptops, smartphones, and tablets, the total shifts to 2% of global carbon emissions.

Why so much energy? Beyond cooling, the energy requirements of data centres are vast. To meet the pledge to customers that their data and cloud services will be available anytime, anywhere, data centres are designed to be hyper-redundant: If one system fails, another is ready to take its place at a moment’s notice, to prevent a disruption in user experiences. Like air conditioners idling in a low-power state, ready to rev up when things get too hot, the data centre is a Russian doll of redundancies: redundant power systems like diesel generators, redundant servers ready to take over computational processes should others become unexpectedly unavailable, and so forth. In some cases, only 6% to 12% of energy consumed is devoted to active computational processes. The remainder is allocated to cooling and maintaining chains upon chains of redundant fail-safes to prevent costly downtime.

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Lawsuit opens research misconduct report that may get a Harvard prof fired • Ars Technica

John Timmer on a lawsuit filed by Prof Francesca Gino against the Data Colada blog and Harvard University, which investigated some of her work on accusations of data fabrication:

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the Data Colada team had initially noted some oddities in the results reported from Gino’s work [about honesty]. In one case, they reported that they had found a spreadsheet of some of the original data, and it had a number of rows that appeared to be out of order. These rows contained some of the strongest effects seen in the experiment, and the editing history preserved in the Excel document format suggested these rows had been moved in from a different experiment.

The Harvard investigators, by contrast, got access to data on the computer systems used for surveying participants, copies from Gino’s hard drive, and raw data from the researchers who had collected them. And that record, the investigators conclude, made two things clear: Data Colada’s suppositions about which data was suspect were largely on target, and the data as published was different from what had originally been collected.

The report characterizes Gino’s response as twofold. One is to suggest that all of the problems on four separate papers represent “honest errors,” either by herself or her research assistants. The report doesn’t really dismiss this but does note that data handling that is “reckless” would also fit Harvard’s definition of research misconduct.

The second defense that Harvard’s investigators say Gino offered is that people conspired to plant evidence of fraud on her computers. At various points, the report indicates she accused either a former collaborator or the Data Colada team themselves of pursuing this plot. The investigators did not find this credible, noting that the issues involved “anomalies and/or discrepancies within or between study datasets accessed from one or more of the following sources: the Open Science Framework (“OSF”) website, where publicly available versions of study data can be posted by researchers; the sequestered hard drive of Professor Gino’s computer; Professor Gino’s Qualtrics account; and the RA who collected the data.”

Anyone maliciously manipulating this data, the investigators conclude, would have had to access lots of computers, identify the right files on them, and modify them at critical times during the preparation of the research papers. This, they felt, made the explanation unlikely.

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Unlikely is certainly one word for it. The feasibility of examining the creation of a paper like this is a big advance for science: it does let us find out in the first place whether papers are worth trying to replicate at all.
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New research suggests that our universe has no dark matter • Phys.org

Bernad Rizk:

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The current theoretical model for the composition of the universe is that it’s made of normal matter, dark energy and dark matter. A new University of Ottawa study challenges this.

A study, published today in The Astrophysical Journal, challenges the current model of the universe by showing that, in fact, it has no room for dark matter.

In cosmology, the term “dark matter” describes all that appears not to interact with light or the electromagnetic field, or that can only be explained through gravitational force. We can’t see it, nor do we know what it’s made of, but it helps us understand how galaxies, planets and stars behave.

Rajendra Gupta, a physics professor at the Faculty of Science, used a combination of the covarying coupling constants (CCC) and “tired light” (TL) theories (the CCC+TL model) to reach this conclusion.

This model combines two ideas—about how the forces of nature decrease over cosmic time and about light losing energy when it travels a long distance. It’s been tested and has been shown to match up with several observations, such as about how galaxies are spread out and how light from the early universe has evolved.

This discovery challenges the prevailing understanding of the universe, which suggests that roughly 27% of it is composed of dark matter and less than 5% of ordinary matter, remaining being the dark energy.

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The paper has the snappy title of “Testing CCC+TL Cosmology with Observed Baryon Acoustic Oscillation Features”, but if it gains traction then it could upend lots of how we think about the universe.
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Walt Disney’s everlasting effect on North American ski resorts • Inside the Magic

TJ Muscaro:

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Before he passed away in 1966, Walt Disney set out to build or buy his own ski resort. One of the proposed locations was Mineral King in California’s Sequoia National Park, but environmentalists reportedly blocked it. Obviously, Walt’s plans for a ski resort would never come to be, and if you take the “Keys to the Kingdom Tour” at the Magic Kingdom, you’ll learn about how the architecture of his ski resort lives on in the log cabin style of Frontierland.

But before the plans for a ski resort completely shut down, Disney already established its proposed trail signage.

That trail signage would survive and become the adopted method of the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA) in 1968 and is still in use today.

According to Signs of the Mountains, the modern trail rating system is as follows:
• Green Circle: The easiest; usually wide, open trails with a grade from 0-25%. (A 100% grade would be a 45-degree angle.)
• Blue Square: Intermediate; generally the most prevalent rating across a mountain, with a grade between 25–40% and often groomed.
• Black Diamond: Most difficult; steeper than 40%, likely ungroomed and therefore covered in moguls and/or the freshest snow.
• Double Black Diamond: Experts only! Very steep and narrow, with extra hazards and obstacles like exposed rock and drop-off cliffs.
• Orange Rectangle, horizontal with rounded edges: Terrain park; this is where you’ll find rails and boxes, professionally shaped jumps and half-pipes.

Now, each mountain and resort have their own subjective grading systems, but they are all based on this scale. For instance, Big Sky Resort in Montana offers triple black diamond routes, and Steamboat Spring in Colorado has Blue-Square-Black-Diamond to signify a run whose difficulty sits between the two standard ratings.

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The Disney company had actually tested how people reacted to the colours and shapes. Though this doesn’t explain how Europe has the Red grade in between the Blue and Black.
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Hundreds rescued from love scam centre in the Philippines – BBC News

Virma Simonette and Kelly Ng:

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Hundreds of people have been rescued from a scam centre in the Philippines that made them pose as lovers online.

Police said they raided the centre on Thursday and rescued 383 Filipinos, 202 Chinese and 73 other foreign nationals.

The centre, which is about 100km north of Manila, was masquerading as an online gambling firm, they said.
South East Asia has become a hub for scam centres where the scammers themselves are often entrapped and forced into criminal activity.

Young and tech-savvy victims are often lured into running these illegal operations, which range from money laundering and crypto fraud to so-called love scams. The latter are also known as “pig butchering” scams, named after the farming practice of fattening pigs before slaughtering them. These typically start with the scammer adopting a fake identity to gain their victim’s affection and trust – and then using the illusion of a romantic or intimate relationship to manipulate or steal from the victim. This often happens by persuading them to invest in fake schemes or businesses.

Thursday’s raid near Manila was sparked by a tip-off from a Vietnamese man who managed to flee the scam centre last month, police said. The man, who in his 30s, arrived in the Philippines in January this year, after being offered what he was told would be a chef’s job, said Winston Casio, spokesman for the presidential commission against organised crime. But the man soon realised that he, like hundreds of others, had fallen prey to human traffickers running love and cryptocurrency scams.

Those trapped in the Bamban centre were forced to send “sweet nothings” to their victims, many of whom were Chinese, Mr Casio said – they would check in on their recipients with questions about their day and if and what they had eaten for their last meal. They would also send photos of themselves to cultivate the relationship. Mr Casio said those running the scam centres trapped “good looking men and women to lure [victims]”.

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Good to see crypto fraud moving up to join those old favourites of money laundering and love scams. (The industrial nature of this scheme becomes clear from the picture accompanying the article.)
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When product markets become collective traps: the case of social media • U of Chicago Becker Friedman Institute for Economics

Leonardo Bursztyn, Benjamin Handel, Rafael Jiménez-Durán, and Christopher Roth:

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The authors begin by measuring the amount of money that users would accept to deactivate their accounts for four weeks, while keeping constant others’ social media use. They next measure how much users value their accounts when other students at their university are asked to deactivate their accounts as well. Finally, the authors measure users’ preferences over the deactivation of accounts of all participating students, including themselves. They find the following:

• Users would need to be paid $59 to deactivate TikTok and $47 to deactivate Instagram if others in their network were to continue using their accounts
• Users would be willing to pay $28 and $10 to have others, including themselves, deactivate TikTok and Instagram, respectively. Accounting for consumption spillovers to non-users reveals that 64% of active TikTok users and 48% of active Instagram users experience negative welfare from the products’ existence. Participants who do not have accounts would be willing to pay $67 and $39 to have others deactivate their TikTok and Instagram accounts, respectively
• Taken together, these results imply the existence of a “social media trap” for a large share of consumers, whose utility from the platforms is negative but would have been even more negative if they didn’t use social media
• The authors use these results to quantify the role of network effects on social media, or the extent to which users value social media platforms more when their peers use them. They find positive and quantitatively significant network effects: users value TikTok and Instagram 33% and 24% more, respectively, when their peers are on the sites compared to when they are not.

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I always find these studies fascinating, though the proof of the pudding really is in the eating: you need to actually offer real money and get people to carry through on the deactivation. Anything less is just indicative.
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US probes Hamas’s use of crypto before Oct. 7 • WSJ

Ian Talley and Angus Berwick:

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The US Treasury Department is investigating $165m in cryptocurrency-linked transactions that may have helped finance Hamas before the militant group’s Oct. 7 attack against Israel, the agency said in a report to Congress.

Treasury officials say the U.S.-designated terror group’s increasing use of digital financing underscores the need for Congress to approve new powers to oversee cryptocurrency as Hamas’s access to traditional sources of funding is hit by Western sanctions.

But the drive to expand regulations has sparked pushback. Crypto advocates and lawmakers who support the industry have attempted to minimize the role of digital currencies in terror financing and other illicit activities. 

The estimate of Hamas’s involvement in crypto-related transactions is contained in a Treasury report on the group’s use of digital currencies that was sent to Congress late Tuesday, the first formal US assessment of its use of cryptocurrencies.

“We continue to assess that Hamas and other terrorists have a preference for the use of traditional financial products and services, but I remain concerned that as we cut off their access to traditional finance these groups will increasingly turn to virtual assets,” deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said in a letter to lawmakers accompanying the report.

…Hamas collects about $100m a year from Iran, its chief international supporter, and raises revenue from a $500m global investment portfolio, according to Western officials. Israel’s military operation since last October has disrupted the roughly $600m a year the group collected in taxes in Gaza, its biggest source of funding, those officials say. But Hamas has been diversifying both its sources of funds and the methods it uses to move them, they add.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A sheep farmer in Montana had pleaded guilty to creating giant hybrids using an illegally cloned Marco Polo sheep.CC-licensed photo by Hans Birger Nilsen 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 TikTok, because why not.

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.

FTC goes undercover against fake antivirus companies • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a legal complaint against two companies based in Cyprus on Wednesday that it claims are behind a wave of malicious pop-ups that trick people into downloading a fake piece of antivirus software that generated tens of millions of dollars for its operators, according to court records. The scam also involved misrepresenting results on malware repository VirusTotal as infections on the user’s own computer. (Update: after the publication of this piece the FTC announced that Restoro and Reimage will pay $26m to settle the FTC’s charges.)

The move is the latest from the FTC in a series of actions in the privacy and cybersecurity space. In January, the FTC banned a data broker called X-Mode from selling sensitive location data after I revealed it was harvesting location data from Muslim prayer and dating apps. In this case, the FTC says it went “undercover” against the two related companies, called Restoro and Reimage, to buy the deceiving software and have phone calls with company representatives.

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The FTC “made four undercover purchases” of the companies’ products, and called them too. Of course the scammers tried to upsell them as well, aiming to get hundreds of dollars.

The other day I watched a terrible film called The Beekeeper, in which Jason Statham has the part of a (retired, of course) super-adept secret agent who keeps bees, but is also, er, one of a select group called, and this will surprise you, The Beekeepers (“we look after the hive”).

Anyhow, the first act setup is a friend of his being scammed for all her life savings and more by one of these fake antivirus companies. I found it notable how we didn’t need it explained that fake antivirus popups are a thing. Of course Statham Has His Revenge on the company, though that’s only the first act. They probably could – and should – have stopped there.
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Montana man pleads guilty to creating massive franken-sheep with cloned animal parts • Gizmodo

Matt Novak:

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An 80-year-old man in Montana pleaded guilty Tuesday to two felony wildlife crimes involving his plan to let paying customers hunt sheep on private ranches. But these weren’t just any old sheep. They were “massive hybrid sheep” created by illegally importing animal parts from central Asia, cloning the sheep, and then breeding an enormous hybrid species.

Arthur “Jack” Schubarth, 80, owns and operates the 215-acre “alternative livestock” ranch in Vaughn, Montana where he started this operation in 2013, according to a press release from the US Department of Justice. Alternative livestock includes hybrids of mountain sheep, mountain goats, and other large mammals which are often used for trophy hunting by wealthy people.

An unnamed accomplice of Schubart kicked off the decade-long scheme by illegally bringing biological tissue from a Marco Polo sheep, the largest sheep in the world, from Kyrgyzstan into the US in 2013, according to prosecutors.

How big are these sheep? An average male can weigh over 300 pounds with horns over five feet wide, giving them the largest sheep horns on the planet. The sheep are endangered and protected by both international treaties and US law. Montana also forbids the import of these foreign sheep or their parts in an effort to protect local American sheep from disease.

Once Schubart had smuggled his sheep parts into the US, he sent them to an unnamed lab which created 165 cloned embryos, according to the DOJ.

«

The lab embryos only seem to have resulted in one viable animal, a male which was then used to sire hybrids with normal sheep. Even so, interesting that cloning has become a workable scheme for animal smuggling.
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Vision Pro is an over-engineered “devkit”.. and other thoughts • Hugo’s Blog

Hugo Barra led the design team at Google for Android, then went to Xiaomi, and then to head the Oculus division at Meta, so he knows all pitfalls and summits of VR; thus his take on the Apple Vision Pro is not short, but is very insightful:

»

the Vision Pro likely draws as much as 40 watts of power, which is more than most MacBook laptops. This also means it has a power supply with the potential of generating a lot of heat. So, in addition to transferring the battery weight out of the headset, the decision to move to a tethered pack also keeps a huge heat source safely away from your head.

MY TAKE: All that said, the long-term strategic reason for having an external battery pack is to set expectations with Vision Pro users that there will always be an external box connected to the headset. In future Vision headsets, Apple should be able to comfortably start moving a lot of electronics off the headset, possibly shaving off as much half of the weight over a few generations and target around 300g. This also opens an extremely interesting path for Apple in a few years to use an iPhone, iPad or MacBook as the tethered computer driving the headset, which would dramatically simplify the headset.

Interestingly, there is a tethered VR headset in the market today that demonstrates this desirable end state. It’s the Bigscreen Beyond, the world’s smallest PC VR headset (i.e. needs to be tethered to a computer) that is lighter than even most ski goggles at 127 grams. Bigscreen’s ability to build this product is in many ways a bit of cheating since the headset was stripped of all sensors (no external cameras or eye tracking), but its existence nonetheless plays an important role in letting us experience what the future holds and where Apple’s sights are focused.

«

He also thinks that “Live sports will be Apple’s secret weapon to sell a huge number of Vision Pro headsets to hardcore fans — but it’s going to be a long & expensive journey”. Agree on that.
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Meta to replace widely used data tool—and largely cut off reporter access • WSJ

Jeff Horwitz:

»

Meta Platforms plans to shut down a data tool long used by academic researchers, journalists and others to monitor the spread of content on its Facebook and Instagram services, the company said on Thursday.

The social-media giant said it will decommission CrowdTangle in five months and is replacing it with a tool called the Meta Content Library, which will be available only to academic and nonprofit researchers, not to most news outlets.

CrowdTangle has been widely used by journalists, researchers and regulators seeking to understand social-media platforms and studying the viral spread of content including false information and conspiracy theories. Reporting based on data that the tool produced often caused frustration for Meta’s leaders, who have been gradually limiting the tool in recent years.

Meta has already started taking applications for access to the new tool, which it said it is continuing to develop. The company said it will be an upgrade over CrowdTangle, with features the old tool lacked, such as the ability to search content based on how widely it was viewed and to see data on public comments on posts.

Two researchers granted early access to the new system offered a mixed appraisal.

Cody Buntain, a researcher at the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies, agreed that the new features are valuable, but said the new system lacks CrowdTangle’s ability to study social-media activity in specific geographic locations.

«

I mean, it’s not as if it’s an election year in multiple countries, or that Facebook and Instagram are widely used, is it?
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Australian computer scientist Craig Wright is not bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, high court rules • The Guardian

Alex Hern:

»

In a highly unusual decision, the presiding judge, Mr Justice Mellor, issued the verdict within seconds of the case concluding, promising to issue a “fairly lengthy written judgment” in due course.

“However, having considered all the evidence and submissions presented to me in this trial, I’ve reached the conclusion that the evidence is overwhelming,” Mellor said.

“First, that Dr Wright is not the author of the bitcoin white paper. Second, Dr Wright is not the person who adopted or operated under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto in the period 2008 to 2011. Third, Dr Wright is not the person who created the bitcoin system. And, fourth, he is not the author of the initial versions of the bitcoin software.”

Wright was sued by a conglomerate of cryptocurrency companies called the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (Copa), which sought to prevent him from continuing to claim he had invented the cryptocurrency and from using this to expand his influence over the sector.

The trial took an unusual turn even before it started. Copa, whose membership includes the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s Block, Coinbase and the bitcoin investment vehicle MicroStrategy, accused Wright of fabricating a significant quantity of the documents provided as evidence.

The group’s expert witnesses said they found hallmarks of backdated edits, created or altered using versions of software that did not exist at the time the documents were supposedly made. One document contained traces of the involvement of ChatGPT in its creation, Copa claimed, despite the fact that the software did not exist until years after the document was supposedly written.

…The expert witnesses for Wright’s defence concurred with many of the assessments, including the finding that the original document describing bitcoin had been made using OpenOffice software, while the version provided by Wright had been written using a tool called LaTeX.

«

Patrick McKenzie, an advisor to Stripe and financial knower of things, has a thread about Wright. Of whom an American judge once said he’d perjured himself and filed forged documents.
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The murderous energy suck of Universal Paperclips • Hill Heat

Brad Johnson:

»

Last week, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said she “couldn’t sleep last night because of the enormous energy suck from AI and crypto.”

None of us should be sleeping.

In 2003, Nick Bostrom warned, as a thought experiment, that an artificial intelligence optimized to create paperclips would decide the optimal outcome would be a universe with “a lot of paper clips but no humans.” In 2017, Frank Lantz designed a game where you can play the role of the paperclip maximizer, where you buy out competition, increase human trust by solving male pattern baldness and global warming, then release the hypnodrones and eventually convert all matter in the universe into paperclips.

As Charles Stross and others have pointed out, the AI-paperclip maximizer is already here, in the form of the modern corporation. A corporation, Stross notes, is a “hive organism” which “pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance,” with “a sociopathic lack of empathy.”

The few humans who live to serve these all-consuming organisms, such as Silicon Valley neo-fascist Marc Andreesen, glorify these goals as “techno-optimism” or “effective accelerationism.”

Even as most humans recognize the wisdom and necessity of reducing energy consumption and the pollution destroying our planet’s habitability, these corporate servants embedded in Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and K Street instead want to feed the borg, with hyper-consumptive computing projects such as cryptocurrency and the machine-learning models currently dubbed “artificial intelligence.”

Bitcoin mining now uses more energy than the entire nation of the Netherlands and as much fresh water as Switzerland. And AI is catching up fast, Elizabeth Kolbert warns. This is great news for NVIDIA stock and bad news for humanity.

«

Johnson has a certain, um, assertiveness about his writing. But it’s refreshing too.
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The three-dimensional porous mesh structure of Cu-based metal-organic-framework – aramid cellulose separator enhances the electrochemical performance of lithium metal anode batteries • ScienceDirect

Why? Let’s skip past the abstract and go to the Introduction, which begins thus:

»

Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic:Lithium-metal batteries are promising candidates for high-energy-density rechargeable batteries due to their low electrode potentials and high theoretical capacities [1], [2].

«

Strangely, though, ChatGPT is not cited as an author for this article. (It’s possible the authors, who are based in China, needed this for the translation, but it’s odd to not get it round-tripped back to Chinese just to check ChatGPT didn’t insert something foolish.)
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Cockpit voice recorders only record two hours at a time. The NTSB chair wants it to be 25 • CNN

Gregory Wallace:

»

Under US standards, cockpit voice recorders, or CVRs, are set up to record on a two-hour loop. As each cycle repeats, the previous audio is overwritten with new sound – a factor that has impacted 10 investigations in the last five years, including several probes into near-collisions on US runways in 2023, according to National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy.

“Cockpit voice recorders aren’t just convenient … they are critical to helping us accurately pinpoint what was going on,” she said in a news conference Sunday night. “And it’s key to safety.”

It is an anomaly in the era of inexpensive and expansive digital storage, when the phone of each passenger onboard a flight could easily have more capacity than the plane’s voice recorder.

Now, Homendy wants the recording standard to change.

She is calling on the Federal Aviation Administration to require a 25-hour recording window for the cockpit voice recorder in all aircraft – a duration that is already a standard requirement under European airline regulations.

«

Following on from Boeing so sadly wiping over video of its workers labouring on the door panel which blew off (which is what the NTSB wants the CVR data from). Strange how the US standard is behind the European one. Or is it? (Thanks Joe for the link.)
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Energy industry’s methane emissions near record despite pledges • Bloomberg via Luxembourg Times

»

Global methane emissions from fossil fuels held near a record high last year, the International Energy Agency said in its annual Methane Tracker report, renewing concerns that governments and industry aren’t doing enough to stem releases of the devastating greenhouse gas.

While the analysis highlighted progress in some places, on the whole it suggests global oil, gas and coal producers and governments are falling short of promises to cut methane emissions, directly jeopardizing global efforts to limit climate change. The fossil fuel industry must cut methane emissions 75% by 2030, the IEA said, in order to be on pace for net-zero emissions in 2050, which aligns with the goals of the Paris Agreement.

Cumulative methane emissions from the energy sector remained near a 2019 record, though fossil fuel output is higher. The report stressed how methane releases from coal, oil and gas operations can be curbed through changes in operator behaviour, equipment upgrades and capture technology. Those interventions would require an estimated $170bn in investment by the end of the decade, or roughly 5% of the industry’s 2023 income.

…Large methane releases – the kind typically associated with big leaks – grew 50% last year, “a worrying trend,” according to Christophe McGlade, head of the IEA’s energy supply unit and lead author of the report.

“It’s very often the case that once a leak is detected, once we know that it’s occurring, it can be quite quick and quite easy to stop,” he said. “Sometimes someone’s left a latch open on a tank, sometimes it’s a flare that’s gone out and once they are aware that this is happening they can stop it.”

«

Lots of pledges. Very little action.
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Gurman: AirPods Pro to gain ‘Hearing Aid Mode’ in iOS 18 • MacRumors

Tim Hardwick:

»

AirPods Pro will gain a new “hearing aid mode” with the release of iOS 18 later this year, according to the latest report by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

Writing in the subscriber edition of his regular Power On newsletter, Gurman claims that the “big news” for AirPods Pro in the near term will be support for a hearing aid-style function when iOS 18 drops in the fall.

To be clear, this isn’t the first time we have heard a potential hearing aid feature for AirPods Pro. The first rumor appeared in a 2021 Wall Street Journal report, but it was previously framed as a feature that would be exclusive to a next-generation model of AirPods Pro. However, Apple in September 2022 released the second-generation AirPods Pro, while the company more recently released a refreshed model with a USB-C port.

AirPods Pro already offer a Conversation Boost feature, which boosts the volume and clarity of people directly in front of the wearer, but Apple has not advertised the earbuds as a hearing aid device, because this would require FDA regulatory approval.

As per the FDA, a hearing aid is defined as “any wearable device designed for, offered for the purpose of, or represented as aiding persons with or compensating for, impaired hearing.” This definition encompasses both air-conduction and bone-conduction devices in a variety of styles (for example, behind-the-ear, in-the-canal, or body worn).

«

Apple has been edging towards the health appliance market – witness the Watch adding blood oxygen reading (and then subtracting it 😬) – so this is a logical next step.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Cranes like these, made by China ZPMC, are suspected of having backdoor modems for malicious use. CC-licensed photo by Jane Nearing 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. Oh, just calling home. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

TikTok’s fate now lies with the Senate • The Verge

Lauren Feiner:

»

The fate of TikTok in the US now lies with the Senate after House lawmakers voted overwhelmingly to pass a bill that would ban the app unless Chinese parent company ByteDance sells it.

President Joe Biden has already said he would sign the bill, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, if both chambers advance it.

But even though the bill sailed through the House only about a week after it was first introduced, the Senate will present a whole different set of challenges.

To start, there’s no companion bill yet, so the legislation is barely at the start line in that chamber. And even if one is introduced, Senate rules could make it tricky to maintain enough support (60 out of 100 members) to clear it. Just one senator can put a hold on legislation to keep it from advancing quickly.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has indicated he could be willing to do just that. He told The Washington Post prior to the House vote that he would block any bill he believed to violate the Constitution and said Congress shouldn’t “be trying to take away the First Amendment rights of [170] million Americans.”

A long legal process could leave room for doubts — and lobbying money — to seep in. Consider the splashy introduction of the RESTRICT Act — another attempt to ban TikTok — in the Senate last year just before TikTok CEO Shou Chew testified in the House. Despite early excitement about the measure, it slowly fell off the radar as opponents lodged their critiques. Ultimately, it failed to move through the chamber.

«

As usual, America’s sclerotic political system inches towards action. It’s basically the same thing that Donald Trump wanted to do, except that was a complete mess which included favouring his mates. (And Trump now opposes it – perhaps because he’s been promised lots of foreign money.)
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Espionage probe finds communications device on Chinese cranes at US ports • WSJ

Dustin Volz:

»

Over a dozen cellular modems were found on crane components in use at one US port, and another modem was found inside another port’s server room, according to a committee aide. Some of the modems had active connections to operational components to the cranes, the aide said.

While it isn’t unusual for modems to be installed on cranes to remotely monitor operations and track maintenance, it appears that at least some of the ports using the ZPMC-made equipment hadn’t asked for that capability, according to congressional investigators and documents seen by The Wall Street Journal. One port with modems told lawmakers in a December letter that it was aware of their existence on the cranes, but couldn’t explain why they were installed.

ZPMC, a Chinese state-owned company, didn’t respond to requests for comment. Liu Pengyu, a spokesman at the Chinese embassy in Washington, didn’t address specific questions about the modems but said claims that China-made cranes pose a national-security risk to the U.S. is “entirely paranoia” and amounted to “abusing national power to obstruct normal economic and trade cooperation.”

Concerns about ZPMC’s cranes have been building steadily in Washington for years. In 2021, the Federal Bureau of Investigation found intelligence-gathering equipment on board a ship that was transporting cranes into the Baltimore port, the Journal previously reported. 

Last month, the Biden administration announced it would invest more than $20bn over the next five years to replace foreign-built cranes with U.S.-manufactured ones. The money will go toward supporting the building of cranes by a US subsidiary of Mitsui, a Japanese company…

«

‘Tis the season for suspicion about Chinese-originating communications systems.
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EU votes to ban riskiest forms of AI and impose restrictions on others • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

»

The European Parliament on Wednesday voted to approve the Artificial Intelligence Act, which will ban uses of AI “that pose unacceptable risks” and impose regulations on less risky types of AI.

“The new rules ban certain AI applications that threaten citizens’ rights, including biometric categorisation systems based on sensitive characteristics and untargeted scraping of facial images from the Internet or CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases,” a European Parliament announcement today said. “Emotion recognition in the workplace and schools, social scoring, predictive policing (when it is based solely on profiling a person or assessing their characteristics), and AI that manipulates human behavior or exploits people’s vulnerabilities will also be forbidden.”

The ban on certain AI applications provides for penalties of up to 35 million euros or 7% of a firm’s “total worldwide annual turnover for the preceding financial year, whichever is higher.” Violations of other provisions have lower penalties.

There are exemptions to allow law enforcement use of remote biometric identification systems in certain cases.

«

You can read the EP’s summary.
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State of subscription apps 2024 • RevenueCat

RevenueCat provides in-app subscription SDKs and integrations for all sorts of apps, from tiny to giant. It’s been doing this annual report for quite a while:

»

Key insights

• 1.7% of downloads turned into paying subscribers in their first 30 days, which is slightly up from last report. The difference between lower quartile (.6%) and upper quartile (4.2%) remains striking.

• The top 5% of newly launched apps generate over 200x more revenue than the bottom quartile does, 12 months after launch.

• The average Realized LTV [lifetime value] per download in North America, 14 days in, is 4x the global average at $0.35 compared to $0.08. A multiple that exists both on the App Store, as well as on Google Play.

• Share of monthly subscribers retained after 12 months dropped by ~14% last year, across categories and impacting both the best and worst performers alike.

• Over 10% of churned monthly subscribers re-subscribe within 12 months, with categories like Media & Entertainment seeing even higher reactivation rates.

«

Lots of fascinating stuff about subscription apps, which feel like they’re everywhere. The suggestion is that they mostly don’t make money.
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Nimby Watch: the Green Party’s solar problem • CapX

Jonn Elledge:

»

Take Rutland councillor Rick Wilson. When he narrowly won the Ryhall & Casterton by-election in March 2022, he credited his victory to his opposition to two things. One, inevitably, was a plan to build more homes (650 of them, but that sort of NIMBYism is barely worth even noting any more). The other was the Mallard Pass Solar Farm, which will cover 4.2km2 of agricultural land immediately next to the East Coast Mainline. 

This, one might think, sounds like a pretty good place to put a facility which will generate clean and renewable energy, but Wilson – who is, let’s remember, a Green – told Lincolnshire Online that while ‘we do need renewable energy… there are other green initiatives we can pursue and there are more suitable locations’. The Mallard Pass Action Group, incidentally, has a brilliantly pithy slogan: ‘YES to solar, NO to Mallard Pass’. To put that another way: yes to building things, no to doing it in my backyard.

And this happens with unnerving frequency – so much so that last June the BBC did a whole piece looking at why. 

In 2023, 25-year-old Frank Adlington-Stringer became the first Green to be elected to North East Derbyshire District Council. Two years earlier, he’d written an article explaining that, while he supports solar farms in principle, he objects to building them in his area in practice. His argument was that, “we shouldn’t be exchanging green energy for green spaces”, a stance which I’m sure will have global warming retreating in terror any day now. 

In doing this, he was echoing the local Green Party’s recent campaign against solar panels in Hastings Country Park. This was not, as Julia Hilton, also later elected councillor, reassured us, a “Nimby argument” – it was merely that this particular site was “not compatible with a solar farm, which would industrialise this very precious landscape habitat”. 

The precious landscape habitat being? Fields. 

«

Don’t like nuclear, don’t like solar.. something’s rubbish in the Green Party.
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Can AI shorten PC replacement cycles? Dell seems to think so • The Register

Paul Kunert:

»

AI could be the mechanism to shorten notebook replacement cycles, according to the chief financial officer at Dell.

Talking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom 2024 conference last week, Dell exec Yvonne McGill pointed out that the PC industry has just emerged from eight straight quarters of shrinking shipments.

“We’ve been in the longest digestion cycle … in the history of PCs, and so we know it’s back-to-back years of double-digit decline, pretty amazing, never seen before results. But it’s time for a refresh, right?” she asked the interviewer and the audience.

The drivers for that refresh – which Dell, HP, and others are banking on beginning later this year – include Windows 10 going end-of-life in 19 months and on-device generative AI, though McGill admitted “that’s less of a driver right now.”

Cutting through some of the hype around the emerging class of client devices, Morgan Stanley’s interviewer mused: “When should we think about the real use cases to drive adoption [of AI PCs]? There’s some skepticism.”

The Dell exec responded by trying to define an AI PC as one with an neural processing unit (NPU) or a specialized GPU. Likewise, Intel said it thinks AI PCs are those with the company’s latest CPUs.

«

Suspect that an AI PC will quickly be defined as “whatever helps us put the price up”.
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Boeing says overwriting video footage of airplane’s door plug standard • Axios

Andrew Childers:

»

Boeing overwrote security camera footage of repair work on the door plug of an Alaska Airlines 737-9 plane that failed during a flight in January, federal inspectors said Wednesday.

The National Transportation Safety Board said in a letter to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation that the missing footage is hampering its investigation into the accident. “To date, we still do not know who performed the work to open, reinstall, and close the door plug on the accident aircraft,” the agency said.

NTSB said it has been unable to interview the door crew manager at the Renton, Washington facility because he is out on medical leave. The agency in the letter stressed that it is not seeking to interview the workers that did the repairs for any punitive means but instead to learn about Boeing’s quality assurance process.

Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 safely returned to Portland International Airport just minutes after takeoff in January after part of the fuselage flew off at 16,000 feet for yet-unclear reasons.

“We will continue supporting this investigation in the transparent and proactive fashion we have supported all regulatory inquiries into this accident,” Boeing said in an emailed statement.

…When asked about the overwritten footage, Boeing responded: “Consistent with standard practice, video recordings are maintained on a rolling 30 day basis.”

«

The work on the plane was done in September. Will the NTSB start requiring Boeing to store tapes for a year? But it’s a bit weird that it doesn’t know who was where on which days. That’s a surprisingly lax approach to factory work where lives depend on the result.
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Algorithms hijacked my generation. I fear for Gen Alpha • After Babel

Freya India:

»

Let’s say you were born in the year 1999 so Instagram comes out when you are 12. Back then it was fairly benign: a platform to share pretty sunsets and candid pictures with friends. A few years in, the editing app FaceTune arrives (launched in 2014), and everyone on your feed starts to look perfect. You start editing yourself—smoothing your skin, reshaping your nose, restructuring your jaw. By the time you’re 16, your Instagram face is very different from your natural face, which you’ve come to despise.

And then the algorithms are introduced: your feed is no longer chronological but customized (launched in 2016 for IG). Instagram now serves you not just photos of the friends you follow but of influencers––beautiful women from all over the world, selecting the ones that make you feel the most insecure. You, with fuller lips! You, with a microscopic waist!! Soon you get ads to fix your flaws: Botox; fillers; Brazilian Butt Lifts! By the time TikTok comes out you’re 18, and your feed tracks you even faster. Hate your nose? Try this editing app. Not enough? Try this video editing app. Want it in real life? Nose jobs near you! Suddenly you’re in your 20s and you’ve transformed your style, your face, maybe even your body. And yet you are still insecure. You still hate how you look. And every day your feeds flash on with “This is your sign to get a nose job!” “The earlier you start Botox the better!” “Get ready with me for a Brazilian butt lift!”

In this way, for many girls, this rewiring of their self-image, this pressure to alter their appearance, happened without them realizing it. It was gradual. Subtle. Drip-fed.  

And where have we ended up? With record rates of cosmetic surgeries, from buccal fat removal to lip fillers to liposuction, and younger clients than ever before. With young women asking plastic surgeons to make them look like Snapchat filters. With 14-year-olds obsessing over wrinkles and a surge in teenagers seeking Botox. Plus rising rates of facial dysmorphia, body dysmorphia and eating disorders.

Algorithms act like conveyor belts. Show even the slightest interest, fear, or insecurity about anything—hover over it for half a second—and you will be drawn in deeper. Little by little, the algorithm learns what keeps you watching.

«

Scary but accurate. “Instagram Face” is definitely a thing.
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Massively popular safe locks have secret backdoor codes • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

Two of the biggest manufacturers of locks used in commercial safes have been accused of essentially putting backdoors in at least some of their products in a new letter by Senator Ron Wyden. Wyden is urging the US government to explicitly warn the public about the vulnerabilities, which Wyden says could be exploited by foreign adversaries to steal what US businesses store in safes, such as trade secrets.

The little known “manufacturer” or “manager” reset codes could let third parties—such as spies or criminals—bypass locks without the owner’s consent and are sometimes not disclosed to customers. Wyden’s office also found that while the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) bans such locks for sensitive and classified US government use in part due to the security vulnerability reset codes pose, the government has deliberately not warned the public about the existence of these backdoors.

The specific companies named in Wyden’s letter are China-based SECURAM and US-based Sargent and Greenleaf (S&G). Each produces keypad locks which are then implemented into safes by other manufacturers. The full list of locks that contain backdoor codes is unknown, but documentation available online points to multiple SECURAM products which do include them, and S&G confirmed to Wyden’s office that some of its own locks also have similar codes.

«

That’s “locks” as in “electronic locks”. I guess that such codes would be needed in, for example, hotels that offer guests in-room safes where you can set your own combination. What if a guest goes away having left the safe locked, or, equally, locks themself out of their safe? Backdoor code to the rescue.

Of course you might not feel like that if you have a big-ass safe that you don’t want people breaking in to. Such codes, inevitably, must leak once their existence is known. (Of course the question is how much this is like demanding backdoors for encryption.)
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Man finds out migraines caused by brain tapeworms; undercooked bacon may be culprit • NBC News

Katherine Itoh:

»

A man was hospitalized with worsening migraines only to find out they were caused by parasitic tapeworm larvae in his brain — and researchers believe he was infected by eating undercooked bacon.

The unidentified 52-year-old American man consulted doctors about changes in his usual migraines over four months, according to a study in the American Journal of Case Reports published Thursday. The migraines became more frequent, severe and unresponsive to medication.

The patient was admitted to the hospital for testing. CT scans revealed numerous cystic foci, which are fluid-filled sacs in the brain. Cysticercosis cyst antibody tests returned positive, and the man was diagnosed with neurocysticercosis, the study said.

Neurocysticercosis is a form of the parasitic tissue infection caused by larval cysts of the pork tapeworm found in the brain, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.

«

Oh, but that isn’t the best part of this nightmare. The actual paper, when you read it, suggests that the undercooked bacon would have led to tapeworm infection in his gut. But then poor handwashing would have led to a faecal-oral ingestion of the eggs which then led to the brain cysts.

So: cook your bacon and wash your hands.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Cocoa, the key to making chocolate, just broke through an all-time high price – so expect smaller cakes, bars and sprinkles. CC-licensed photo by generalising 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. Swap it for a gold bar. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Apple to allow iOS app downloads direct from websites in the EU • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

Apple is planning to make further changes in EU countries to allow some developers to distribute their iOS apps directly from a website. The new web distribution feature will be available with a software update “later this spring,” according to Apple, providing developers with a key new way to distribute iOS apps in EU markets without the need for a separate app store — as long as they’re willing to adhere to Apple’s strict rules.

While Apple is opening up iOS to more third-party apps here, these are still some key security protections around how apps are distributed via websites — namely, you’ll still have to work within the strict Apple app development ecosystem. “Apps offered through Web Distribution must meet Notarization requirements to protect platform integrity, like all iOS apps, and can only be installed from a website domain that the developer has registered in App Store Connect,” explains Apple.

It’s also not going to be a simple process to install these apps on an iPhone in the EU. “To install apps from a developer’s website, users will first need to approve the developer to install apps in Settings on their iPhone,” says Apple. “When installing an app, a system sheet will display information that developers have submitted to Apple for review, like the app name, developer name, app description, screenshots, and system age rating.”

So this isn’t going to be an open and free way for developers to distribute apps over the web to iOS devices in EU markets.

«

Unsurprising. But Apple’s fear of the EU’S DMA (potential fine much bigger than EU revenues) seems to be moving it towards a much more, um, compliant stance. Apple’s never going to call it “sideloading” except in a disparaging way, of course.
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The meltdown in chocolate is coming • Bloomberg via The Economic Times

Javier Blas:

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because millions of West African farmers saw cocoa as their only way to escape abject poverty, the world had plentiful supply and low prices. As a result, you and I have been enjoying the pleasures of chocolate on the cheap for decades.

Unlike most other agricultural commodities, cocoa hasn’t developed into a plantation business. At the prevailing prices of the 1990s and 2000s, it simply didn’t make commercial sense. The money was made around trading the beans, and processing them into chocolate — not planting, growing and harvesting cocoa trees.

Today, the crop is still grown overwhelmingly by poor smallholders. Just making enough to subsist, most lack the means to re-invest in their plots. And finally, the decades of underinvestment have caught up with growing chocolate demand. For the third consecutive crop season, global consumption in 2023-24 will meaningfully surpass production – something unseen since the early 1960s.

We are all now confronting the inevitable chocolate crisis.

In the world of commodities, price records have fallen everywhere on the back of the industrialization of China. At the end of 2023, cocoa was one of only a four major commodities that still traded below their price peaks set in the 1970s, the previous commodity boom.

But the 46-year-old record finally fell [in February], when the cost of cocoa jumped in New York to more than $5,500 per metric ton. The industry is now abuzz with hyperbole, including predictions of prices doubling again to $10,000 a ton. I don’t think it will get to that. It’s worth remembering that the cocoa beans traded a year ago for $2,500, and that in 2000 they changed hands at just $650.

What’s happening in West Africa will soon be felt in supermarkets around the world. In a conference call with investors on Feb. 8, the day that cocoa prices blew past their previous record, Michele Buck, chief executive officer of The Hershey Co., warned about what’s coming: “We will be using every tool in our toolbox, including pricing, as a way to manage the business.”

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This piece appeared in late February; on Tuesday the cocoa price passed $7,000 per metric tonne.
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Online opt-in polls can produce misleading results about young adults’, Hispanics’ views • Pew Research Center

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Online opt-in polls have become increasingly popular. And for some purposes, such as election polling, they can perform similarly to more traditional survey approaches.

There is evidence, however, that the online environment in which they operate is somewhat unstable.

In particular, several recent studies have documented large errors in online opt-in surveys due to the presence of so-called “bogus respondents.” These respondents do not answer questions sincerely; instead, they attempt to complete surveys with as little effort as possible to earn money or other rewards.

Studies have shown that bogus respondents can cause opt-in surveys to overestimate rare attitudes and behaviors, such as ingesting bleach to protect against COVID-19, belief in conspiracies like Pizzagate or support for political violence.

At Pew Research Center, we’ve found that this type of overreporting tends to be especially concentrated in estimates for adults under 30, as well as Hispanic adults. Bogus respondents may be identifying this way in order to bypass screening questions that might otherwise prevent them from receiving a reward, though the precise reasons are difficult to pin down. Whatever the underlying cause, the result can be unreliable estimates for those groups.

For example, in a February 2022 survey experiment, we asked opt-in respondents if they were licensed to operate a class SSGN (nuclear) submarine. In the opt-in survey, 12% of adults under 30 claimed this qualification, significantly higher than the share among older respondents. In reality, the share of Americans with this type of submarine license rounds to 0%.

The problem was even worse for Hispanic estimates. About a quarter (24%) of opt-in cases claiming to be Hispanic said they were licensed to operate a nuclear sub, versus 2% of non-Hispanics.

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Pew is doing this in the context of a ridiculous poll which suggested that 20% of American adults under 30 agree with the statement “The Holocaust is a myth”. Pew tried it with a more robust panel: found the figure is 3% across all age ranges.

The only puzzle is why anyone, anywhere, would use an online opt-in poll with financial rewards and expect it not to be gamed to hell and back.
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Why everyone Is a Kate Middleton truther now • The Atlantic

Helen Lewis:

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We have become so used to smartphone surveillance, oversharing on social media, and the commercial harvesting of life events for content that the prospect of remaining uninformed about the state of a stranger’s intestines now seems like a personal affront. On March 4, a grainy photograph of Kate traveling in the passenger seat of a car with her mother, Carole, began to circulate, but it did not stop the speculation. Did her face look weird if you zoomed in to 20 times magnification? (Yes, but then so would anyone’s.) Where was Prince William? (Maybe with their kids?) Was the photo staged, as in Weekend at Bernie’s? (Come on.) Just to add fuel to the fire, that picture was not widely circulated in Britain. Again: What aren’t we being told? Why are they hiding the truth from us?

Over the weekend, the frenzy intensified when Kensington Palace released a photograph, supposedly taken by Prince William last week, of Catherine with her three children. Within hours, TikTok was full of momfluencers earnestly discussing the clumsy signs of editing on Prince Louis’s patterned sweater. Someone on X (formerly Twitter) put the photo in an online tool that deemed it AI-generated. Someone else claimed, in a post that went viral, that the photo had been taken in November, based on the family involved wearing the same clothes that they did on a trip to a food bank—edited to be different colors, for some reason. Another person jumped in to say that the shrub behind them was suspiciously green for early spring in England. And—oh, look—she didn’t appear to be wearing her wedding ring.

These assertions sounded plausible, and the sheer volume of them was self-reinforcing. But when I stopped to think, my brain somehow rewired itself. Why did I instantly believe in such a thing as an online tool that can precisely calculate the probability of a photograph being AI-generated? Why would Kensington Palace cunningly edit a white sweater to be navy—and then leave telltale signs of fakery, such as Princess Charlotte’s impossible sleeve? When I read a suggestion that Kate’s face had been lifted from her Vogue cover portrait, the spell broke. Maybe the faces looked the same … because they belonged to the same person?

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The same person?? That’s crazy talk! Though the fun in this piece is also about the scramble in loyal newsrooms which had trumpeted the photo as proof that Everything Is Totally Fine (which I think it is) and then had to reverse ferret to say that its nixing by photo agencies Raised Questions.
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Colorado’s star DNA analyst intentionally manipulated data, investigation finds • WSJ

Dan Frosch:

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Colorado’s star DNA scientist intentionally manipulated evidence for years, calling into question all of the criminal cases she worked on in her nearly three-decade career, according to a preliminary investigation released by officials Friday.

Yvonne “Missy” Woods, who helped solve some of the state’s most notorious crimes, abruptly left her post last November after the Colorado Bureau of Investigation discovered anomalies in her work and initiated a criminal probe. The internal inquiry released Friday asserts that Woods, long one of the bureau’s most respected analysts, purposefully altered DNA testing results.

The report said her manipulation affected at least 652 cases she handled between 2008 and 2023. The total could end up being higher, as investigators are still reviewing Woods’s cases dating back to the beginning of her career in 1994.

“Our actions in rectifying this unprecedented breach of trust will be thorough and transparent,” said CBI Director Chris Schaefer. 

The review didn’t find that Woods falsified DNA matches or fabricated DNA profiles. Instead, it said she omitted material facts in records, tampered with DNA testing results, and violated a variety of lab policies including quality-control measures.

State officials previously said they would need to retest and review a total of about 3,000 DNA samples handled by Woods.

Her lawyer, Ryan Brackley, said Woods never created or falsely reported any exculpatory DNA evidence or gave false testimony resulting in someone being wrongfully convicted or imprisoned. 

“To the extent that the findings of the internal investigation will call her good work into question, Ms. Woods will continue to cooperate to preserve the integrity of her work,” he said.

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There’s an episode of Elementary (the excellent Sherlock-Holmes-transplanted-to-modern-day-New-York series starring Jonny Lee Miller) in which the police, and Holmes, think they’ve got their man. Except it turns out that he works in the DNA analysis division and was very sloppy.

That doesn’t seem to be the case here, though. What a mess.
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Trump just rug-pulled the China hawks on TikTok • Noahpinion

Noah Smith:

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Why are both TikTok’s current management and CCP [Chinese Communist Party] mouthpieces so desperate to prevent a sale [of the US part of TikTok to a US-owned company]? After all, TikTok would still exist, and [current owners] ByteDance would get tens of billions of dollars in cash. There’s only one answer that makes sense: Chinese authorities believe that TikTok is an important tool for influencing public opinion in the United States.

There are two reasons usually given for forcing a TikTok sale. First, people complain that the app spies on Americans for the CCP. This is true. The company has repeatedly been caught doing any number of bad things with its American users’ data — tracking journalists who criticize the company, forwarding private data to the Chinese parent company (where the law stipulates that the CCP then owns the information), and so on. Efforts to police the app to prevent these misuses of data have been helpless, hapless, and ultimately hopeless.

But the bigger concern about TikTok isn’t spying — it’s propaganda. About a third of young Americans, and a seventh of Americans in general, now regularly get their news from the app.

The problem here isn’t that the news young Americans get on TikTok is bad — much of it certainly is bad, but that’s more of a problem with news consumers than with the app. The problem is that the news is subtly and invisibly controlled by a foreign adversary government.

…every single topic that the CCP doesn’t want people to talk about is getting suppressed on TikTok.

Again, pay close attention to what this study says. The point is not that topics like Tiananmen Square are less popular on TikTok than on Instagram. The point is that the difference between the two platforms is much, much greater for topics like Tiananmen Square than for other politically sensitive topics that the CCP doesn’t care about.

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“TikTok is propaganda” has moved from “flat-out conspiracy theory” to “accepted wisdom” in just a couple of years.
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Solar panels spread across America’s heartland as farmers chase stable returns • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Ilena Peng, Michael Hirtzer and Will Wade:

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For Stuart Woolf, who grows wine grapes, almonds and other specialty crops in California, solar power is a necessary compromise as farming gets more challenging.

Woolf, who has 1,200 acres of panels on his farm in the state’s Central Valley, says individual growers like him are turning to solar to survive. He began leasing land to solar developers about a decade ago, an arrangement that provides him with a much-needed new profit stream.

“We would prefer not to have any solar, but if we don’t have it, we won’t have the ability to keep this farm going,” he said.

Farmers are increasingly embracing solar as a buffer against volatile crop prices and rising expenses. Their incomes are heading for a 26% slide this year, the biggest drop since 2006, as cash receipts for corn, soy and sugar cane are expected to drop by double-digit percentages.

The shift is a big part of the renewables push in the US: The American Farmland Trust estimates that 83% of expected future solar development will take place on agricultural soil.

“Solar developers are looking for larger parcels of flatter land, and agricultural land often features those characteristics,” said Sean Gallagher, senior vice president of policy for Washington, DC-based trade group Solar Energy Industries Association. In return, farmers get more stable revenue over the long term — and it can be above what they earn from crops, he said.

…Solar panels are “covering up so much of the most fertile, productive farmland in the world,” said Ben Riensche, an Iowa corn and soybean farmer. “Someday, people will have electricity to run their Tesla, but no food.”

Others don’t see it as a food-versus-fuel debate. “There’s plenty of acres and record supplies. I don’t think we need those corn acres,” Dan French, executive producer of Solar Farm Summit, said at a conference held outside of Chicago. Solar so far makes up a small share of overall US farmland. Having solar account for as much as 40% of US electricity would require about 5.7 million acres, the Department of Energy estimates. That is less than 1% of America’s some 880 million acres of farmland.

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The money is in all the wrong places • Defector

Kelsey McKinney:

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The shadow of our destiny is racing towards us—a promise that meritocracy was a lie, and that we all live in and with the stagnant reality of that. There is a dread building, a bleakness that is already casting a shadow on the future. Maybe you feel it, too.

“They don’t pay actors like they used to, and with streamers, you no longer get residuals,” [actress Sydney] Sweeney told The Hollywood Reporter. She cannot do what Jennifer Aniston did a generation ago—be on a network television hit that gets replayed and replayed so frequently for so long that her life would unfold like a 300-thread-count sheet before her. Sweeney could have an entire career of choosing only hits, of never taking a break, and still not reach the kind of money the generation before her made more or less passively once their work was done. That passive income, which is the real American dream, is no longer something that the actual artists—not just actors but writers and directors and everyone else who ever made a dime off of residuals—involved in the entertainment business get to enjoy.

The same situation is happening in media, too. Writers are paid less now than they were 50 years ago, for the same work. Ernest Hemingway was paid $1 a word in 1936. That’s more than $21 per word in today’s dollars. The maximum I was ever paid to write for a glossy magazine in print was $2/word, in 2021. No one (and I really mean no one) in media makes $21/word. That compensation just doesn’t exist. You could be the most popular novelist in the world and not make $21/word to report. You could argue that no writer today is as good or popular as Hemingway was at his peak, but no writer today is even making half or a quarter of what he made, and writers only ever get so famous. If someone were paid $5/word in 2022—which is something I have never heard of happening and is a full $2 more than than anyone I know has ever been paid per word—that would be a quarter of what Hemingway was paid. That writer would be able to pay their rent and health insurance premiums and tuck some money away in savings off a standard-issue story per month, but again, that lucky writer does not exist.

What this means is that the door a writer could step through to make a career 50 or even 20 years ago, the one opening onto a life where someone who works hard and does well could buy a house on the strength of that work alone, has been slammed shut.

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McKinney’s simple, but scary point: the rich are just getting richer.
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Satellites are burning up in the upper atmosphere – and we still don’t know what impact this will have on the Earth’s climate • The Conversation

Fionagh Thomson is a senior research fellow (visual ethnographer) at Durham University:

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ozone loss is caused by human-made industrial gases, which combine with natural and very high altitude polar stratospheric clouds or mother of pearl clouds. The surfaces of these ethereal clouds act as catalysts, turning benign chemicals into more active forms that can rapidly destroy ozone.

Dan Cziczo is an atmospheric scientist at Purdue University in the US, and a co-author of the recent study that found ozone depleting substances in the stratosphere. He explains to me that the question is whether the new particles from spacecraft will help the formation of these clouds and lead to ozone loss at a time when the Earth’s atmosphere is just beginning to recover.

Of more concern to atmospheric scientists such as Cziczo is that only a few new particles could create more of these types of polar clouds – not only at the upper atmosphere, but also in the lower atmosphere, where cirrus clouds form. Cirrus clouds are the thin, wispy ice clouds you might spot high in the sky, above six kilometres. They tend to let heat from the sun pass through but then trap it on the way out, so in theory more cirrus clouds could add extra global warming on top of what we are already seeing from greenhouse gases. But this is uncertain and still being studied.

Cziczo also explains that from anecdotal evidence we know that the high-altitude clouds above the poles are changing – but we don’t know yet what is causing this change. Is it natural particles such as meteoroids or volcanic debris, or unnatural particles from spacecrafts? This is what we need to know.

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And, guess what, what we don’t know – at a time when burning spacecraft is being treated as the simple way to dispose of them.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The question of who owns specific parts of the Moon if they’re commercially valuable has never been raised. Soon it might be. CC-licensed photo by marcus agrippa 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Automakers are sharing consumers’ driving behavior with insurance companies • The New York Times

Kashmir Hill:

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In recent years, insurance companies have offered incentives to people who install dongles in their cars or download smartphone apps that monitor their driving, including how much they drive, how fast they take corners, how hard they hit the brakes and whether they speed. But “drivers are historically reluctant to participate in these programs,” as Ford Motor put it in a patent application that describes what is happening instead: Car companies are collecting information directly from internet-connected vehicles for use by the insurance industry.

Sometimes this is happening with a driver’s awareness and consent. Car companies have established relationships with insurance companies, so that if drivers want to sign up for what’s called usage-based insurance — where rates are set based on monitoring of their driving habits — it’s easy to collect that data wirelessly from their cars.

But in other instances, something much sneakier has happened. Modern cars are internet-enabled, allowing access to services like navigation, roadside assistance and car apps that drivers can connect to their vehicles to locate them or unlock them remotely. In recent years, automakers, including G.M., Honda, Kia and Hyundai, have started offering optional features in their connected-car apps that rate people’s driving. Some drivers may not realize that, if they turn on these features, the car companies then give information about how they drive to data brokers like LexisNexis.

Automakers and data brokers that have partnered to collect detailed driving data from millions of Americans say they have drivers’ permission to do so. But the existence of these partnerships is nearly invisible to drivers, whose consent is obtained in fine print and murky privacy policies that few read.

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America’s nonexistent privacy laws are being quietly exploited by data brokers in every possible avenue? I’m shocked, shocked I tell you. And of course all those details are used by the insurance companies to push premiums up.
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Why Americans suddenly stopped hanging out • The Atlantic

Derek Thompson:

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In the 1990s, the sociologist Robert Putnam recognized that America’s social metabolism was slowing down. In the book Bowling Alone, he gathered reams of statistical evidence to prove that America’s penchant for starting and joining associations appeared to be in free fall. Book clubs and bowling leagues were going bust.

If Putnam felt the first raindrops of an antisocial revolution in America, the downpour is fully here, and we’re all getting washed away in the flood. From 2003 to 2022, American men reduced their average hours of face-to-face socializing by about 30%. For unmarried Americans, the decline was even bigger—more than 35%. For teenagers, it was more than 45%. Boys and girls ages 15 to 19 reduced their weekly social hangouts by more than three hours a week. In short, there is no statistical record of any other period in US history when people have spent more time on their own.

And so what? one might reasonably ask. Aloneness is not loneliness. Not only that, one might point out, the texture of aloneness has changed. Solitude is less solitary than ever. With all the calling, texting, emailing, work chatting, DMing, and posting, we are producing unprecedented terabytes of interpersonal communication. If Americans were happy—about themselves, about their friends, about their country—then whining about parties of one would feel silly.

But for Americans in the 2020s, solitude, anxiety, and dissatisfaction seem to be rising in lockstep. Surveys show that Americans, and especially young Americans, have never been more anxious about their own lives or more depressed about the future of the country. Teenage depression and hopelessness are setting new annual records every year. The share of young people who say they have a close friend has plummeted. Americans have been so depressed about the state of the nation for so many consecutive years that by 2023, NBC pollsters said, “We have never before seen this level of sustained pessimism in the 30-year-plus history of the poll.”

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Lots of strange data, including the stuff about pets (Americans spend more time with them on average than humans. Then again, pets don’t argue or want to change the channel.)
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Who owns the Moon? The race for lunar real estate is an impending ethical nightmare • Inverse

Kiona Smith:

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Along with private missions like the recent Intuitive Machines’ lander IM-1, several countries’ space agencies all have their eyes on the same real estate around the Moon’s south pole, where water ice may lie waiting in permanently shadowed craters. Until recently, debates about what should and shouldn’t happen on the Moon have been abstract. Only one country’s space agency had ever sent humans to the Moon, and they didn’t stay long. That’s on the brink of changing. The next decade may see the once-pristine lunar landscape dotted with bases and riddled with mines, all jostling for space (and bandwidth) with telescopes and other scientific exploration. But is the lunar environment worth preserving, for science or in its own right, and who gets to decide?

A recent (failed) mission to land cremated human remains on the Moon raised a high-profile example of the kind of ethical issues space ethicists say we should be considering. Astrobotic’s Peregrine One lander was scheduled to deliver the cremated remains of Gene Roddenberry and several members of the original Star Trek cast, and others to the Moon.

The Navajo Nation formally protested the mission’s launch; in Navajo beliefs, the Moon is a sacred object, and placing human remains there would be a desecration. In the end, a fuel leak forced the mission to return to Earth, where it ended in a fiery plunge into the upper atmosphere, but it drew attention to a larger debate about who gets to decide — for everyone — how we as a species relate to the Moon now.

“Every culture on Earth has conceptions about the Moon,” Santa Clara University space ethicist Brian Green tells Inverse. “There are lots of groups on Earth who have thoughts on how the Moon should be treated. This is why we need to have a larger conversation.”

Part of the unfolding discussion centers on what, if anything, we should try to protect on the Moon. Several groups here on Earth, such as For All Moonkind, have spent years arguing that the first crewed lunar landing sites are an important part of human history and should be preserved, but at the moment there’s no law or treaty preventing someone from erasing the rover tracks or astronauts’ footprints.

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It’s very expensive to go to the Moon, so any valuable resources such as water will be even more valued. So this is likely to be ugly and solved through force majeure.
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Colorado ranchers sentenced after tampering with rain gauges to increase crop subsidies • CBS Colorado

Logan Smith:

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Two southeastern Colorado ranch owners were recently sentenced to pay $6.6m to resolve federal charges that they damaged or altered rain gauges in an effort to get paid for worsening drought conditions. 

By preventing the rain gauges from accurately measuring precipitation, the men aimed to increase the amount of money they could receive from the federal government, according to court documents. 

Patrick Esch, 72, and Ed Dean Jagers, 62, both of Springfield, received short prison sentences – Esch two months and Jagers six. They also were ordered to pay a combined $3.1m in restitution – the estimated amount of fraudulently inflated funds they received from the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation. As well, they agreed to pay a combined $3.5m to settle the allegations.

The cases against Esch and Jager included civil allegations and criminal charges accusing the men of making false statements and defrauding the federal government, in addition to the physical tampering of the rain gauges.  

“Hardworking farmers and ranchers depend on USDA crop insurance programs, and we will not allow these programs to be abused,” U.S. Attorney for the District of Colorado Cole Finegan stated in a press release.  “This case also shows the full measure of justice that can be achieved when our office uses both civil and criminal tools to protect vital government programs.”

…The group allegedly damaged rain gauges located in Springfield, Ordway, La Junta, Walsh, and Ellicott, Colorado, and others in Syracuse, Coolidge, and Elkhart, Kansas. Wires were cut, funnels to rain collectors were filled with silicone, holes drilled or punched in collectors, parts of collectors were disassembled, and objects such as cake pans or pie tins were placed over the gauges during rainstorms. The incidents occurred between July 2016 and June 2017.

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As the saying goes – once you start to make the measurement of something that can be manipulated important, it ceases to be a useful measurement.
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Kate Middleton’s photo editing controversy is an omen of what’s to come • TechCrunch

Amanda Silberling:

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It’s not clear what tools the princess used to edit the photo — a tool like Facetune might be able to remove blemishes or toggle the brightness of the photo, but it won’t create a phantom sleeve beneath Charlotte’s elbow. Some retouching tools, like Photoshop’s content-aware fill or a clone brush, might use elements of the photo to create something that wasn’t originally there. But those aren’t the kinds of photo editing tools that people use when they’re trying to make themselves look Instagram-ready — it’s what you use when you’re trying to edit out a random guy in the background of your beach photo.

Even British celebrities like Piers Morgan have weighed in, raising the question of why the Royal Family won’t quash the conspiracy theories by just releasing the unedited photo.

As AI-powered image generation becomes mainstream, we’re losing our grip on reality. In a time when any image can be fake, how can we know what’s actually real? There are some tell-tale signs, like if someone has an abnormal number of fingers, or if someone is wearing an earring on one ear but not the other (though that could also be a style choice — you know it when you see it). But as AI gets better and more widespread, these methods of detection aren’t as reliable. A recent study from the Center for Countering Digital Hate revealed that deepfake images about elections have been rising by 130% per month on average on X (Twitter). Though speculation about a missing princess isn’t going to sway an election, this incident shows that people are finding it more and more challenging to distinguish between fact and fiction.

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But.. the photo is fiction, in a sense. We don’t know what it was like before the edits. (Not very much different, I’m sure: Kate and the three children. But perhaps not all laughing with eyes open at exactly the same time.) I’m sure Morgan knows there isn’t just one photo, but multiple: he knows what a contact sheet is.

People love a mystery, in truth. Especially when those who know the answer to the mystery won’t talk. (Kate editing the pictures? Yeah, suuuuure.)
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Analysis: UK emissions in 2023 fell to lowest level since 1879 • Carbon Brief

Carbon Brief Staff:

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The UK’s greenhouse gas emissions fell by 5.7% in 2023 to their lowest level since 1879, according to new Carbon Brief analysis.

The last time UK emissions were this low, Queen Victoria was on the throne, Benjamin Disraeli was prime minister, Mosley Street in Newcastle became the first road in the world with electric lighting and 59 people died in the Tay Bridge disaster in Dundee.

Carbon Brief’s analysis, based on preliminary government energy data, shows emissions fell to just 383m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e) in 2023. This is the first time they have dropped below 400MtCO2e since Victorian times.

Other key findings from the analysis include:
• The UK’s emissions are now 53% below 1990 levels, while GDP has grown by 82%
• The drop in emissions in 2023 was largely due to an 11% fall in gas demand. This was due to higher electricity imports after the French nuclear fleet recovered, above-average temperatures and weak underlying demand driven by high prices
• Gas demand would have fallen even faster, but for a 15% fall in UK nuclear output
• Coal use fell by 23% in 2023 to its lowest level since the 1730s, as all but one of the UK’s remaining coal-fired power stations closed down
• Transport was the single-largest sector in terms of emissions, followed by buildings industry, agriculture and electricity generation. The electricity sector likely dropped below agriculture for the first time.

While the 23MtCO2e reduction in 2023 was faster than the 14MtCO2e per year average needed to reach net-zero by 2050, it was mostly unrelated to deliberate climate action. The UK will need to address emissions from buildings, transport, industry and agriculture to reach its 2050 target.

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So we need more nuclear power stations, and higher gas prices? Not sure the latter would be desirable on a societal basis, even if it gets us nearer net zero.
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$500K sand dune designed to protect coastal homes washes away in just three days • Daily Beast

Dan Ladden-Hall:

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In a drastic attempt to protect their beachfront homes, residents in Salisbury, Massachusetts, invested $500,000 in a sand dune to defend against encroaching tides. After being completed last week, the barrier made from 14,000 tons of sand lasted just 72 hours before it was completely washed away, according to WCVB.

“We got hit with three storms—two in January, one now—at the highest astronomical tides possible,” Rick Rigoli, who oversaw the dune project, told the station. Ron Guilmette, whose tennis court was destroyed in previous storms along the beach, added that he now doesn’t know how much his property is worth or if he will stay in the area. He calls the situation on Salisbury Beach “catastrophic.” “I don’t know what the solution is,” Guilmette said. Beachfront homes in the area started being damaged by strong winds and high tides after a winter storm in December 2022 removed previous protective dunes, according to WBTS-CD.

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As so often when the US is hit by climate change, this feels like a sowing/reaping thing.
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Deadspin sold by G/O Media, editorial staff to be laid off • Axios

Sara Fischer:

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G/O Media, formerly Gizmodo Media Group, has sold sports blogging site Deadspin to European firm Lineup Publishing, a new digital media rollup company, CEO Jim Spanfeller announced in a note to staff Monday.

The firm, which was acquired by private equity firm Great Hill Partners in 2019, has been slowly offloading sites as pressure mounts from investors to make a return on its investment.

In the memo, Spanfeller said none of Deadspin’s existing staff will move over with the site as part of the deal and the new owners will “instead build a new team more in line with their editorial vision for the brand.”

Impacted staffers were notified Monday that they were being let go from G/O Media, marking the third round of cuts at the firm in less than a year.

Spanfeller said Lineup Publishing approached him about the sale and that the company was not “actively shopping Deadspin.”

“The rationale behind the decision to sell included a variety of important factors that include the buyer’s editorial plans for the brand, tough competition in the sports journalism sector, and a valuation that reflected a sizable premium from our original purchase price for the site,” Spanfeller wrote in the memo.

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In the aforementioned memo, Spanfeller refers to the site on first mention as “Deadpin”, which maybe is a bit on the nose. Apparently the staff were given 30 minutes’ notice before they were locked out of their company laptops. What nobody’s saying: how many staff that actually is.
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Who sends traffic on the web and how much? New research from Datos & SparkToro • SparkToro

Rand Fishkin:

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Close to twi-thirds (63.41%) of all US web traffic referrals from the top 170 sites initiated on Google.com. The second-largest individual, traffic-referring domain is technically YouTube.com, but whereas Google.com hosts Google Docs, Gmail, Google Meet, and others, Microsoft splits these among a wide range of domains in the top 100 (Bing.com, Office.com, Live.com, Office365.com, Sharepoint.com, MicrosoftOnline.com, and Microsoft.com).

And for the curious, the 170th largest traffic-referrer (Pinimg.com) sent 0.003197%, suggesting that even if the next thousand sites (#171-1,171) all sent similar amounts of traffic to the web, their combined referral traffic is smaller than Facebook or YouTube.

I reasoned it was only fair to group these and compare apples to apples. Taken together, these Microsoft-owned sites are responsible for a combined 7.21% of referrals.

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It’s an absorbing read with lots of slicing and dicing, but the message that comes through overall: when it comes to traffic on the web, the only one that really matters is Google.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Academy Awards on Monday night were a triumph for… semaglutide, the weight control drug. CC-licensed photo by Thank You (24 Millions ) views on Flickr.

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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.

Apple reverses ban on Fortnite-maker in EU, a sign of softening approach to crackdown • WSJ

Aaron Tilley:

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Apple has reversed course on its decision to prevent Fortnite-maker Epic Games from building its own app store in Europe, softening what appeared to be a hard line stance as it faces an array of regulations.

The tech giant earlier banned Epic’s developer account in Sweden after Chief Executive Tim Sweeney sharply criticized Apple’s response to new EU regulations that took effect this week. Sweeney accused Apple of retaliating and the company drew a public rebuke from an EU official.

Sweeney said in a post on X that Apple’s reversal was a big win “for the freedom of developers worldwide to speak up” and further suggested that Europe’s new law, called the Digital Markets Act, had its first major victory in securing Apple’s compliance.

The back-and-forth between the two companies, which have been sparring for years over Apple’s control over third-party software on its devices, comes as European regulators are evaluating how the iPhone-maker has opened up its App Store in response to the new law.

“Following conversations with Epic, they have committed to follow the rules, including our DMA policies,” said an Apple spokeswoman. “As a result, Epic Sweden AB has been permitted to re-sign the developer agreement and accepted into the Apple Developer Program.”

Apple has stridently defended its App Store and software ecosystem in the face of a barrage of criticism from developers such as Sweeney. The Justice Department is expected to file an antitrust lawsuit in the coming weeks accusing Apple of monopolistic practices related to its interactions with outside companies, according to people familiar with the matter.

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This isn’t “a softening approach” at all. As Ben Thompson pointed out on the Dithering podcast, Apple faces this equation: the EU can impose a fine of 10% of worldwide revenue. Meanwhile, the EU is only 7% of Apple’s worldwide revenue. (Seems low, but OK.) Pissing off the EU is therefore a terrible idea, and Apple rapidly came to realise this when the EU made angry noises over the revocation of Epic’s Swedish developer account.

But notice how Apple’s dictatorial approach is now getting it into increasingly hot water. Worked OK when it just applied to hardware and some software. Gets a lot more problematic once you’re offering services and app stores and so on to significant chunks of the world. Can Apple change its culture to give developers more flexibility? (The saying is that Apple’s priorities are: 1) Apple 2) its users 3) third-party developers 5000000000000000000) everyone else. Pushing developers up the stack won’t come easy.)
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How Ozempic ate awards season • The Ankler

Allen Salkin:

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Forget Chanel, Dior or Prada: this year, the most prominent designers on the red carpet are Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, whose injectable weight-loss drugs are the new couture. As awards season peaks this weekend with the 96th Academy Awards, those in every cranny of the celebrity-industrial complex, from restaurateurs to marketing mavens, have found themselves dealing with profound changes wrought on entertainment industry bodies and minds by this new kid in town. In the old days — five years ago (and five decades ago) — you’d get someone into rehab or to Two Bunch Palms to dry out and get in shape for a big role or a red carpet. Now a star can quickly lose up to 15 pounds (or more) in plain sight.

Only a handful of celebrities — Oprah Winfrey, Elon Musk and Tracy Morgan are the most prominent — have publicly acknowledged using this new class of drugs, known as semaglutides, GLP-1s or by their brand names Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro. A few other famous people, such as Amy Schumer, Chelsea Handler and Sharon Osbourne, have admitted to using these drugs in the past, and an even smaller subset is using them for their original purpose of helping type 2 diabetics (Anthony Anderson). Indeed, a whole separate cottage industry has popped up of people denying or condemning the use of them.

Julia Fox told Entertainment Tonight, “People are saying that I’m taking Ozempic. I’m not, and I never have. I would never do that. There are diabetics that need it.” Jessica Simpson denied to Bustle that her weight loss was injection based, saying “Oh Lord . . . it is not.” Most judgy of all was Vanderpump Rules’ Lala Kent, who may be thin in the old-fashioned way, possibly so hungry that she recently bit the hand that feeds her. “Stop taking it for weight loss,” she told People. “Enough already. I think that Hollywood is all sorts of f—ed up.” 

So in honor of the Oscars, let’s look at the impact on restaurants, plastic surgeons, trainers and makeup artists around town of a drug turning Hollywood into wannabe Barbies and Kens.

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Salkin goes on to talk to a fair number of people. Restaurants are feeling it. But of course it would be LA where these drugs get most used.
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Death threats and disinformation: what it’s like being viciously targeted by conspiracy theory activists • British Vogue

Marianna Spring:

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I try to protect my friends and family as much as I can. Both from the hate itself, but also from worrying about my safety. I don’t ever publicly share their names, because they could be fresh meat for the trolls. My family love my reporting almost as much as I love doing it. But I don’t want them to pay any price for it.

I’m far from any frontline, unlike my extraordinary colleagues at the BBC, many of whom have put themselves at risk to report what’s happening on the ground from war zones all across the world. That includes operating in autocracies, where they’re at risk of persecution for attempting to tell the truth. I’m not subjected to racist hate, or other forms of discrimination.

Still, it seems sinister when a young female investigative reporter working in a democracy is specifically targeted with abuse at her office. If you care about protecting freedom of expression – as many of those embedded in these conspiracy theory movements claim to – why would you condone or refuse to condemn that?

We seem to have accepted online hate as part of the fabric of our society – that it’s something to be expected now social media exists. As a consequence, the onus falls on the individuals to call out and battle these trolls. The trolls as a collective, though, are more than random people expressing their anger in an unacceptable way online. Trolling is a tool used to silence and intimidate. If we do not highlight the issue of violent rhetoric and abuse online, those who can do something about it are let off the hook.

You’re probably thinking: why not just pack it in, Marianna? After all, it’d be easier. The answer? Well, then they win. All of this shows how investigating the harm caused by what’s unfolding on social media, giving a voice to those who’ve been targeted, and holding those responsible to account is more important than ever. I am grateful to everyone who allows me to investigate their stories. The more I experience the very thing they’re living through, the more I want to tell their stories – without fear.

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Sounds like she’s experiencing the outcomes of s_c__l w_rm_ng doesn’t it.
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Energy transitions: the decline of whale oil and the rise of petroleum • JKempEnergy.com

John Kemp:

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Before Edwin Drake drilled his first successful well in Pennsylvania in 1859, however, spermaceti was already becoming increasingly scarce and prices were climbing sharply as a result of overfishing, escalating costs and crew shortages. Sperm oil imports into the United States (the amount declared to customs on landing) had halved to 2.6 million gallons in 1858 down from 5.3 million gallons in 1843. The landed price of sperm oil had doubled to $1.21 per gallon from 63 cents.

Spermaceti availability was declining primarily because of overfishing, which forced whaling ships further offshore and on longer voyages, and even then they increasingly came back with less than a full load. The industry’s cost base was also rising as ships were fitted out to higher and more modern standards.

Once the California gold rush was underway, crewing became a major problem. Sailors would contract for a lengthy voyage from the U.S. east coast to go whaling in the Pacific, collect their sign on bonus, enjoy free passage to the Pacific, then jump ship when they reached California to try their luck in the gold fields, delaying voyages and requiring costly extra hires.

Spermaceti as a source of illumination was already in trouble before Drake’s well. It could never have satisfied the growing demand for lighting. The sudden competition from a plentiful source of cheap lighting in the form of petroleum-derived kerosene accelerated the industry’s decline. By the late 1870s the whale fishery had become a shadow of its former self.

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There must be an alternative history to be written about a world where people didn’t figure out how to use oil, or where for some reason it wasn’t accessible (at the bottom of the ocean?). Would there be whale farming? What would we have done?
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‘Unexploded bombs’: call for action after 11 deaths in UK due to e-bike fires • The Guardian

Jon Ungoed-Thomas:

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Eleven people were killed in fires caused by e-bikes in the UK last year and now ministers face calls for urgent action over the sale of dangerous products.

E-bike fires can be particularly deadly because they can rapidly ignite in a fireball, and because the bikes are routinely left to charge overnight in hallways, they can block what may be the only exit. Campaigners compare the most dangerous products to “unexploded bombs”.

New figures produced by the Office for Product and Safety Standards (OPSS), drawn from data from UK fire and rescue services, reveal what is believed to be the highest number of deaths recorded from e-bike fires in the UK last year.

Yvonne Fovargue, a Labour MP and chair of the all party parliamentary group on online and home electrical safety, said: “These e-bikes can reach a phenomenally high temperature in seconds. They are so dangerous. It is almost like having an unexploded bomb in your house.”

MPs and safety groups are calling for third-party certification to ensure e-bikes, e-scooters and their batteries are approved by an independent body before being available for sale. This is already the case for other high-risk products such as fireworks.

Fire safety officers say consumers should buy from a reputable retailer and warn e-bikes fitted with conversion kits or fitted with batteries bought online may pose a greater risk.

An inquest heard last month how Sofia Duarte, 21, died on New Year’s Day 2023 after a fire broke out in the hallway of a property she was staying in at Bermondsey, south-east London. The fire is believed to have been caused by an unbranded battery pack fitted to a converted bike.

Other residents escaped by jumping out of windows, but Duarte, unaware of the ferocity of the fire, tried to leave by the staircase. She died of burns and smoke inhalation.

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The Rossminster affair: how Led Zeppelin tried to use a Shakespearean theatre charity to avoid paying tax • Led Zeppelin News

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Led Zeppelin’s record sales skyrocketed during the 1970s, leaving the band with a difficult problem to solve by 1978: How could the members of the band receive £3.668m in royalty payments without giving a significant portion of the money to British tax authorities?

The band’s tax advisers had an inventive solution: The members of Led Zeppelin would hand control of their companies to a Shakespearean theatre charity based in a former church in London that was run by an actor known for playing mysterious foreign villains. That would enable the band’s royalties to be classed as profits received by the charity, keeping it out of the reach of the tax authorities.

In 1978, the members of Led Zeppelin and their manager Peter Grant sold their businesses to the charity in the hope of solving their tax problem. But the transaction, despite its inventiveness, failed to solve Led Zeppelin’s financial woes and saw the band caught up in one of the UK’s most infamous corporate scandals.

[Led Zep’s accountants] Rossminsters knew that any income or capital gains generated by [actor George] Murcell’s theatre charity were completely exempt from taxes in the UK.

Furthermore, a business could choose to pay its profits as a dividend to a parent company. This meant that a business generating profits could essentially hand up that money to its owner and avoid paying tax itself.

Another quirk of British tax law meant that if the parent company of that business was a charity like St George’s Elizabethan Theatre, those profits were passed on not as a dividend but instead as a donation. This meant that the business didn’t need to plan to pay corporation tax on the profits.

Rossminster managed to combine the theatre’s charity status with these facets of UK law to develop a scheme that meant any businesses owned by the charity could essentially move their profits through the corporate structure without paying any taxes on it.

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And you thought it was about music. Then again, the top marginal personal tax rate was 83% (and 98% on investment income). That was down from when the Beatles wrote “Taxman“: “it’s one for you, 19 for me” – referring to the 95% top personal tax rate. (There are SO many stories of those giant bands and their tax avoidance frolics.)
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OpenAI GPT sorts resume names with racial bias, test shows • Bloomberg

Leon Yin, Davey Alba and Leonardo Nicoletti :

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In the race to embrace artificial intelligence, some businesses are using a new crop of generative AI products that can help screen and rank candidates for jobs — and some think these tools can even evaluate candidates more fairly than humans. But a Bloomberg analysis found that the best-known generative AI tool systematically produces biases that disadvantage groups based on their names.

OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, the AI-powered chatbot that can churn out passable song lyrics and school essays, also sells the AI technology behind it to businesses that want to use it for specific tasks, including in HR and recruiting. (The company says it prohibits GPT from being used to make an automated hiring decision.) Becker, who has tested some of these AI-powered hiring tools, said that she’s skeptical of their accuracy. OpenAI’s underlying AI model, which is developed using a vast number of articles, books, online comments and social media posts, can also mirror and amplify the biases in that data.

In order to understand the implications of companies using generative AI tools to assist with hiring, Bloomberg News spoke to 33 AI researchers, recruiters, computer scientists and employment lawyers. Bloomberg also carried out an experiment inspired by landmark studies that used fictitious names and resumes to measure algorithmic bias and hiring discrimination. Borrowing methods from these studies, reporters used voter and census data to derive names that are demographically distinct — meaning they are associated with Americans of a particular race or ethnicity at least 90% of the time — and randomly assigned them to equally-qualified resumes.

When asked to rank those resumes 1,000 times, GPT 3.5 — the most broadly-used version of the model — favored names from some demographics more often than others, to an extent that would fail benchmarks used to assess job discrimination against protected groups. While this test is a simplified version of a typical HR workflow, it isolated names as a source of bias in GPT that could affect hiring decisions. The interviews and experiment show that using generative AI for recruiting and hiring poses a serious risk for automated discrimination at scale.

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Rishi Sunak’s report finds low-traffic neighbourhoods work and are popular • The Guardian

Peter Walker:

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An official study of low-traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) ordered by Rishi Sunak amid efforts to stop them being built has instead concluded they are generally popular and effective and the report was initially buried, the Guardian has learned.

The long-delayed review by Department for Transport (DfT) officials was commissioned by the prime minister last July, as Sunak sought to capitalise on controversy about the schemes by promising drivers he was “on their side”.

Downing Street had hoped that the study would bolster their arguments against LTNs, which are mainly installed by Labour-run councils, but it largely points the other way.

The report, which applies only to England as transport is devolved, had been scheduled for publication in January. However, after its findings emerged, government advisers asked that it be permanently shelved, the Guardian was told.

One government source disputed this, saying the report would be published soon, and it was “categorically not the case” that it had been suppressed.

A copy of the report seen by the Guardian said that polling carried out inside four sample LTNs for the DfT found that overall, twice as many local people supported them as opposed them.

A review of evidence of their effectiveness said that although formal studies were limited, they did not support the contention of opponents that LTNs simply displaced traffic to other streets rather than easing overall congestion.

“The available evidence from the UK indicates that LTNs are effective in achieving outcomes of reducing traffic volumes within their zones while adverse impacts on boundary roads appear to be limited,” it read.

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This administration has never been hot on evidence-based policy, and this is just more, well, evidence of that.
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Here’s how much shorter the US ski season might be in 25 years • SKI

Samantha Berman:

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A new report detailing climate change’s effect on the ski industry takes a look at both the past and future. The study, which was published in the trade publication Current Issues in Tourism, examines global warming’s effect on different aspects of the ski industry, including season length, average winter temperatures in different US regions, and projected economic losses if climate issues go unchecked.

One of the most unique aspects of the report is that it presents an alternate reality of what our ski seasons would have looked like over the last 20 years without any climate-change impacts. Using data from ski resorts gathered between 1960-1979, before the effects of global warming started to impact our winters, the researchers concluded that our ski seasons would have been extended by 5.5 to 7.1 days. Those days equaled around $252m in lost revenue
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Using similar extrapolated data, the researchers also projected how our future ski seasons will be impacted by global warming. Instead of only gloom and doom, however, they offer a glimpse of what it might look like if we successfully lower our fossil fuel emissions—as well as if we don’t.

We’ll give you the bad news first. If we continue on our current trajectory, our seasons risk losing up to 60 days in the high-emissions scenario. That’s two months. And if we do manage to reduce our carbon emissions, we’ll only lose an estimated 14 to 33 days. Those estimates take into account not only reduced snowfall, but also higher temperatures that will make it more difficult or impossible to make snow.

It’s not a great scenario, but it’s also not surprising given the way global warming has left its mark in every corner of the globe. Yet despite evidence of climate change touching our everyday lives, we can’t seem to move the needle.

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Despite the SUV being the best-selling car in the US, and vehicle emissions being a major source of greenhouse gases, you can’t seem to move the needle? Surprising.
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NYTimes files copyright takedown against hundreds of Wordle clones • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

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The New York Times has filed a series of copyright takedown requests against Wordle clones and variations in which it asserts not just ownership over the Wordle name but over the broad concepts and mechanics of the word game, which includes its “5×6 grid” and “green tiles to indicate correct guesses.”

The Times filed at least three DMCA takedown requests with coders who have made clones of Wordle on GitHub. These include two in January and, crucially, a new DMCA filed this week against Chase Wackerfuss, the coder of a repository called “Reactle,” which cloned Wordle in React JS (JavaScript). (The full takedown is embedded at the bottom of this article.)

The most recent takedown request is critical because it not only goes after Reactle but anyone who has forked Reactle to create a different spinoff game; an archive of the Reactle code repository shows that it was forked 1,900 times to create a diverse set of games and spinoffs. These include Wordle clones in dozens of languages, crossword versions of Wordle, emoji and bird versions of world, poker and AI spinoffs, etc. 

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So the NYT thinks it has the One True Wordle? You could agree that the 5×6 grid and the use of green tiles for correct letters does mark it out. But not that much more. (What about lower-case letters?)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified