Researchers at the University of Surrey have found that higher pressure makes people use less water in showers. CC-licensed photo by Dean McCoy 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.

A selection of 9 links for you. Don’t read in the shower. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

How hackers dox doctors to order mountains of Oxycodone and Adderall • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

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404 Media has uncovered a wide-spanning scheme in which criminals break into various panels used by doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and even wholesale narcotics providers, and then leverage that access to order controlled substances like oxycodone. Some of the hackers then appear to sell these substances for profit online. Because the hackers are using legitimate ordering tools designed for industry professionals, when a prescription request lands at a pharmacy, it can look as legitimate as any other.

In some cases hackers are phishing doctors for certain pieces of information, such as their unique DEA-assigned number, to then create drug ordering accounts in their name. The hackers are also making use of powerful bots that allow them to dox nearly anyone in America for as little as $15. Some of these bots use credit header data, which is information a person provides, such as their physical address, to the big three credit bureaus who then sell access to third-parties. I’ve previously shown how these bots are connected to violent criminals. Now, they’re being used as part of the underground drug trade, with hackers able to dox a specific doctor within a target ZIP code in around 15 minutes, one fraudster said.

The news presents not just a series of individual breaches at multiple companies in the pharmaceutical industry, but a more fundamental undermining of the trust in a digital prescription system that itself was created as a response to pill mills, doctor shopping, and other systemic abuses during the opioid crisis.

…One person on Telegram, who used the handle “Escripted,” explained how they steal doctor’s personal and professional information and then sign-up to electronic prescription portals. Instead of a tear-off from a notepad that a doctor signs and hands to a patient, electronic prescriptions are digitally sent by the doctor to a fulfilling pharmacy. The idea is that they are much harder to counterfeit, with a digital signature being more robust than simply copying a doctor’s handwritten one.

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Another banger from 404 Media. (Clearly, rootling about in Telegram is a reliable way to find story leads.)

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TikTok campaign against ban backfires • Semafor

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A House committee unanimously advanced legislation that would force ByteDance to divest the social media app TikTok, despite congressional offices being bombarded with calls from TikTokers who were urged by the platform to call their representatives to protest the bill.

“Let Congress know what TikTok means to you and tell them to vote NO,” a pop-up message on the app said, imploring users to “stop a TikTok shutdown.”

Aides from multiple congressional offices told Semafor that they were getting flooded with calls pushing back on the legislation Thursday. Some offices reported getting as many as 50 phone calls. One office received a message from a caller threatening suicide if the app was taken down, a Politico reporter posted on X.

But later Thursday afternoon, the House Energy and Commerce Committee unanimously advanced the legislation in a 50-0 vote. The bipartisan House bill introduced Tuesday would force ByteDance to sell off TikTok or face it being banned in the United States, over national security concerns associated with Chinese ownership of the app, which TikTok says is used by 170 million Americans. House majority leader Steve Scalise said the bill would come to the floor next week.

“This legislation has a predetermined outcome: a total ban of TikTok in the United States,” a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement. “The government is attempting to strip 170 million Americans of their Constitutional right to free expression. This will damage millions of businesses, deny artists an audience, and destroy the livelihoods of countless creators across the country.”

The bill was proposed by Reps. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), the top lawmakers on the House select committee on China, and quickly received support from the White House and Speaker Mike Johnson.

“Here you have an example of an adversary-controlled application lying to the American people, and interfering with the legislative process in Congress,” Gallagher said in response to the calls. “In a weird way it almost proves the point that we’ve been making here.”

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Beyond the water flow rate: water pressure and smart timers impact shower efficiency • OSF Preprints

Ian Walker, Pablo Pereira-Doel and James Daly at the University of Surrey :

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England is projected to face a water supply shortfall of 4 billion litres daily by 2050, mostly due to population growth and increasing climate-driven droughts and flooding. The Environment Act 2021 mandates significant water usage reductions, targeting a decrease for households from the current 144 litres per person/day to 110, and a 15% reduction for businesses.

Enhancing water efficiency in showers is crucial, given their high water consumption, energy use and associated carbon emissions. Water consumption in 290 showers was covertly monitored for 39 weeks, capturing 86,421 showering events. Increased water pressure was strongly associated with reduced water use – an effect that can be amplified even further by installing smart timers to inform users of their shower duration.

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Walker, who is professor of environmental psychology (pause a moment to consider what that implies), wrote a thread about this research which has all sorts of fascinating details – such as that there are people who take showers lasting an hour or more. (Mean 6.7 minutes, median 5.7 minutes, 50% lie between 3.3 and 8.8 minutes. Time yourself next time!)

But the idea that making the shower stronger reduces water use is initially counterintuitive. Except: you know that a really high-pressure shower is pretty brutal, and doesn’t encourage lingering. (Thanks Adewale A for the link.)
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The Iditarod is embroiled in a controversy over moose guts • Outside Online

Frederick Dreier:

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What’s the weirdest rule in endurance sports? A few come to mind.

• Regulations governing the New York City Marathon explicitly forbid runners from pooping on the pavement at the starting line
• Article 7.01-G of the Ironman Triathlon rulebook prohibits nakedness in transition areas
• And don’t get me started on the wackadoo bylaws enforced by pro cycling’s governing body, the Union Cycliste International, which govern the minutiae of oh so many aspects of bike racing, from the height of an athlete’s socks to the size and shape of his or her ugly helmet.

But in all my time covering professional outdoor competitions, I’ve never come across anything like Rule 34 in the regulations governing Alaska’s Iditarod, the Tour de France of dogsledding. The law, titled “Killing of Game Animals,” is below:

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In the event that an edible big game animal, i.e., moose, caribou, buffalo, is killed in defense of life or property, the musher must gut the animal and report the incident to a race official at the next checkpoint. Following teams must help gut the animal when possible. No teams may pass until the animal has been gutted and the musher killing the animal has proceeded. Any other animal killed in defense of life or property must be reported to a race official, but need not be gutted. 

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Yes, the Iditarod requires you to disembowel the big mammals that you kill along the way. Not only that—officials will scrutinize the efficacy of your job gutting the animal in question.

At the moment, there’s a brewing controversy about the Iditarod’s Rule 34 – specifically, whether or not a star athlete gutted a moose the right way.

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AI likely to increase energy use and accelerate climate misinformation – report • The Guardian

Oliver Milman:

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Claims that artificial intelligence will help solve the climate crisis are misguided, with the technology instead likely cause rising energy use and turbocharge the spread of climate disinformation, a coalition of environmental groups has warned.

Advances in AI have been touted by big tech companies and the United Nations as a way to help ameliorate global heating, via tools that help track deforestation, identify pollution leaks and track extreme weather events. AI is already being used to predict droughts in Africa and to measure changes to melting icebergs.

Google, which has developed its own AI program called Bard (recently rebranded to Gemini) and has an AI project to make traffic lights more efficient, has been at the forefront of promoting emissions reductions through AI adoption, releasing a report last year that found AI could cut global emissions by as much as 10%, equivalent to the entire carbon pollution put out by the European Union by 2030. “AI has a really major role in addressing climate change,” said Kate Brandt, Google’s chief sustainability officer, said in December, describing the technology at an “inflection point” in making major progress in environmental goals.

However, a new report by green groups has cast doubt over whether the AI revolution will have a positive impact upon the climate crisis, warning that the technology will spur growing energy use from data centers and the proliferation of falsehoods about climate science.

“We seem to be hearing all the time that AI can save the planet, but we shouldn’t be believing this hype,” said Michael Khoo, climate disinformation program director at Friends of the Earth, which is part of the Climate Action against Disinformation coalition that put out the report.

“It’s not like AI is ridding us of the internal combustion engine. People will be outraged to see how much more energy is being consumed by AI in the coming years, as well as how it will flood the zone with disinformation about climate change.”

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There’s so much handwaving about AI saving energy down the years. It was going to be deployed in 2017 by the electricity grid in the UK to optimise things. Did anything come of that?
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Ozempic is in fact a brain drug • The Atlantic

Sarah Zhang:

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When scientists first created the class of drugs that includes Ozempic, they told a tidy story about how the medications would work: The gut releases a hormone called GLP-1 that signals you’re full, so a drug that mimics GLP-1 could do the exact same thing, helping people eat less and lose weight.

The rest, as they say, is history. The GLP-1 revolution birthed begat semaglutide, which became Ozempic and Wegovy, and tirzepatide, which became Mounjaro and Zepbound—blockbuster drugs that are rapidly changing the face of obesity medicine. The drugs work as intended: as powerful modulators of appetite. But at the same time that they have become massive successes, the original science that underpinned their development has fallen apart. The fact that they worked was “serendipity,” Randy Seeley, an obesity researcher at the University of Michigan, told me. (Seeley has also consulted for and received research funding from companies that make GLP-1 drugs.)

Now scientists are beginning to understand why. In recent years, studies have shown that GLP-1 from the gut breaks down quickly and has little effect on our appetites. But the hormone and its receptors are naturally present in many parts of the brain too. These brain receptors are likely the reason the GLP-1 drugs can curb the desire to eat—but also, anecdotally, curb other desires as well. The weight-loss drugs are ultimately drugs for the brain.

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Fascinating. (Subediting note: “birth” is not a transitive verb; it’s a noun. “Created” works, and “begat” as substituted by me above if you want to sprinkle a little light Biblical feel.)
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How Google blew up its open culture and compromised its product • Big Technology

David Kiferbaum:

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In my seven years at Google, one of the most shocking moments came after I questioned our fixation with the word “guys.”

It was 2017, and Google had been facing gender pay gap allegations when I attended an unconscious bias training. Rather than directly discuss the issue, the instructors were obsessed with word choice, focusing on replacing “guys.”

“You should be aware that the term ‘guys’ is gendered and could be alienating for some Googlers, so instead you should be referring to groups of people you work with as ‘team’ or ‘folks’,” one session leader said.

When I challenged the instructor, raising skepticism that this language change would address the real issue, I got shouted down.

“How dare you!” a colleague said from the other side of the room. Other participants, and the instructor, began to scold me. I nearly got shouted out of the session.

Google used to be a place to ask questions. “You must make it safe to ask the tough questions and to tell the truth at all times, even when the truth hurts,” wrote Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg in their 2014 book How Google Works. “When you learn of something going off the rails, and the news is delivered in a timely, forthright fashion, this means — in its own, screwed-up way — that the process is working.” 

Inside Google today, the process is not working. Previously accessible Google executives have disappeared, once acceptable questions can’t be asked, and a dispassionate arrogance has taken hold. Unsurprisingly, the company’s deficient culture is showing up in the product, most vividly in its recent Gemini debacle. As a user and shareholder, I’m concerned.

…Lacking the forums for public questioning — and feeling their precarious job security — Google employees no longer feel fully able to speak up within the company.

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Very much what we suspected, but interesting to hear it from the horse’s mouth.
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IDC forecasts global PC shipments to grow 2.0% in 2024, led by the arrival of AI PCs and the start of a commercial refresh cycle • IDC

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As the global economy nears recovery, so will the PC market with global shipments forecast to reach 265.4 million units in 2024, up 2.0% from the prior year according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. While vendors focused on clearing inventory in 2023, IDC expects 2024 to be an expansion year with the introduction of AI PCs, which will ultimately drive the market forward to 292.2m units in 2028 and a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 2.4% over the 2024–2028 forecast period.

Growth is expected to slowly ramp up over the year along with the availability of AI PCs, which will coincide with the beginning of a commercial refresh cycle in 2025. “Commercial buyers, both enterprise and educational, are on the cusp of a refresh cycle that begins later this year and reaches its peak in 2025,” said Jitesh Ubrani, research manager with IDC’s Worldwide Mobile and Consumer Device Trackers. “Many of these buyers are expected to be among the first in terms of AI PC adoption. The presence of on-device AI capabilities is not likely to lead to an increase in the PC installed base, but it will certainly lead to a growth in average selling prices.”

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Have to love IDC forecasting this to four significant figures: 292.2 million, not 292. To be honest, though, I wouldn’t put that much weight on this. Wayyy back in 2012 I looked at how IDC’s forecasts for PC sales had changed in the light of tablets. The forecast for 2016’s sales: over 500m. Actual sales in 2016: 270m. This stuff is not very good guesswork.
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Roku disables TVs and streaming devices until users consent to new terms • TechCrunch

Devin Coldewey:

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Roku users around the country turned on their TVs this week to find an unpleasant surprise: The company required them to consent to new dispute resolution terms in order to access their device. The devices are unusable until the user agrees.

Users (at least, this user) received an email the day before saying that “we have made changes to our Dispute Resolution Terms, which describe how you can resolve disputes with Roku. We encourage you to read the updated Dispute Resolution Terms. By continuing to use our products or services, you are agreeing to these updated terms.”

The terms, of course, include a forced arbitration agreement that prevents the user from suing or taking part in lawsuits against Roku. It’s common these days as a way of limiting liability, and users often have little or no recourse. They only find out later, when the company does something heinous and consequences are negligible. Tech companies love this one dirty trick to save millions! (Full disclosure, our parent company requires arbitration as part of its dispute resolution policy as well.)

But what is actually new on perusal of the terms is a whole “Informal Dispute Resolution” section. This requires anyone with legal complaints to take them to Roku lawyers first, who will conduct a “Meet-and-Confer” call and then “make a fair, fact-based offer of resolution” that will no doubt be generous and thoughtful. So they’ve added a pre-arbitration arbiter to further distance legal threats from materializing. The change was actually made last fall (though no notification appears to have been sent out) but only came into effect recently, and now, some weeks later, users are being informed by this questionable method.

I try to opt out of these when I can, and after reading the terms (to which, of course, by “continuing to use” my TV, I had already agreed), I found that you could only do so by mailing a written notice to their lawyers — something I fully intended to do today. Actually, since arbitration was apparently already required, this update provides an opportunity to opt out of something I didn’t know I was already subject to.

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Of course disconnecting your Roku TV from the internet will mean that you can’t look at any content through the Roku part.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Airlines in the US are becoming a lot more restrictive about what people can claim is “carry-on baggage”. CC-licensed photo by Bradley Gordon 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. They fit perfectly. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Airlines are coming for your carry-on bags • WSJ

Dawn Gilbertson:

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Fanny packs. Cross-body bags. Shopping bags. Pillows and blankets. The Southwest Airlines gate agent rattled off so many items that counted toward the two carry-on bag limit on my flight to Baltimore, I thought it might be a playful jab at Spirit and Frontier and their rigid carry-on policing to collect more fees.

But this was no joke. Southwest quietly began cracking down on carry-on bags on Feb. 22, ahead of the spring and summer travel rush, advising gate agents of the changes in a memo. This crackdown isn’t about bag size. It is about how many bags you have.

Southwest isn’t alone in putting passengers’ personal items in its crosshairs as a way to save precious bin space and speed up boarding. Delta and United agents have also recently asked me to stuff my small Lululemon bag in my backpack. One American Airlines frequent flier told me he watched gate agents in Sacramento, Calif., and Dallas list a litany of items that count as a personal item on weekend flights to Nashville, Tenn., last month.

Carting all your stuff to the gate can save you time and often saves money, especially with some airlines’ new, higher checked-baggage fees. Delta joined the club on Tuesday, announcing prices of $35 for your first bag and $45 for your second.

But testing airlines’ carry-on limits is now more likely to backfire, and lose you precious time as airlines make you consolidate items or check a bag at the gate. Few things sum up the industry’s carry-on challenges like Southwest’s latest move. The nation’s largest domestic carrier by passengers should have the fewest issues given its generous two-free-checked-bag policy. (Unlike checked bags, the government doesn’t track carry-on bag volume and airlines don’t disclose it.)

Southwest declined to discuss its carry-on changes beyond a statement saying the change “provides for a consistent customer experience and helps to align with other airlines’ policies.” A memo to employees about the changes singles out cross-body purses of any size and pillows and blankets, but employees are free to ad lib, spokesman Chris Perry says. Representatives for Delta, United and American pointed to their carry-on policies when asked for comment.

Tymali Gore, a traveling hospice nurse, couldn’t believe it when she heard a gate agent announce new rules about pillows, blankets and a host of other items counting as a personal item late last month. “It was the first time I’d ever heard anything like that,” she says. 

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Then again, some people pretty much bring a steamer trunk and try to wedge it into the overhead lockers, then give up and vainly attempt to stuff it under the seat in front. The mind boggles.
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Inside the world of TikTok spammers and the AI tools that enable them • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

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We have recently been getting bombarded with Instagram Reels of influencers explaining how they make five figures a month by using AI to create tons of viral TikTok pages using stolen celebrity clips juxtaposed next to Minecraft gameplay footage. This strategy, the influencers say, allows them to passively make $10,000 a month by flooding social media platforms with stolen and low-effort clips while working from private helicopters, the beach, the ski slope, a park, etc.

What I found was a complex ecosystem of content parasitism, with thousands of people using a variety of AI tools to make low-quality spammy videos that recycle Reddit AMAs, weird “Would You Rather” games, AI-narrated “scary ocean” clips, ChatGPT-generated fun facts, slideshows of tweets, clips lifted from celebrities, YouTubers, and podcasts.

To help these people fill the internet with nonsense, there is an entire industry of creators, influencers, hustlers, and software developers selling them templates, stock clips, TikTok account creation services, cash out services, low-wage video editors in the developing world, AI voiceover and editing tools, and different “strategies” or “metas” to go viral enough to earn money from YouTube’s AdSense or from TikTok’s Creativity Program Beta, a monetization program that pays for “high-quality, longer TikTok videos” but which AI content influencers say can be easily gamed with low-effort content.

One of the kings of this world is Musa Mustafa, who got his start editing clips for the streamer Sneako but now seemingly makes most of his money from a Discord channel called “Media Metas,” which has 80,000 members and has a locked, premium section that costs $40 per month and is full of strategies and software people can supposedly use to go viral and make thousands of dollars a month. Whop, the platform he uses to sell access to the Discord, claims he is now making more than a million dollars a year through their platform.

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Probably knock a couple of zeroes off that, but it’s slightly depressing that it’s an option at all.
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European Electricity Review 2024 • Ember

Sara Brown and Dave Jones:

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The EU accelerated its shift away from fossil fuels in 2023, with record falls in coal, gas and emissions. Fossil fuels dropped by a record 19% to their lowest ever level at less than one third of the EU’s electricity generation. Renewables rose to a record 44% share, surpassing 40% for the first time. Wind and solar continued to be the drivers of this renewables growth, producing a record 27% of EU electricity in 2023 and achieving their largest ever annual capacity additions. Furthermore, wind generation reached a major milestone, surpassing gas for the first time.

Clean generation reached more than two-thirds of EU electricity, double fossil’s share, as hydro rebounded and nuclear partially recovered from last year’s lows alongside the increase in wind and solar. 

Coal was already in long-term decline, and that trend resumed in 2023. The temporary slowdown in coal plant closures during the energy crisis did not prevent a huge fall in coal generation this year, with a wave of plant closures imminent in 2024. Gas generation fell for the fourth consecutive year, and as coal nears phase-out in many countries, gas will be next to enter terminal decline.

In addition to clean growth, falling electricity demand also contributed to the drop in fossil fuel generation. Demand fell by 3.4% (-94 TWh) in 2023 compared to 2022, and was 6.4% (-186 TWh) lower than 2021 levels when the energy crisis began. This trajectory is unlikely to continue. With increased electrification, this rate of demand fall is not expected to be repeated in the coming years. To reduce fossil fuels at the speed required to hit EU climate goals, renewables will need to keep pace as demand increases. 

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That fall in electricity demand is peculiar: Ember puts it down to “a drop in industrial electricity consumption, mild weather and energy savings and efficiency” – principally in the energy-intensive industries of chemicals/petrochemicals, iron/steel, and paper/pulp, where manufacturing may have been reined in as gas prices soared.
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Vendor offering citations for purchase is latest bad actor in scholarly publishing • Science

Katie Langin:

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In 2023, a new Google Scholar profile appeared online featuring a researcher no one had ever heard of. Within a few months, the scientist, an expert in fake news, was listed by the scholarly database as their field’s 36th most cited researcher. They had an h-index of 19—meaning they’d published 19 academic articles that had been cited at least 19 times each. It was an impressive burst onto the academic publishing scene.

But none of it was legitimate. The researcher and their institution were fictional, created by researchers at New York University (NYU) Abu Dhabi who were probing shady publishing practices. The publications were written by ChatGPT. And the citation numbers were bogus: some came from the author excessively citing their own “work,” while 50 others had been purchased for $300 from a vendor offering a “citations booster service.”

“The capacity to purchase citations in bulk is a new and worrying development,” says Jennifer Byrne, a cancer researcher at the University of Sydney who has studied problematic publications in the biomedical literature. In academia, a researcher’s h-index and the number of citations they’ve garnered are often used for hiring and promotion decisions. And the fabricated profile, which was part of a study posted as a preprint on arXiv, shows “extreme” tactics that can be employed to manipulate them, adds Byrne, who was not involved in the work. (The researchers declined to name the vendor to avoid giving them more business.)

The study got started when Yasir Zaki, a computer scientist at NYU Abu Dhabi, and his colleagues noticed troubling patterns among real researchers. After combing through the Google Scholar profiles of more than 1.6 million scientists and looking at authors with at least 10 publications and 200 citations, the team identified 1016 scientists who had experienced a 10-fold increase in citations over a single year. “You know something is off when a scientist experiences a sudden and massive spike in their citations,” Zaki says.

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Arguably this sort of thing would have been harder to spot in the days before Google Scholar – though there maybe wouldn’t have been the same incentive to do it.
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Apple car’s crash: design details, Tim Cook’s indecision, failed Tesla deal • Bloomberg (archived)

Mark Gurman and Drake Bennett:

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According to a longtime Apple executive who worked on the car, it was widely seen within the company as an ill-conceived product that needed to be put out of its misery. “The big arc was poor leadership that let the program linger, while everyone else in Apple was cringing,” they say. Asked what went wrong with the effort, a senior manager involved in the vehicle’s interior design replied: “What went right?”

…It was Steve Jobs who first floated the idea of a car at Apple. In the late 2000s, in a typically grand pronouncement, the company’s co-founder and CEO declared internally that Apple should have dominant technologies in all of the spaces in which people spent time: at home, at work and on the go. For many Americans, being in transit means being on the road, sometimes for hours a day. “We talked about what would be this generation’s new Volkswagen Beetle,” recalls Tony Fadell, who led mobile device engineering under Jobs. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, with American car companies on the brink of failure, the Apple chief executive even floated the idea of acquiring General Motors Co. for pennies on the dollar.

That scheme was quickly abandoned, in part because Apple decided it would be a bad look and in part because of the need to focus on the iPhone. But in 2014, seeking a new multi-hundred-billion-dollar revenue stream, Cook began to focus again on cars. Apple executives weighing whether to enter the market joked with one another that they’d rather take on Detroit than a fellow tech giant: “Would you rather compete against Samsung or General Motors?” The profit margins in cars were far lower than in consumer electronics, but Apple was coming off a stretch during which it had reshaped not only the music industry but the mobile phone market.

To its supporters, the idea of getting into automobiles had the potential to be, as one Apple executive puts it, “one more example of Apple entering a market very late and vanquishing it.” While the initial prototypes operated like traditional cars, these supporters eventually pursued more radical redesigns, invoking a transportation technology experience they said would “give people time back.” The ultimate plan was a living room on wheels where people who no longer needed to drive their cars could work or entertain themselves with Apple screens and services instead.

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Absorbing read; more is going to come out about this. Lots of wrong choices and indecision.
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Decoder guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future • The Verge

Hank Green, not of The Verge, interviewed Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, about how The Verge is still here:

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HG: let’s start with you being the person who runs the last website on earth. Because you say things all the time and then you don’t explain them, which I love, but now I’ve got you. And so you have to explain to me why The Verge is “the last website on earth.”

NP: That’s a little bit of a joke. It’s 50% a joke. I’m aware that there are other websites. What I specifically mean is we were founded in a boom time of websites. We were founded in 2011. We started talking about the site in 2010. We remain part of a venture-backed digital media startup. There were a lot of those back then. We had a lot of competition in 2011, meaningful — like we were scared of them — competition.

ReadWriteWeb existed, and we tried to beat them every day. TechCrunch was a very different kind of publication back then. We tried to beat them all the time, and I really respect the people I competed against. I came up at Engadget competing ferociously against the people at Gizmodo, and we became first rivals and then really good friends out of that competition. Some of those sites still exist. Some of them are still doing great work. Some of them still have great people. But that moment when there was a ferocious rush of energy and money and attention into websites has obviously faded.

We’re not making those the same way we used to anymore, and I look at my peer group and so many of them are gone. To me, it’s that. It’s all the things: the people and the properties that I used to wake up in fear of, many of them are radically different than they used to be. And we’re still here. And that feels strange to me.

HG: It feels strange. You won, and it’s like, “Oh, I don’t actually…” It turns out that when you’re put into the arena and you’re the last man standing, there’s just a lot of carnage around, which isn’t that much of a triumph. It feels like it hurts a little bit. It’s weird to be us, our age, and hear that the word website feels almost anachronistic. It feels of another era.

The way I think about it is that I don’t have anyone else’s algorithm to think about, and that is really important to me. But then I look at all of the most important creators and the most influential members of the new media, and what they are is so successful that they have transcended algorithms on other people’s platforms.

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The whole podcast is available to listen to (for free); there’s also the transcript. The Verge has indeed managed something remarkable in surviving and succeeding in its current form for so long.
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Google hit with €2.1bn lawsuit from more than 30 European media companies • POLITICO

Pieter Haeck:

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A group of 32 European media organizations have filed a lawsuit against Google, seeking damages of about €2.1bn.

The lawsuit touches on the US tech giant’s digital advertising practices, with the media groups claiming that they “incurred losses due to a less competitive market,” according to a statement shared by law firms Geradin Partners and Stek, which represent the organizations.

“Without Google’s abuse of its dominant position, the media companies would have received significantly higher revenues from advertising and paid lower fees for ad tech services,” the statement added.

Among the media groups are some of Europe’s leading news companies, including Axel Springer (owner of POLITICO), Norway-based Schibsted, and Benelux groups such as DPG Media and Mediahuis. The coalition claims to cover 17 European countries.

The lawsuit was filed in a Dutch court.

In June last year, the European Commission sent antitrust charges to Google over its advertising business.

“Our preliminary concern is that Google may have used its market position to favour its own intermediation services,” Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager said at the time.
“Not only did this possibly harm Google’s competitors but also publishers’ interests, while also increasing advertisers’ costs.”

The European Union’s competition watchdog has been probing Google’s online display advertising business since 2021. It’s previously probed the company’s shopping search service, its mobile phone software and advertising contracts, levying more than €8bn in fines.

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(I’m involved with a similar lawsuit against Google in the UK; the process is ongoing.)
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Amazon just bought a 100% nuclear-powered data center • Electrek

Michelle Lewis:

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One of the US’s largest nuclear power plants will directly power cloud service provider Amazon Web Services’ new data centre.

Power provider Talen Energy sold its data center campus, Cumulus Data Assets, to Amazon Web Services for $650m. Amazon will develop an up to 960-megawatt (MW) data center at the Salem Township site in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.

The 1,200-acre campus is directly powered by an adjacent 2.5 gigawatt (GW) nuclear power station also owned by Talen Energy.

The 1,075-acre Susquehanna Steam Electric Station is the sixth-largest nuclear power plant in the US. It’s been online since 1983 and produces 63m kWh per day. The plant has two General Electric boiling water reactors within a Mark II containment building that are licensed through 2042 and 2044.

According to Talen Energy’s investor presentation, it will supply fixed-price nuclear power to Amazon’s new data center as it’s built. Amazon has minimum contractual power commitments that ramp up in 120 MW increments over several years. The cloud service giant has a one-time option to cap commitments at 480 MW and two 10-year extension options tied to nuclear license renewals.

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Not sure how I feel about this: OK, so the centre is going to be nuclear-powered: hooray. But isn’t that energy that could be used to power homes or other businesses? The tradeoff implied here is tricky.
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Meta & LG confirm “next-gen XR device” partnership • UploadVR

David Heaney:

»

LG just officially announced an XR “strategic collaboration” with Meta.

Earlier today, Mark Zuckerberg met with LG CEO William Cho and the president of LG’s Home Entertainment division Park Hyoung-sei at LG’s headquarters in Seoul to finalize the details of the partnership. The meeting apparently included Zuckerberg demoing Quest 3 to Cho.

This is Zuckerberg’s first publicly-known trip to South Korea since 2014, when he visited Samsung to finalize the Gear VR smartphone-holder headset partnership.

William Cho, Mark Zuckerberg, and Park Hyoung-sei earlier today at LG headquarters in Seoul.
LG confirmed the talks included discussing “business strategies and considerations for next-gen XR device development”, giving the following statement:

»

“LG envisions that by bringing together Meta’s platform with its own content/service capabilities from its TV business, a distinctive ecosystem can be forged in the XR domain, which is one of the company’s new business areas.

Moreover, the fusion of Meta’s diverse core technological elements with LG’s cutting-edge product and quality capabilities promises significant synergies in next-gen XR device development.”

«

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One rather suspects that Zuck would have preferred to be visiting Samsung again, rather than smartphone-loser LG. But Samsung likely has its eyes on Google (whose blandishments Meta just rejected to cooperate on VR).
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AI models make stuff up. How can hallucinations be controlled? • The Economist

»

Researchers at Google DeepMind found that telling an LLM to “take a deep breath and work on this problem step-by-step” reduced hallucinations and improved problem solving, especially of maths problems. One theory for why this works is that AI models learn patterns. By breaking a problem down into smaller ones, it is more likely that the model will be able to recognise and apply the right one. But, says Edoardo Ponti at the University of Edinburgh, such prompt engineering amounts to treating a symptom, rather than curing the disease.

Perhaps, then, the problem is that accuracy is too much to ask of llms alone. Instead, they should be part of a larger system—an engine, rather than the whole car. One solution is retrieval augmented generation (RAG), which splits the job of the ai model into two parts: retrieval and generation. Once a prompt is received, a retriever model bustles around an external source of information, like a newspaper archive, to extract relevant contextual information. This is fed to the generator model alongside the original prompt, prefaced with instructions not to rely on prior knowledge. The generator then acts like a normal LLM and answers. This reduces hallucinations by letting the LLM play to its strengths—summarising and paraphrasing rather than researching. Other external tools, from calculators to search engines, can also be bolted onto an LLM in this way, effectively building it a support system to enhance those skills it lacks.

Even with the best algorithmic and architectural antipsychotics available, however, LLMs still hallucinate. One leaderboard, run by Vectara, an American software company, tracks how often such errors arise. Its data shows that GPT-4 still hallucinates in 3% of its summaries, Claude 2 in 8.5% and Gemini Pro in 4.8%.

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The RAG approach sounds like the adversarial system used for generating images such as thispersondoesnotexist, where one neural network generates and the other tries to find fault with it, feeding back between the two until the latter is satisfied.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Twenty years on, a version of the Star Wars films that aired in Chile is delighting the internet. CC-licensed photo by Gustavo Rivas Valderrama 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. Refreshing. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google’s ‘March 2024 core update’ fights back against site spammers • Fast Company

Harry McCracken:

»

Known as the March 2024 Core Update, this round of fixes builds on algorithmic tweaks the company began implementing in 2022 to prevent questionable sites from competing with the useful ones people turn to a search engine to find. In total, Google says, these adjustments should reduce the amount of “low-quality, unoriginal content” by 40%.

Google already penalized sites that used AI to churn out vast amounts of content that was willfully lousy but highly optimized to rank well in its results. With the advent of large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s own Gemini, it’s never been easier to stuff a site with AI-generated material. But rather than target sites specifically for harnessing AI in such efforts, Google now says it will focus on curtailing low-grade, high-SEO content regardless of the techniques involved.

“I think generative AI is actually a really valuable tool for creators, and there’s nothing wrong with using it to create the content you create for your users,” says Pandu Nayak, a Google Search VP overseeing quality and ranking. “The problem is when you start creating content at scale not with the idea of serving your users, but with the idea of targeting search ranking.” (Whether the revised policy mentions automation or not may be a wash: It’s tough to imagine anyone who’s mass-producing web pages without regard to their quality not relying on AI to do most of the work.)

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Hard to think this is an arms race that ends well for Google.
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Star Wars meets beer ads: George Lucas’ legal battle with Chilean broadcaster • BNN

Geeta Pillai:

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During the December 2003 broadcasts of several Star Wars films, viewers were treated to an unconventional advertising strategy by channel 13 in collaboration with Cerveza Cristal, one of Chile’s most popular beer brands. Instead of traditional ad breaks, the channel inserted 30-second commercials directly into the movies. These ads were crafted to appear as continuations of the scenes they interrupted, integrating them so smoothly that they seemed to be part of the original films. One ad featured Obi-Wan Kenobi opening a chest to reveal a stash of Cerveza Cristal, complete with rock music and the brand’s logo, while another showed Emperor Palpatine pulling out a beer bottle instead of a lightsaber.

The discovery of these edits has elicited laughter and surprise among the Star Wars community, with some fans expressing a newfound interest in watching these uniquely altered versions of the films. This incident, however, was not taken lightly by Star Wars creator George Lucas. In 2004, Lucas filed a grievance with the Chilean Council for Self-Regulation and Advertising Ethics, leading to a judgment in Lucas Films’ favor. The council decreed that the commercials were not to be aired again. Despite this ruling, the channel and Cerveza Cristal partnered once more in 2004, embedding the beer into scenes from other popular movies like American Beauty, Notting Hill, and Gladiator.

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These are absolutely the funniest things you will see all day. People have been collecting them all day, mostly via the Twitter user Windy. They’re collected in his thread, or this article.

And they are the best laugh you’ll have all day; possibly all week. Or longer. And it’s such an improvement on the originals.
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Satellite to ‘name and shame’ worst oil and gas methane polluters • The Guardian

Damian Carrington:

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A washing-machine-sized satellite is to “name and shame” the worst methane polluters in the oil and gas industry.

MethaneSat is scheduled to launch from California onboard a SpaceX rocket on Monday at 2pm local time (22:00 GMT). It will provide the first near-comprehensive global view of leaks of the potent greenhouse gas from the oil and gas sector, and all of the data will be made public. It will provide high-resolution data over wider areas than existing satellites.

Methane, also called natural gas, is responsible for 30% of the global heating driving the climate crisis. Leaks from the fossil fuel industry are a major source of human-caused emissions and stemming these is the fastest single way to curb temperature rises.

MethaneSat was developed by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), a US NGO, in partnership with the New Zealand Space Agency and cost $88m to build and launch. Earlier EDF measurements from planes show methane emissions were 60% higher than calculated estimates published by US authorities and elsewhere.

More than 150 countries have signed a global methane pledge to cut their emissions of the gas by 30% from 2020 levels by 2030. Some oil and gas companies have made similar pledges, and new regulations to limit methane leaks are being worked on in the US, EU, Japan and South Korea.

The EDF’s senior vice-president, Mark Brownstein, said: “MethaneSat is a tool for accountability. I’m sure many people think this could be used to name and shame companies who are poor emissions performers, and that’s true. But [it] can [also] help document progress that leading companies are making in reducing their emissions.”

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Name and shame, name and praise. It all helps.

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We tested Amazon’s new AI shopping chatbot. It’s not good • The Washington Post

Shira Ovide:

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Amazon’s chatbot [called Rufus] doesn’t deliver on the promise of finding the best product for your needs or getting you started on a new hobby.

In one of my tests, I asked what I needed to start composting at home. Depending on how I phrased the question, the Amazon bot several times offered basic suggestions that I could find in a how-to article and didn’t recommend specific products.

Another time, the Amazon bot suggested items such as a small compost bin, compost bin liners, a garden fork and a compost thermometer.

Compost fans may notice that the first two suggestions were appropriate for collecting compost scraps in your kitchen. The latter two were for making a backyard compost pile. Amazon’s bot appeared to conflate two different needs.

When I clicked the suggestions the bot offered for a kitchen compost bin, I was dumped into a zillion options for countertop compost products. Not helpful.

Because the Amazon chatbot typically shows you a handful of choices, it might feel better than not knowing what product you want and being deluged with a flood of options on Amazon.

Still, when the Amazon bot responded to my questions, I usually couldn’t tell why the suggested products were considered the right ones for me. Or, I didn’t feel I could trust the chatbot’s recommendations.

I asked a few similar questions about the best cycling gloves to keep my hands warm in winter. In one search, a pair that the bot recommended were short-fingered cycling gloves intended for warm weather.

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AI invents quote from real person in article by Bihar news site: a wake-up call? • The Quint

Karan Mahadik:

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At first glance, an article about Meta’s AI chatbot that was published on Patna-based news portal Biharprabha reads like a regular 600-word news report that delves into the history of the AI bot, the controversy surrounding its responses, and the concerns raised, in particular, by Dr Emily Bender, a “leading AI ethics researcher”.

“The release of BlenderBot 3 demonstrates that Meta continues to struggle with addressing biases and misinformation within its AI models,” Dr Emily Bender is quoted as saying in the article titled ‘Meta’s AI Bot Goes Rogue, Spews Offensive Content’ published on 21 February.

But it turns out that the real Dr Emily Bender never actually said it. The entire quote was fabricated and misattributed to her in the article that was generated using an AI tool, specifically Google’s Large Language Model (LLM) known as Gemini.

Confirming this with The Quint, Dr Bender said that she “had no record of talking to any journalist from Biharprabha.”

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Bender is the professor (of linguistics, at the University of Washington) who came up with the phrase “stochastic parrot” to describe LLMs: “stochastic” because it’s probability-based, “parrot” because it says the things without knowing their meaning. Ironically, the quote wrongly attributed to her is the sort of thing she probably would have said.
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iOS 17.4 won’t remove Home Screen web apps in the EU after all • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

»

Apple’s decision to remove Home Screen web apps, also known as progressive web apps or PWAs, faced a lot of criticism. The Open Web Advocacy organization, for example, said “entire categories of apps will no longer be viable on the web as a result” of the change. There were also reports the EU was going to investigate the decision.

At the time, Apple explained that it would have to build an “entirely new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS” to address the “complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps using alternative browser engines.” This, the company said, “was not practical to undertake given the other demands of the DMA and the very low user adoption of Home Screen web apps.”

With [this] announcement, Apple has reversed course and said that Home Screen web apps will continue to exist as they did pre-iOS 17.4 in the European Union. “This support means Home Screen web apps continue to be built directly on WebKit and its security architecture, and align with the security and privacy model for native apps on iOS,” Apple explains today.

This means that all Home Screen web apps will still be powered by WebKit, regardless of whether the web app is added using Safari or not – exactly as it works today and has for years.

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So it was “not practical” and then it became practical? Hmm.
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Behind Formula 1’s velvet curtain • Road and Track (archived version)

Kate Wagner:

»

The sound came before the machine and then the machine blurred by and disappeared over the elegant hill, singing. By the second sprint shootout, even though I’ve watched F1 for a few years now, I had no idea what was going on without 10 split-screen views and a guy yelling in my ear. The cards fell where they fell: Max in first as usual, followed by Leclerc, but then, unexpectedly, Alex Albon.

After the second sprint, the INEOS folks informed the journalists that we needed to leave early in order to avoid traffic and make it to dinner on time, where, apparently there would be a special guest. Frustrated, I returned to watching the cars as they started up again, knowing that the drivers were pushing them to their limits, engrossed in their personal kaleidoscope of motion and color.

[Lewis] Hamilton was in one of them. In the last shootout, he drove differently than before. A great verve frayed the lines he was making, something we can only call effort, push. Watching him, I understood what was so interesting about this sport, even though I was watching it in its most bare-bones form—cars going around in circles. The driver is the apotheosis of quick-moving prowess, total focus and control. The car is both the most studied piece of human engineering, tuned and devised in lab-like environments and at the same time a variable entity, something that must be wrestled with and pushed. The numbers are crunched, the forms wind-tunneled. And yet some spirit escapes their control, and that spirit is known only by the driver.

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Wagner is a cycling journalist, but was given a freebie to go and watch the F1 race in Texas with the sponsors, INEOS. She was stunned by the indifferent affluence on show, and said so. Which is why the article was quickly taken down by Road & Track. Which is a pity: this extract shows the insight that she brings to bear on what seems unbearably dull when seen on TV.

Might be a while before she gets sent on another freebie to F1. But anyone looking for a good writer will remember her name. (Thanks Mark C for the link.)
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Wisdom of the Silicon Crowd: LLM ensemble prediction capabilities match human crowd accuracy • ArXiv

Philip Tetlock et al:

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Human forecasting accuracy in practice relies on the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ effect, in which predictions about future events are significantly improved by aggregating across a crowd of individual forecasters. Past work on the forecasting ability of large language models (LLMs) suggests that frontier LLMs, as individual forecasters, underperform compared to the gold standard of a human crowd forecasting tournament aggregate.

In Study 1, we expand this research by using an LLM ensemble approach consisting of a crowd of twelve LLMs. We compare the aggregated LLM predictions on 31 binary questions to that of a crowd of 925 human forecasters from a three-month forecasting tournament. Our main analysis shows that the LLM crowd outperforms a simple no-information benchmark and is statistically equivalent to the human crowd. We also observe an acquiescence effect, with mean model predictions being significantly above 50%, despite an almost even split of positive and negative resolutions.

Moreover, in Study 2, we test whether LLM predictions (of GPT-4 and Claude 2) can be improved by drawing on human cognitive output. We find that both models’ forecasting accuracy benefits from exposure to the median human prediction as information, improving accuracy by between 17% and 28%: though this leads to less accurate predictions than simply averaging human and machine forecasts.

Our results suggest that LLMs can achieve forecasting accuracy rivaling that of human crowd forecasting tournaments: via the simple, practically applicable method of forecast aggregation. This replicates the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ effect for LLMs, and opens up their use for a variety applications throughout society.

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Tetlock, if the name isn’t familiar, is the man who coined “superforecasting”; this is a look at how good LLMs might be at the task. (Not better than the best humans, seems to be the answer.) You can read the paper. The full list of questions that were posed to the humans and the LLMs is on page 20; they were asked in late 2023, and many have deadlines expiring in January 2024.
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Delusional self-belief is a superpower… until it’s a disaster • The Ruffian

Ian Leslie:

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Great things are often accomplished by irrational people for irrational reasons. The rational move for Churchill in May 1940 was to pursue a peace agreement with Germany. In 1997, no Prime Minister without Tony Blair’s luxuriously proportioned ego would have believed it possible to lead a successful peace process in Northern Ireland. Failures of political leadership often stem from leaders without the necessary grandeur of self-conception to really lead – from recent British history, Gordon Brown, Teresa May and Rishi Sunak spring to mind. Leaders without this special sauce tend to flounder around without direction; leaders with too much of it become Liz Truss.

If you’re trying to spot future political stars, look for individuals who display some delusions of grandeur but who aren’t in thrall to them. Similarly, when trying to predict how a political leader will behave, you should factor in the likelihood they are more optimistic about their prospects and abilities than any sane person would be. I often see commentators assuming that a leader’s assessment of the landscape is similar to their’s. This is usually a mistake, and it’s the one I made when I assumed that Joe Biden was unlikely to run for a second term.

Of course, he may still step down, but the fact that we’ve got this close to an election without him doing so is not what I would have predicted when I wrote about his inauguration speech. I assumed that having slain the dragon, he would retire, nobly, to Delaware. In fact, it wasn’t until late in 2022 that his intention to run again became unmistakably clear to me. As soon as it did, I realised I’d made the elementary error of assuming that top-level politicians see the world in the way the rest of us do. To me and other observers, it seemed obvious that he would be too old to run and win in 2024, and be a competent second-term president. Surely Biden would see that too?

No. Joe Biden ran two failed presidential campaigns and didn’t even come close to winning – and still believed he should take another shot, even when nobody else did. He wanted to run in 2016 and was eased out of the way by the Obamas, who thought Clinton was a better bet. Throughout it all, Biden kept believing he could and should be president, and eventually the world came around to where he had been in his mind for fifty years.

So if you’re Joe Biden, of course you believe that you can and should win a second term. Indeed, you believe that you’re the only person in America capable of defeating Trump and governing a divided nation.

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This is a terrific essay which makes you realise why these politicians do things that to anyone else smack of idiocy. And hidden in there is a fascinating little what-if: what if Biden had been the Democrat candidate in 2016? Would he have repeated VP Gore’s 2000 failure? Or won, and followed on in 2020, giving us a new candidate this year?
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‘The internet is an alien life form’: how David Bowie created a market for digital music • The Guardian

Eamonn Forde:

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In early 1998, Virgin Records/EMI had made Massive Attack’s Mezzanine available for streaming in full online at the same time as its physical release, albeit previewing it track-by-track over several weeks. At the time, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) cautioned against this, suggesting that streaming experiments could increase the possibility of albums being pirated by tech-savvy individuals and burned to CD. This did not stop other major labels or their acts from occasionally experimenting. Both Def Leppard and Red Hot Chili Peppers made their latest albums, respectively Euphoria and Californication, available to stream in full on 4 June 1999, four days before the records would be in the shops. “Getting airplay is getting airplay, you just have to define air,” said Bob Merlis of Warner Bros, the Chili Peppers’ label. “We felt good about this since it was not downloadable.”

But the Bowie album release [Hours – “far from his best album, and not even his best album of the 1990s”] was designed to be a significant step forward. In 1999, he was interviewed by Jeremy Paxman for BBC Newsnight and talked about his career, his art and, most invigoratingly for him, the internet. The 16-minute interview is still available on the BBC website and is frequently shared, especially since Bowie’s death in January 2016, as evidence of his startling prescience with regard to the impact the internet would have on art, politics and society.

“I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg,” he told a wearily cynical Paxman. “I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.” Paxman, in his arch way, suggested it was just “a tool”, which saw Bowie spring into action. “No, it’s not,” he said. “No – it’s an alien life form!”

He went on to say that the internet would completely change the dynamics of consumption: “The interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.”

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And of course, he was proved right. What we lost when we lost Bowie: vision.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A group of British scientists have discovered the secret of getting media coverage by referencing popular film topics. CC-licensed photo by Hervé Simon 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.

Apple fined €1.84bn in one of Europe’s largest antitrust actions • WSJ via MSN

Kim Mackrael:

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The European Commission, the EU’s executive body, said it found the company violated antitrust rules by restricting app developers from telling users about alternative ways to subscribe to music-streaming services. The commission said it ordered Apple to change its practices.

“Apple’s conduct, which lasted for almost 10 years, may have led many iOS users to pay significantly higher prices for music streaming subscriptions,” the commission said Monday.

Apple said it plans to appeal the decision, which it said was reached “despite the Commission’s failure to uncover any credible evidence of consumer harm.”

Monday’s fine is the culmination of a multiyear investigation into Apple’s App Store practices and represents one of the largest antitrust penalties ever imposed by the Commission against a single company. Google has faced larger fines—of €4.3bn and €2.4bn—in two separate cases that the tech company has appealed.

Apple’s fine of €1.84bn, equivalent to about $2bn, was larger than some antitrust lawyers had anticipated. The EU’s guidance for calculating an antitrust fine allows it to increase the baseline calculation for what the fine should be to deter a company from its behaviour.

“I think it’s important to say that if you are a company who’s dominant, and you do something illegal, you will be punished,” said Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s competition czar. The size of the fine should help demonstrate the bloc’s resolve in tackling anticompetitive behavior, she added.

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Obviously this follows from Spotify’s complaint about not being able to tell people in the Spotify app about the option of subscribing in Spotify itself. Apple’s response of not being able to show consumer harm is sort of true, but also irrelevant. One can calculate the counterfactual where people could be told that they’d pay less by following a link to the Spotify site: there are plentiful well-paid experts around Brussels who make a good living working out the numbers for hypotheticals like that.
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Scientists unearth mysteries of giant, moving Moroccan star dune • The Guardian

Steven Morris:

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They are impressive, mysterious structures that loom out of deserts on the Earth and are also found on Mars and on Saturn’s biggest moon, Titan.

Experts from universities including Aberystwyth in Wales have now pinpointed the age of a star dune in a remote area of Morocco and uncovered details about its formation and how it moves across the desert.

Prof Geoff Duller of the department of geography and earth sciences at Aberystwyth said: “They are extraordinary things, one of the natural wonders of the world. From the ground they look like pyramids but from the air you see a peak and radiating off it in three or four directions these arms that make them look like stars.”

The team, which was also made up of University of London academics, travelled to the south-east of Morocco to study a 100-metre high and 700-metre wide dune in the Erg Chebbi sand sea known as Lala Lallia, which means the “highest sacred point” in the Berber language.

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This item has been on radio, TV and other media all day, and I wondered why, because it barely makes any sense and it’s about something that I’ve never worried about and didn’t even when I read it. (Still don’t.) Then someone pointed out that it contains the word “dune”, same as a big film that’s just been released. Scientists timing the announcement about their work to catch some hot SEO? Why of course. That’s much more fun to observe.
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TurboTax and H&R Block’s AI chatbots are giving bad tax advice • The Washington Post

Geoffrey Fowler:

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This year, TurboTax and H&R Block added artificial intelligence to the tax-prep software used by millions of us. Now while you’re doing your taxes online, there are AI chatbots on the right side of the screen to answer your burning questions.

But watch out: Rely on either AI for even lightly challenging tax questions, and you could end up confused. Or maybe even audited.

Here’s one example: Where should your child file taxes if she goes to college out of state? When I asked, TurboTax’s “Intuit Assist” bot offered irrelevant advice about tax credits and extensions. H&R Block’s “AI Tax Assist” bot gave me the wrong impression she has to file in both places. (The correct answer: she only files in the other state if she has earned income there.)

Question after question, I got many of the same random, misleading or inaccurate AI answers.

…After I shared my results with TurboTax maker Intuit, the company changed some of how the bot picks its answers. But its new version of Intuit Assist was still unhelpful on a quarter of the questions.

H&R Block’s AI gave unhelpful answers to more than 30% of the questions. It did well on 529 plans and mortgage deductions, but confidently recommended an incorrect filing status and erroneously described IRS guidance on cryptocurrency.

“I feel that my job as a tax professional is very secure,” said Beverly Goodman​​​​, a tax manager at EP Wealth who helped me analyze the AI advice.

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This was so predictable. So very predictable.
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Here’s the full AI-generated script from the Willy Wonka disaster • Gizmodo

Thomas Germain:

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An event based on Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory made international news over the weekend after a promised world of imagination turned into a full on disaster. “Willy’s Chocolate Experience” in Glasgow, Scotland was promoted with elaborate AI-generated images of lollipop forests and jellybean waterfalls. But when families arrived, they were greeted by a filthy, barely decorated warehouse, prompting parents to call the police (see the photos here). Now, Gizmodo has a copy of the event’s unhinged AI-generated script.

The script was shared in a Facebook group organized after the event called “House of Illuminati Scam,” named after the company behind the production. An actress named Cara Lewis posted the document, saying actors were given two days to memorize it and then told to abandon the text and improvise as the fiasco unfolded.

Gizmodo reached out to Lewis and a number of the other actors but didn’t hear back, and with no response from House of Illuminati, we can’t fully guarantee the script’s authenticity. However, Lewis was clearly present at Willy’s Chocolate Experience, and the script matches descriptions from other actors and people who attended the event. Based on our reporting, it seems like the real thing.

The script has all the hallmarks of AI, including the nonsensical decision to include lines for audience members and descriptions of the crowd’s reaction, as though it’s happening in real-time. You’ll also notice the code names for Willy Wonka and the Oompa Loompas. House of Illuminati said on its website that any resemblance to existing characters is “coincidental” and the event is unrelated to the copyrighted Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

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AI is the warming water, and we’re the frogs.
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A WordPress ‘firehose’ allows AI companies to buy access to a million posts a day • 404 Media

Jason Koebler and Samantha Cole:

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In September 2023, WordPress.com quietly changed the language of a developer page explaining how to access a “Firehose” of roughly a million daily WordPress posts to add that the feeds are “intended for partners like search engines, artificial intelligence (AI) products and market intelligence providers who would like to ingest a real-time stream of new content from a wide spectrum of publishers.” Before then, this page did not note the AI use case. 

This is notable because of the fervor and confusion that has arisen this week after we broke the news that Automattic, which owns WordPress.com and Tumblr, was preparing to send user data to OpenAI and Midjourney. Since then, there has been much discussion about which WordPress blogs would be included, which would not, whether data was already sent, and whether people who opt out would have their data redacted retroactively. 

We still do not know the answers to all of these questions, because Automattic has repeatedly ignored our detailed questions, will not get on the phone with us, and has instead chosen to frame a new opt-out feature as “protecting user choice.”

Update: After this article was published, Automattic told 404 Media that it is “deprecating” the Firehose: “SocialGist is rolling off as a firehose customer this month and the remaining customers are winding down in the coming months, both things that were already in motion for different reasons,” an Automattic spokesperson said. “We’re in the process of updating our developer page to indicate that we have been deprecating the old firehose for several months.” The spokesperson did not answer the original questions we posed to them about the data supply chain for the Firehose.

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Cool – so all this nonsense of mine is getting indexed? I’m going to be immortal? (Though to quote Woody Allen: “I don’t want to be immortal through my works, I want to be immortal through not dying.”)
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Your TV is too good for you • The Atlantic

Ian Bogost:

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Last fall, when Netflix hiked the cost of its top-tier Ultra HD plan by 15%, I had finally had enough: $22.99 a month just felt like too much for the ability to see Jaws in 4K video resolution. A couple of weeks later, I heard that Max was pushing up the fee of its own 4K streaming by 25%. Now I wasn’t just annoyed, but confused. Super-high-res televisions are firmly ensconced as the next standard for home viewing of TV and movies. And yet, super-high-res content seems to be receding ever further into a specialty consumer niche. What happened?

4K certainly is ubiquitous; you won’t find many sets with lower resolution for sale at Best Buy. In practice, though, the technology is rarely used. Cable signals are generally mere HD, as are the standard plans on most streaming services. And the fancy new displays, as they’re placed and viewed in people’s homes, may never end up looking any sharper than the old ones, no matter what Netflix plan you have. In short, the ultra-high-definition future for TV has turned out to be a lie.

A relentless narrative of progress brought us to this point, but it did not begin in 2012, when the first 4K televisions were brought to market at roughly the price of a Honda Accord. Rather it extends back into the early days of TV, with the idea that picture quality can and always will be improved: first with the introduction of color sets, then with bigger screens, then with added pixels.

But sometimes progress ends. The peak of television-picture quality, as actually seen by TV viewers, was reached 15 years ago, and we’ve been coasting ever since. Forget the cable signals and the streaming plans. Most people just can’t sit close enough to today’s televisions to make full use of their picture.

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But.. but the Vision Pro! Which maybe goes up to 8K, or something comparable. No problem sitting close enough to that.
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Fury after Exxon chief says public to blame for climate failures • The Guardian

Dharna Noor and Oliver Milman:

»

The world is off track to meet its climate goals and the public is to blame, Darren Woods, chief executive of oil giant ExxonMobil, has claimed – prompting a backlash from climate experts.

As the world’s largest investor-owned oil company, Exxon is among the top contributors to global planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions. But in an interview, published on Tuesday, Woods argued that big oil is not primarily responsible for the climate crisis.

The real issue, Woods said, is that the clean-energy transition may prove too expensive for consumers’ liking.

“The dirty secret nobody talks about is how much all this is going to cost and who’s willing to pay for it,” he told Fortune last week. “The people who are generating those emissions need to be aware of and pay the price for generating those emissions. That is ultimately how you solve the problem.”

Woods said the world was “not on the path” to cut its planet-heating emissions to net zero by 2050, which scientists say is imperative to avoid catastrophic impacts of global heating. “When are people going to willing to pay for carbon reduction?” said Woods, who has been Exxon’s chief executive since 2017.

“We have opportunities to make fuels with lower carbon in it, but people aren’t willing to spend the money to do that.”

«

Yes, definitely our fault that ExxonMobil chose not to invest in renewable energy decades ago and drive the prices down.
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How the Pentagon learned to use targeted ads to find its targets—and Vladimir Putin • WIRED

Byron Tau:

»

As he would explain in a succession of bland government conference rooms, [US government contractor and technology Mike] Yeagley was able [in 2019] to access the geolocation data on Grindr users through a hidden but ubiquitous entry point: the digital advertising exchanges that serve up the little digital banner ads along the top of Grindr and nearly every other ad-supported mobile app and website. This was possible because of the way online ad space is sold, through near-instantaneous auctions in a process called real-time bidding. Those auctions were rife with surveillance potential. You know that ad that seems to follow you around the internet? It’s tracking you in more ways than one. In some cases, it’s making your precise location available in near-real time to both advertisers and people like Mike Yeagley, who specialized in obtaining unique data sets for government agencies.

Working with Grindr data, Yeagley began drawing geofences—creating virtual boundaries in geographical data sets—around buildings belonging to government agencies that do national security work. That allowed Yeagley to see what phones were in certain buildings at certain times, and where they went afterwards. He was looking for phones belonging to Grindr users who spent their daytime hours at government office buildings. If the device spent most workdays at the Pentagon, the FBI headquarters, or the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency building at Fort Belvoir, for example, there was a good chance its owner worked for one of those agencies. Then he started looking at the movement of those phones through the Grindr data. When they weren’t at their offices, where did they go? A small number of them had lingered at highway rest stops in the DC area at the same time and in proximity to other Grindr users—sometimes during the workday and sometimes while in transit between government facilities. For other Grindr users, he could infer where they lived, see where they traveled, even guess at whom they were dating.

Intelligence agencies have a long and unfortunate history of trying to root out LGBTQ Americans from their workforce, but this wasn’t Yeagley’s intent. He didn’t want anyone to get in trouble. No disciplinary actions were taken against any employee of the federal government based on Yeagley’s presentation. His aim was to show that buried in the seemingly innocuous technical data that comes off every cell phone in the world is a rich story—one that people might prefer to keep quiet.

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A really great story.
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The Guardian’s new “Deeply Read” article ranking focuses on attention, not just clicks • Nieman Journalism Lab

Laura Hazard Owen:

»

The No. 1 most-clicked story on The Guardian’s US site last Wednesday: “Alabama IVF ruling leaves Republicans stuck between their base and the broader public.” The most “deeply read” story, however, was on a very different topic: “Dune v Dune: do Denis Villeneuve’s films stay true to the book?“

“Deeply Read,” a feature launched Wednesday, “uses attention time to surface a wider range of journalism that other readers are spending more time with,” The Guardian said:

»

It appears on our regionalised home pages and reflects the interests of the region’s audience.

Not all of these pieces are long. To power the list we created a metric that looks at the attention time from readers compared with the length of the piece. This means that the list is diverse in terms of topic, length and format.

«

With news publishers increasingly relying on subscription revenue rather than advertising, engagement is becoming a more important metric. Expanding the kinds of “top” lists can also help publishers promote discovery within their own sites. The Guardian’s ranking gauges “active time spent” on a story, Chris Moran, the Guardian’s head of editorial innovation, explained to me via Twitter DM.

“The metric is a long-term internal one in Ophan [The Guardian’s internal analytics system] called the attention benchmark and it’s very simple,” he said. “It takes active reading time, takes into account the length of the article, and gives us a score out of five clocks. So five clocks is ‘this is a great reading time for this length!’ and one clock is ‘this isn’t great for this length.”

“We’ve had this for a number of years internally to help us see less reach-y pieces that really work with a smaller audience,” he added. “And for many years I’ve wanted to share it with readers because it highlights such great journalism and little off the beaten track of trending topics. To be clear it still matters to show people what is popular, but we love showing them something more.”

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Chris is a very smart guy, and this is a typically clever thing to intrigue passers-by.
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An update on Facebook News • Meta

»

In early April 2024, we will deprecate Facebook News – a dedicated tab in the bookmarks section on Facebook that spotlights news – in the US and Australia. This follows our September 2023 announcement that we deprecated Facebook News in the UK, France and Germany last year.   

This is part of an ongoing effort to better align our investments to our products and services people value the most. As a company, we have to focus our time and resources on things people tell us they want to see more of on the platform, including short form video. The number of people using Facebook News in Australia and the U.S. has dropped by over 80% last year. We know that people don’t come to Facebook for news and political content — they come to connect with people and discover new opportunities, passions and interests. As we previously shared in 2023, news makes up less than 3% of what people around the world see in their Facebook feed, and is a small part of the Facebook experience for the vast majority of people.

The changes affecting the Facebook News feature will not otherwise impact Meta’s products and services in these countries. People will still be able to view links to news articles on Facebook. News publishers will continue to have access to their Facebook accounts and Pages, where they can post links to their stories and direct people to their websites, in the same way any other individual or organization can. News organizations can also still leverage products like Reels and our ads system to reach broader audiences and drive people to their website, where they keep 100% of the revenue derived from outbound links on Facebook. 

«

It may be true that news is less than 3% of what people around the world see in their Facebook feed, but it’s 100% of what news organisations produce, and nobody has ever tried to measure how much of their output contributes to the content “people around the world” see when they’re not on Facebook. So while that 3% figure may be true, it may also be a distraction.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Call centre workers might be some of the first people to be displaced by chatbots, after Klarna found its satisfactory in a trial. CC-licensed photo by ILO Asia-Pacific 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. Your call is important to us. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Behind Apple’s doomed car project: false starts and wrong turns • The New York Times

Brian Chen and Tripp Mickle:

»

Throughout its existence, the car effort was scrapped and rebooted several times, shedding hundreds of workers along the way. As a result of dueling views among leaders about what an Apple car should be, it began as an electric vehicle that would compete against Tesla and morphed into a self-driving car to rival Google’s Waymo.

By the time of its death — Tuesday, when executives announced internally that the project was being killed and that many members of the team were being reassigned to work on artificial intelligence — Apple had burned more than $10bn on the project and the car had reverted to its beginnings as an electric vehicle with driving-assistance features rivaling Tesla’s, according to a half dozen people who worked on the project over the past decade.

The car project’s demise was a testament to the way Apple has struggled to develop new products in the years since Steve Jobs’s death in 2011. The effort had four different leaders and conducted multiple rounds of layoffs. But it festered and ultimately fizzled in large part because developing the software and algorithms for a car with autonomous driving features proved too difficult.

…Despite having a vote of confidence from Apple’s chief executive, members of the team knew they were working against harsh realities, according to the six employees familiar with the project. If it ever came to market, an Apple car was likely to cost at least $100,000 and still generate razor-thin profit compared with smartphones and earbuds. It would also arrive years after Tesla had dominated the market.

The company held some discussions with Elon Musk about acquiring Tesla, according to two people familiar with the talks. But ultimately, it decided that building its own car made more sense than buying and integrating another business.

«

My feeling is that Jony Ive-thinking infected the project too early: make a thing that offers the fewest affordances possible. Why have a steering wheel or accelerator if the car drives itself? Except the self-driving part isn’t as simple as drawing a keyboard on the LCDs beneath a touch-sensitive surface. It’s orders of magnitude more difficult. And people like having stuff to fiddle with in a car. Some dashboards are basically huge fidget spinners for passenger and driver alike.
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What we lost when Twitter became X • The New Yorker

Sheon Han worked at Twitter for a couple of years, and left with the Musk clearout:

»

Community can be a fuzzy, sentimental notion. But, on Twitter, communities are concrete. The platform’s recommendation algorithm is powered by “SimClusters,” a representation of overlapping communities that, according to the company, “range in size from a few thousand users for individual friend groups, to hundreds of millions of users for news or pop culture,” and are “anchored by a cluster of influential users.”

Pre-Musk Twitter leaned into fostering such communities; the month before the acquisition, an all-hands meeting featured a presentation from the company’s head of global K-pop and K-content partnerships, whose responsibilities involved promoting collaborations between Twitter and key players in the K-pop industry. But if a community can be fostered it can also fade. Every time a high-profile user leaves the platform in response to Musk’s antics, a critical node in the social graph is removed.

I wonder whether Musk understands that to undermine communities is to weaken the principal element that sustains the service. To monitor the health of a social-media platform, you can ask a question you might also ask of an indie-music venue: Is it still cool to hang out there? Since the takeover, for many people, it doesn’t “feel good” to be on Twitter. Friends are leaving, and tweeting feels like shouting into the void.

What does the future hold? It seems likely that users will still come for breaking news, and for expert threads, and for the memes recycled by dedicated joke accounts. Some weirdness will persist—and yet the weirdos will be gone. The platform will have lost its élan. Twitter’s laughably unserious name belied its seriousness. But X, with its overbearing name, may not prosper unless it undertakes the serious work of maintaining a platform on which people want to be.

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Gartner predicts search engine volume will drop 25% by 2026, due to AI chatbots and other virtual agents • Gartner

»

By 2026, traditional search engine volume will drop 25%, with search marketing losing market share to AI chatbots and other virtual agents, according to Gartner, Inc.

“Organic and paid search are vital channels for tech marketers seeking to reach awareness and demand generation goals,” said Alan Antin, Vice President Analyst at Gartner. “Generative AI (GenAI) solutions are becoming substitute answer engines, replacing user queries that previously may have been executed in traditional search engines. This will force companies to rethink their marketing channels strategy as GenAI becomes more embedded across all aspects of the enterprise.”

With GenAI driving down the cost of producing content, there is an impact around activities including keyword strategy and website domain authority scoring. Search engine algorithms will further value the quality of content to offset the sheer amount of AI-generated content, as content utility and quality still reigns supreme for success in organic search results.

There will also be a greater emphasis placed on watermarking and other means to authenticate high-value content. Government regulations across the globe are already holding companies accountable as they begin to require the identification of marketing content assets that AI creates. This will likely play a role in how search engines will display such digital content.

«

If we assume that this is correct, then for Google, that’s a near-existential collapse unless it can find some way to replace those searches (and their associated ad revenue) with AI-related ones.
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The leap day is only half of the leap year fun • rachelbythebay

“Rachel”:

»

Only half of the fun of a leap year happens on February 29th.

The rest of it happens in ten months, when a bunch more code finds out that it’s somehow day 366, and promptly flips out. Thus, instead of preparing to party, those people get to spend the day finding out why their device is being stupid all of the sudden.

So, if you got through today unscathed, but are somehow counting days in the year somewhere, you now have about 305 days to make sure you don’t have your own Zune bug buried in your own code.

One more random thought on the topic: some of today’s kids will be around to see what happens in 2100. That one will be all kinds of fun to see who paid attention to their rules and who just guessed based on a clean division by four.

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(The link to the Zune bug isn’t in the original; it was the first that came up on my search for “zune bug leap year”.)
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The Humane AI Pin worked better than I expected — until it didn’t • The Verge

Allison Johnson got a demo of the Pin at Mobile World Congress:

»

The AI Pin was genuinely impressive at times. There’s a vision feature that will use the camera to scan the scene in front of you when prompted, analyze what’s there, and describe it out loud. I stood in front of a Humane spokesperson as he tried out this feature, and frankly, the pin nailed it. It described Mobile World Congress as “an indoor event or exhibition with people walking around.” Easy enough.

But it also pointed out the name Qualcomm on the signage behind me, and obviously reading the badge around my neck, identified me as “a person wearing a lanyard from the The Verge.” One too many the’s, but pretty impressive when you consider I wasn’t standing all that close to the pin and the lighting was dim.

The gesture navigation was also impressive — more fluid and responsive than I thought it would be. I wasn’t allowed to put the pin on myself, and it’s hard to get into the right spot to project the laser onto your own hand since it’s really a single-user device. I tried. But a couple of Humane employees demoing the product, who obviously had lots of practice with it, navigated the projected menus quickly and easily just by tilting their hands and tapping two fingers together.

But the pin isn’t immune to the thing that gadgets often do: frustrate the hell out of you. Most of the AI is off-device, so there’s a solid few seconds of waiting for responses to your requests and questions — not helped by the convention center’s spotty connectivity. It also shut down on one occasion after briefly flashing a notice that it had overheated and needed to cool off. The employee demoing the pin for me said that this doesn’t happen very often, and that the continued use of the laser for demonstration purposes probably did it. I believe that, but still, this is a device meant to sit next to your chest and go with you into lots of different environments, presumably including warm ones. Not great!

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Germany to adopt 2060 target for net-negative greenhouse gas emissions • Clean Energy Wire

Julian Wettengel:

»

The German government is aiming to introduce a 2060 target for net-negative greenhouse gas emissions, as well as intermediate targets for technical carbon sinks, as key elements of its contribution to the Paris climate targets.

By the end of 2024, the ruling coalition wants to agree on a long-term strategy for negative emissions to help deal with residual emissions which are difficult or impossible to avoid. In a document outlining the upcoming strategy, the government says that limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5°C is “increasingly unlikely”, so negative emissions will also be necessary to lower the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere to limit the risks of severe and irreversible consequences for humans and ecosystems.

The strategy will set the targets, evaluate different carbon dioxide removal methods, and analyse economic incentives to help ramp up the necessary technologies. Experts say Germany could become a frontrunner on CO2 removal policy with the strategy.

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And just think how much sooner you could have done this, Germany, if you hadn’t prematurely shut down your nuclear power stations because one of your political parties worried irrationally that the country would be overwhelmed by a tsunami.
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A most wanted man: fugitive Wirecard COO Jan Marsalek exposed as decade-long GRU spy • The Insider

Roman Dobrokhotov, Christo Grozev, and Michael Weiss:

»

In the city of Lipetsk, 300 miles south of Moscow, stands a yellow chapel. Somewhat out of place next to a modern mirrored-window building, situated on the lip of a roundabout, the 200 year-old Church of Holy Transfiguration caters to the faithful of a large mining town that dates back to the era of Peter the Great. Inside, Father Konstantin Baiazov performs the customary rites and rituals for his flock. Dark and bearded, with a short, military-style buzz cut, the church’s archpriest’s routine is standard – services twice a day. Father Konstantin inherited the job — and the calling — from his own father, a revered Orthodox priest who, as local legend goes, had challenged the authority of the formidable KGB during Soviet times.

Konstantin, the father of three, used to travel abroad. He liked visiting Europe, and was particularly fond of Rome. However, he has not left Russia since September 2020. Since the fifth of that month, Father Baiazov’s official passport, numbered 763391844, has not belonged to a man of God. Rather, it belongs to someone who wears a different kind of white collar, looks a lot like him, and is the most wanted man in Europe.

For more than four years, Jan Marsalek, the former chief operating officer of the disgraced German financial services company Wirecard, has been living in Russia under this assumed identity, a year-long investigation by The Insider, Der Spiegel, ZDF, and Der Standard has uncovered.

…But Marsalek is not only an internationally accused swindler. He is also an agent of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service, and he has been for the last decade. More recently, since his defection to Russia, he has also done jobs for the FSB.

«

This is what is known in the news trade as a marmalade-dropper: something that makes you drop your toast in shock. It’s not short but it seems like a classic piece of recruitment, starting with a honeypot.
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The Twitter settings you should change now to block unwanted calls • Forbes

Barry Collins:

»

[Last] week, X (formerly Twitter) announced that audio and video calls are now available to everyone on the service. By default, this means anyone you follow can make an audio or video call to you.

X has automatically turned this on for everyone, there’s no opt-in. Suddenly, the mere act of following a person or brand gives them the right to phone you.

Some users may welcome this new feature, but many will be concerned about the potential for interruptions and unwanted calls. It’s not as if X has a sparkling record with dealing the bot accounts that Elon Musk once promised to eradicate.

If you want to ensure you’re not bothered by junk calls, here are the settings you need to change now.

To access the relevant settings, you’ll need to open the Twitter app on your smartphone. Now you should:

• Tap the envelope icon used to access your direct messages
• Click the settings cog at the top of the screen

You’ll now be presented with a series of options. You can simply block all video and audio calls outright by unchecking the box that says “enable audio and video calling.”

Beneath that are more nuanced options, which let you choose who can call you.

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How about “nobody”? “Nobody” works for me. (And of course they made it default-on. Ugh.)
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Klarna AI assistant handles two-thirds of customer service chats in its first month • Klarna Media Centre

»

Klarna today announced its AI assistant powered by OpenAI. Now live globally for 1 month, the numbers speak for themselves:

• The AI assistant has had 2.3 million conversations, two-thirds of Klarna’s customer service chats

• It is doing the equivalent work of 700 full-time agents

• It is on par with human agents in regard to customer satisfaction score

• It is more accurate in errand resolution, leading to a 25% drop in repeat inquiries

• Customers now resolve their errands in less than 2 mins compared to 11 mins previously

• It’s available in 23 markets, 24/7 and communicates in more than 35 languages

• It’s estimated to drive $40m in profit improvement to Klarna in 2024

Klarna has also seen massive improvement in communication with local immigrant and expat communities across all our markets thanks to the language support.

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Seems like there will be a lot of former customer service agents. There are millions with that job title in the US alone. Though I do wonder whether those conversations are truly as satisfying as dealing with humans. Maybe I can get my chatbot to talk to your chatbot and sort all this out? That’s the obvious next stage.
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Wikipedia no longer considers CNET a “generally reliable” source after AI scandal • Futurism

Maggie Harrison Dupré:

»

Remember last year, when we reported that the Red Ventures-owned CNET had been quietly publishing dozens of AI-generated articles that turned out to be filled with errors and plagiarism?

The revelation kicked off a fiery debate about the future of the media in the era of AI — as well as an equally passionate discussion among editors of Wikipedia, who needed to figure out how to treat CNET content going forward.

“CNET, usually regarded as an ordinary tech [reliable source], has started experimentally running AI-generated articles, which are riddled with errors,” a Wikipedia editor named David Gerard wrote to kick off a January 2023 discussion thread in Wikipedia’s Reliable Sources forum, where editors convene to decide whether a given source is trustworthy enough for editors to cite.

“So far the experiment is not going down well, as it shouldn’t,” Gerard continued, warning that “any of these articles that make it into a Wikipedia article need to be removed.”

Gerard’s admonition was posted on January 18, 2023, just a few days after our initial story about CNET’s use of AI. The comment launched a discussion that would ultimately result in CNET’s demotion from its once-strong Wikipedia rating of “generally reliable.”

It was a grim fall that one former Red Ventures employee told us could “put a huge dent in their SEO efforts,” and also a cautionary tale about the wide-ranging reputational effects that publishers should consider before moving into AI-generated content.

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Wikipedia generates a ton of SEO juice for referred sites, because Wikipedia itself is one of the most linked-to sites on the web. So yes, this is bad for Red Ventures.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The art of “coin clipping” was rife in the 17th century in Britain. Then a new king came to power, and things went a bit wild. CC-licensed photo by Portable Antiquities Scheme 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.

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

Laurie Anderson on making an AI chatbot of Lou Reed: ‘I’m totally, 100%, sadly addicted’ • The Guardian

Walter Marsh:

»

There’s a 2013 Black Mirror episode in which a young widow played by Hayley Atwell signs up to an online service that scrapes a person’s entire digital footprint to create a virtual simulation. She soon starts chatting online with her late husband (Domhnall Gleeson), before things inevitably get Black Mirror-y.

Laurie Anderson, the American avant garde artist, musician and thinker, hasn’t seen the episode but, in the last few years, has lived a version of it: growing hopelessly hooked on an AI text generator that emulates the vocabulary and style of her own longtime partner and collaborator, Velvet Underground co-founder Lou Reed, who died in 2013.

“People are like, ‘Wow, you were so prescient; I didn’t even know what you were talking about back then’,” she says on a video call from New York.

A new Anderson exhibition, I’ll Be Your Mirror, has just opened in Adelaide, where Anderson will be doing an In Conversation event via live stream on Wednesday 6 March. The last time Anderson was in Australia, in March 2020, she spent a week working with the University of Adelaide’s Australian Institute for Machine Learning. Before the pandemic forced her to catch one of the last flights home, they had been exploring language-based AI models and their artistic possibilities, drawing on Anderson’s body of written work.

In one experiment, they fed a vast cache of Reed’s writing, songs and interviews into the machine. A decade after his death, the resulting algorithm lets Anderson type in prompts before an AI Reed begins “riffing” written responses back to her, in prose and verse.

…“I mean, I really do not think I’m talking to my dead husband and writing songs with him – I really don’t. But people have styles, and they can be replicated.”

The results, Anderson says, can be hit and miss. “Three-quarters of it is just completely idiotic and stupid. And then maybe 15% is like, ‘Oh?’. And then the rest is pretty interesting. And that’s a pretty good ratio for writing, I think.”

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Oh, super, man. (They always struck me as the most unlikely rock pairing; but were utterly devoted. One must remember that people are not their music.)
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Apple orders ‘Neuromancer’ series based on William Gibson novel • Variety

Joe Otterson:

»

Apple TV+ has ordered a series adaptation of the William Gibson novel “Neuromancer,” Variety has learned.

The 10-episode series hails from co-creators Graham Roland and JD Dillard. Roland will also serve as showrunner, while Dillard will direct the pilot. Skydance Television will co-produce with [production company] Anonymous Content.

Per the official logline, the series “will follow a damaged, top-rung super-hacker named Case who is thrust into a web of digital espionage and high stakes crime with his partner Molly, a razor-girl assassin with mirrored eyes, aiming to pull a heist on a corporate dynasty with untold secrets.”

“We’re incredibly excited to be bringing this iconic property to Apple TV+,” said Roland and Dillard in a joint statement. “Since we became friends nearly ten years ago, we’ve looked for something to team up on, so this collaboration marks a dream come true. Neuromancer has inspired so much of the science fiction that’s come after it and we’re looking forward to bringing television audiences into Gibson’s definitive ‘cyberpunk’ world.”

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That’s either going to be amazing or terrible – it’s such a beloved novel (even though lots of people now just pay it lip service; there’s a consensual illusion of having read it) that the discourse will make or break it. Will have to do well to compete with Amazon’s excellent adaptation of The Peripheral, another Gibson novel.
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The Great Recoinage Of 1696 • The Britannia Coin Company

Edward Robertson:

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Today, the coins in circulation in Britain are simply a token of value, but our coins used to contain their value in silver or gold. In fact, it was once possible to take a file to your coins and take shavings of these precious metals – and many people did just that. 

‘Clippers’, as they were called, made great profits from this often highly organised crime. Coins were worn down with general use, so it wasn’t easy to identify a coin that had been purposely clipped.  

The practice left our coins in a terrible condition. In fact, back in the 17th century, Britain’s currency was in a state of emergency.  Various monarchs had made moves to solve Britain’s currency crisis. Having sold Dunkirk to Louis XIV, the last remaining piece of France that Britain owned, Charles II used some of the funds to demonetise the Commonwealth coins of 1649-60 and introduce new milled coins. 

But many of the old hammered coins, ripe for clipping, were still in circulation, and the new coins weren’t enough to deal with the nationwide problem. By the latter half of the 17th century, the state of Britain’s coinage was wreaking havoc all across the country.  

With the country’s coinage worth their original weight in precious metal, clipping entirely undermined Britain’s currency. Clipped currency was naturally disliked by merchants, while “heavy money”, coins that weighed as much as they should, was prized. Merchants would hoard heavy money and pass clipped coins along. Foreign merchants would only accept heavy money. Soon enough, almost all coins that circulated in Britain were clipped and there were few worthwhile coins left. 

There were serious punishments in place for clipping: the death penalty and branding with hot irons, to name a few. Many did indeed get condemned to these sentences. But the allure of clipping was simply too strong – some clippers managed to earn tantalising fortunes from the illegal practice. 

In 1689, King William III came to power. This was to be the king under whom the state of Britain’s coinage was entirely reformed. 

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You can guess what William ordered: proper milled coins (which would show any clipping). But you won’t guess how that led to outbreaks of serious diseases such as cholera and typhus. (Includes a cameo by, of course, Isaac Newton.)
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The business of winding down startups is booming • PitchBook

Rosie Bradbury:

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On the phone with a founder who recently wound down his seed-stage software startup, I asked him what his plan was next.

Having laid off all of his employees in autumn of last year, he was the last man standing: tasked with the thankless job of shutting down the company, returning capital, and dealing with tax documents.

“I suspect I’ll start another company again, but not for a while. I need a break,” he told me.

To handle the bureaucracy, the founder used Sunset, one of the companies that sprung up last year to respond to the burgeoning industry of failed startups.

In a sign of the times, such wind-down startups are growing rapidly. Sunset saw 9x quarter-over-quarter revenue growth and a 65% monthly customer growth rate between November 2023 and January 2024.

Competitor SimpleClosure, which closed a $4m seed round this month led by Infinity Ventures, has passed the $1m mark in annualized revenue and also recorded a monthly growth rate of over 50% in the same period. Since its public launch in September, the startup’s revenue has increased more than 14x.

Even larger startups are interested in the additional help. “We’ve now had multiple companies that have become customers that have raised tens of millions [in venture funding],” said Dori Yona, co-founder and CEO of SimpleClosure.

In early February, equity management platform Carta joined the bandwagon: CEO Henry Ward announced in a blog post a new startup shutdown service, Carta Conclusions. “[T]he work of dissolving a company is exceptionally unpleasant. It is also, by definition, zero-value to the founder, the company, and the world,” Ward wrote.

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Though logically once startups are going through a boom period again, these folk will be having a thin time of it. Will they eat themselves, or each other?
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A new media company is here – and ready to make some noise • Zeteo

Mehdi Hasan has gone solo (possibly not of his own accord) after time at various UK and US broadcasters, most recently MSNBC:

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To be clear: racism has been mainstreamed and normalized across the West. Donald Trump is about to usher in a new era of fascism in the United States. And the highest court in the world has said it is “plausible” that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. 

Nevertheless, most news organizations won’t touch the R-word, the F-word, or the G-word. They hide behind euphemisms and ‘both sides’ coverage. Far too many journalists hold back from speaking the truth because they don’t want to offend conservatives, or ‘sound biased,’ or risk losing their connections to the people in power. We have reached a point where I can’t help but be reminded of this line, often misattributed to George Orwell: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

I hope that Zeteo will be revolutionary in that sense, a vanguard of a new media movement. One which prioritizes speaking truth to power over securing access to power. 

Don’t get me wrong. I have spent more than two decades working at some of the biggest media organizations in the West – the BBC, Sky News, and NBC, among them – and I will forever be grateful for the opportunities, and the platforms that they gave me. There are hundreds of outstanding journalists still employed at those corporations. 

But the corporate media itself is in crisis. The business models are failing, audiences are declining, and public trust is in freefall. Countless crimes and abuses are being committed in plain sight, both at home and abroad, while countless news outlets distract us with fluff, gossip, and nonsense. 

Zeteo will be a new online platform for the kind of tough interviews and deep-dive monologues that I have become known for in recent years, but it will also be a home to new podcasts, newsletters, and social videos. We won’t hide our opinions – or our biases. But we will always tell you the truth.

And our business model is simple: you pay a little to get and support a lot. Six bucks a month for a paid subscription, via Substack, if you sign up for an annual plan.

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Straightforward enough. And it’s not like he’s trying to hire a bazillion people.
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Trump Media co-founders Andy Litinsky, Wes Moss sue to keep stake in company • The Washington Post

Drew Harwell:

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The co-founders of former president Donald Trump’s media company filed a lawsuit Wednesday, claiming that Trump and other leaders had schemed to deprive them of a stake in the company that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The case could complicate a long-delayed bid by Trump Media & Technology Group, owner of the social network Truth Social, to merge with a special purpose acquisition company called Digital World Acquisition and become a publicly traded company.

That merger deal, which could value Trump’s stake in the company at more than $3bn, would offer the former president a financial lifeline at a time when he is facing more than $454m in penalties from a civil fraud judgment this month in New York.

The case is one of three lawsuits filed this week that detail bitter recriminations among people key to the Trump company’s earliest days. The filings will probably serve as the opening salvo in what could be all-out legal warfare ahead of the March 22 shareholder vote on whether to go ahead with the merger.

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Another of those legal cases where you quietly wish that everyone could lose.
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Court orders maker of Pegasus spyware to hand over code to WhatsApp • The Guardian

Stephanie Kirchgaessner:

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NSO Group, the maker of one the world’s most sophisticated cyber weapons, has been ordered by a US court to hand its code for Pegasus and other spyware products to WhatsApp as part of the company’s ongoing litigation.

The decision by Judge Phyllis Hamilton is a major legal victory for WhatsApp, the Meta-owned communication app which has been embroiled in a lawsuit against NSO since 2019, when it alleged that the Israeli company’s spyware had been used against 1,400 WhatsApp users over a two-week period.

NSO’s Pegasus code, and code for other surveillance products it sells, is seen as a closely and highly sought state secret. NSO is closely regulated by the Israeli ministry of defense, which must review and approve the sale of all licences to foreign governments.

In reaching her decision, Hamilton considered a plea by NSO to excuse it of all its discovery obligations in the case due to “various US and Israeli restrictions”.

Ultimately, however, she sided with WhatsApp in ordering the company to produce “all relevant spyware” for a period of one year before and after the two weeks in which WhatsApp users were allegedly attacked: from 29 April 2018 to 10 May 2020. NSO must also give WhatsApp information “concerning the full functionality of the relevant spyware”.

Hamilton did, however, decide in NSO’s favor on a different matter: the company will not be forced at this time to divulge the names of its clients or information regarding its server architecture.

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Significant. Though will examination of the code just show that there’s a flaw in iOS which was exploited? Will it be the current code, or the code that was used in 2019?
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Peering through Lenovo’s transparent laptop into a sci-fi future • The Verge

Jon Porter:

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A year after flexing its R&D muscles with a rollable laptop that expanded its screen with a simple button push, Lenovo is back at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, with another somehow even more sci-fi concept device. This is the ThinkBook Transparent Display Laptop, a 17.3in notebook with a screen you can peer straight through.

The key draw is its bezel-less 17.3in MicroLED display, which offers up to 55% transparency when its pixels are set to black and turned off. But as its pixels light up, the display becomes less and less see-through, until eventually, you’re looking at a completely opaque white surface with a peak brightness of 1,000 nits.

Although the appeal of transparent screens in sci-fi films and TV shows is obvious (opaque screens are boring, actor’s faces are interesting), it’s a lot harder to put your finger on their practical uses in real life. How often do you actually want to see the empty desk behind your laptop? Would it be beneficial to be able to see your colleague sitting across from you, or would it be distracting?

One of Lenovo’s big ideas is that the form factor could be useful for digital artists, helping them to see the world behind the laptop’s screen while sketching it on the lower half of the laptop where the keyboard is (more on this later). “I am not a good artist,” Lenovo’s executive director of ThinkPad portfolio and product, Tom Butler, admits to me in an interview, “but I can bring something behind and I can trace it.” In the room we’re sitting in, that means pulling a bunch of sunflowers behind the laptop screen, but Butler pitches the idea of an architect being able to sit on location and sketch a building without taking their eyes off the environment in front of them. He even goes as far as to call the transparent laptop display a form of augmented reality.

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I take it from this that Butler has never met or spoken to an architect. Lenovo keeps on throwing out concept products – it’s a laptop with a keyboard that’s a tablet! It’s a see-through laptop! – but there’s no sign it has the faintest idea of who would want them. Complete the sentence: “I want a see-through screen because I–” And don’t make the thing until you can.
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Apple to ‘break new ground’ on AI, says CEO Tim Cook • 9to5 Mac

Zac Hall:

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Apple CEO Tim Cook has a message for Wall Street. He believes Apple will “break new ground” on generative AI this year. Cook’s latest AI hype comments came during Apple’s annual shareholders meeting on Wednesday.

During the meeting, a shareholder proposal to release a report on AI and ethics was voted down as expected.

This marks the Apple CEO’s second tease for major AI news out of the company so far this month. A few weeks ago, Cook promised Apple AI announcements coming later this year — likely WWDC in June. That’s when iOS 18 will be unveiled, which Mark Gurman at Bloomberg has frequently reported will focus on AI features.

Last autumn, Apple briefly mentioned generative AI when it introduced new autocorrect and text prediction features across its platforms.

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I’m not going to hold my breath for whatever Cook is being coy about. The autocorrect in iOS 17 is better than its predecessor, but the (default setting) desire to guess what your next typed word will be is maddening.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: your e-bike is not going to give you more exercise than a bike bike. The Electrek article interpreted the studies wrongly. Apologies: should have checked when my spidey sense tingled. Thanks to those who pointed this out.