Claims by Google’s DeepMind to have discovered millions of new crystal forms don’t stand up to closer examination, scientists say. CC-licensed photo by Paul Hudson on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Crystal clear. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Millions are using TikTok parent ByteDance’s homework app Gauth • Forbes
Emily Baker-White:
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Gauth AI, an app that uses generative AI to help school-aged children do their homework, has surged in popularity in recent months, skyrocketing to #2 in the Education category in both Apple and Google’s app stores. Owned by ByteDance, it has been downloaded more than 10 million times on Android phones alone, and until recently, its website boasted that it had supported more than 200 million students. But its Chinese ownership could pose problems as TikTok — the most famous app owned by ByteDance — fights for its life against lawmakers in Washington D.C.
Unlike TikTok, Gauth is an educational app, designed specifically to help users with their homework. To use it, you take a photo of a homework assignment — like a sheet of math problems, for example — and watch as AI solves the problems for you. Upon downloading the app, the first prompt you receive is a request for permission to use the camera. The app appears similar to a China-based ByteDance app known as “Hippo Learning.”
In addition to AI help, Gauth also offers a paid “Plus” version, which connects students with tutors in a given subject area. “We have fifty thousands of experts and dedicated experts ready to help you 24/7 with multiple subjects,” says the app description in the Apple app store. Gauth solicits tutors through a website, gauthexpert.com, where it offers payment of up to $1500 per month for tutors with expertise in math, chemistry, physics, or biology. ByteDance spokesperson Mike Hughes told Forbes that tutors are based in the United States, India, the Philippines and portions of Africa.
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It has an LLM (of course!) but it’s powered by OpenAI’s chatbot. With all of this, though, I can’t help always thinking of the Philip K Dick story War Game.
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TikTok’s unwritten rules for Israel-Gaza ads sparked internal outrage • Forbes
Alexandra S. Levine:
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Among a number of ads created by the Hostage and Missing Families Forum, the leading volunteer organization campaigning for the release of those taken captive, was one that showed 12-year-old Noam Avigdori boogying to an electronic dance music track. Another featured 47-year-old Elad Katzir cheering in a stadium filled with green-clad sports fans.
They both ended the same way, with text saying: “On October 7th, hundreds of innocent civilians were taken hostage by Hamas. Bring them home now.”
But TikTok rejected the advertisements throughout October, according to Dorit Gvili, an ad executive who oversaw social media for the Forum. TikTok top brass previously considered ads about hostages to be against company policy, according to internal material from October obtained by Forbes and two TikTok sources familiar with the matter.
In the months that followed, local TikTok representatives explained in conversations with the Forum that their various ads had been declined because they included visuals that were “triggering,” text that was “triggering,” mentions of Hamas (prohibited under TikTok’s advertising rules related to terrorism), and explicit references to the hostages, Gvili said. The group could compromise on the first three pieces, she added, but not the final one. “You cannot talk about the hostages without using the word hostages,” Gvili explained.
Ads depicting the war’s growing and devastating toll in Gaza, meanwhile, had been running regularly across the platform since the earliest weeks of the conflict, TikTok’s Ad Library for Europe shows. They included videos from humanitarian relief groups like the United Nations World Food Programme, Human Appeal and Save the Children—showing hospitals in chaos, smoke rising from bombs and buildings reduced to rubble—as well as one-offs from unknown users who’d paid to run ads, many of them graphic.
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The disparity thus leading to big ructions inside the company: “The problem hit especially close to home for employees in Israel because a beloved TikTok department head there has a sibling among the kidnapped, they said.”
Truly this conflict is cursed: everyone it touches is sadder than before – at best.
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Tenth consecutive monthly heat record alarms and confounds climate scientists • The Guardian
Jonathan Watts:
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Another month, another global heat record that has left climate scientists scratching their heads and hoping this is an El Niño-related hangover rather than a symptom of worse-than-expected planetary health.
Global surface temperatures in March were 0.1ºC higher than the previous record for the month, set in 2016, and 1.68ºC higher than the pre-industrial average, according to data released on Tuesday by the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
This is the 10th consecutive monthly record in a warming phase that has shattered all previous records. Over the past 12 months, average global temperatures have been 1.58C above pre-industrial levels.
This, at least temporarily, exceeds the 1.5ºC benchmark set as a target in the Paris climate agreement but that landmark deal will not be considered breached unless this trend continues on a decadal scale.
The UK Met Office previously predicted the 1.5ºC goal could be surpassed over the period of a year and other leading climate monitoring organisations said the current levels of heating remain within the bounds anticipated by computer models.
However the sharp increase in temperatures over the past year has surprised many scientists, and prompted concerns about a possible acceleration of heating.
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Scientists are very worried about the acceleration possibility: that could cause all sorts of feedback loops. Or indeed we might be seeing those loops getting underway. The climate news is not good.
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The backdoor in xz-utils has been removed (CVE-2024-3094). · tukaani-project/xz@e93e13c · GitHub
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While the backdoor was inactive (and thus harmless) without inserting a small trigger code into the build system when the source package was created, it’s good to remove this anyway:
• The executable payloads were embedded as binary blobs in the test files. This was a blatant violation of the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
• On machines that see lots bots poking at the SSH port, the backdoor noticeably increased CPU load, resulting in degraded user experience and thus overwhelmingly negative user feedback.
• The maintainer who added the backdoor has disappeared.
• Backdoors are bad for security.
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I particularly like the last two for their bluntness. But the xz-utils saga (which happened last week, so lost to this collection) does raise the very obvious question, still unanswered: where else might this be happening? Or have happened? If one state actor has been foiled, might others from the same state, or a different one, be or have been, at work?
She stole $54m from her town. Then something unexpected happened • POLITICO
Kathy Gilsinan:
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It was the spring of 2012 and nearly three weeks had passed since police had marched Rita Crundwell, the town’s well-liked comptroller, out the door of that very same building in handcuffs. In that time, the magnitude of her betrayal had grown clearer, and more dumbfounding: at first the feds believed she’d “misappropriated” $30m from the coffers of this small town of about 16,000, but now the figure was close to $54m. The place previously best-known as Ronald Reagan’s childhood home, site of the Petunia Festival and the Catfish Capital of Illinois, was now also the home of the largest municipal fraud in United States history.
What had so enraged the citizens of Dixon was that until late 2011, no one seemed to notice this theft – for some 20 years. Dixon’s finances had not only passed annual independent audits but also audit reviews by the state of Illinois. The bank that handled city accounts had never flagged anything amiss.
Yes, the city had struggled financially, then-Mayor Jim Burke acknowledged at the press conference announcing Crundwell’s arrest in April 2012, but Dixon was no different than many other communities around the country: Declining tax revenues, tardy payments from the state, rising health care costs and infrastructure investments all added up, he said, to a “plausible reason for the financial problems our community is facing.”
Burke did not note that all of this had happened as Crundwell herself was building a nationally renowned horse-breeding empire, racking up awards and riches while only making about $80,000 a year in her day job. Burke vowed to help the FBI investigate and recover the assets. He did not take questions [at a public meeting].
Crundwell’s arrest itself had begun to answer many of the more basic questions: why city budgets had faced such steep cuts for years; why some municipal vehicles had holes in the floors and the ambulance spewed smoke; why sidewalks were crumbling and pipes disrepaired to the degree that, within a few years after Crundwell’s arrest, a sinkhole would open up on West 7th Street like some kind of ham-handed metaphor for disappearing taxpayer dollars.
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Absolutely stereotypically, Crundwell was caught because she went on holiday, and someone else came in to look after the money. A fun tale of bad administration. (Consider whether the same could happen in your organisation. Some make the accounts people take enforced holidays for just this reason.)
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Microsoft to separate Teams and Office globally amid antitrust scrutiny • Reuters
Foo Yun Chee:
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Microsoft will sell its chat and video app Teams separately from its Office product globally, the US tech giant said on Monday, six months after it unbundled the two products in Europe in a bid to avert a possible EU antitrust fine.
The European Commission has been investigating Microsoft’s tying of Office and Teams since a 2020 complaint by Salesforce-owned competing workspace messaging app Slack.
Teams, which was added to Office 365 in 2017 for free, subsequently replaced Skype for Business and became popular during the pandemic due in part to its video conferencing. Rivals, however, said packaging the products together gives Microsoft an unfair advantage. The company started selling the two products separately in the EU and Switzerland on Oct. 1 last year.
“To ensure clarity for our customers, we are extending the steps we took last year to unbundle Teams from M365 and O365 in the European Economic Area and Switzerland to customers globally,” a Microsoft spokesperson said. “Doing so also addresses feedback from the European Commission by providing multinational companies more flexibility when they want to standardise their purchasing across geographies.”
After the Justice Department sued Microsoft in 1998 for using its dominance of the Windows platform to stifle competition from rival web browsers, the company eventually made concessions that loosened its control of what software computer manufacturers could install on their products.
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As Benedict Evans observed, even if this is the desired outcome, it’s taken far too long: seven years since the integration, which exploited Microsoft’s dominance in Office, and was obviously an anti-competitive move against Slack. A truly competent regulator would spot that move and be straight on the phone to Microsoft threatening big fines or demanding a standstill.
Still, at least it’s preempted a US Department of Justice lawsuit in 2030.
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Insurers are spying on your home from the sky • WSJ
Jean Eaglesham:
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Cindy Picos was dropped by her home insurer last month. The reason: aerial photos of her roof, which her insurer refused to let her see.
“I thought they had the wrong house,” said Picos, who lives in northern California. “Our roof is in fine shape.”
Her insurer said its images showed her roof had “lived its life expectancy.” Picos paid for an independent inspection that found the roof had another 10 years of life. Her insurer declined to reconsider its decision.
Across the US, insurance companies are using aerial images of homes as a tool to ditch properties seen as higher risk.
Nearly every building in the country is being photographed, often without the owner’s knowledge. Companies are deploying drones, manned airplanes and high-altitude balloons to take images of properties. No place is shielded: the industry-funded Geospatial Insurance Consortium has an airplane imagery program it says covers 99% of the US population.
The array of photos is being sorted by computer models to spy out underwriting no-nos, such as damaged roof shingles, yard debris, overhanging tree branches and undeclared swimming pools or trampolines. The red-flagged images are providing insurers with ammunition for nonrenewal notices nationwide.
“We’ve seen a dramatic increase across the country in reports from consumers who’ve been dropped by their insurers on the basis of an aerial image,” said Amy Bach, executive director of consumer group United Policyholders.
The increasingly sophisticated use of flyby photos comes as home insurers nationwide scramble to “derisk” their property portfolios, dropping less-than-perfect homes in an effort to recover from big underwriting losses.
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You’re thinking: examining those photos must take a huge amount of time, surely? And yet there’s no mention of machine learning being used (which I expected). Can’t be far behind, though. Could it happen in Europe (or the UK)? Would GDPR and its post-Brexit version block it? I don’t know.
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Artificial intelligence driving materials discovery? Perspective on the article: scaling deep learning for materials discovery • Chemistry of Materials
Anthony Cheetham and Ram Seshadri:
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The recent report from a group of scientists at Google who employ a combination of existing data sets, high-throughput density functional theory calculations of structural stability, and the tools of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to propose new compounds is an exciting advance. We examine the claims of this work here, unfortunately finding scant evidence for compounds that fulfill the trifecta of novelty, credibility, and utility.
While the methods adopted in this work appear to hold promise, there is clearly a great need to incorporate domain expertise in materials synthesis and crystallography.
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The back reference here is to a Google DeepMind claim from November 2023 that it had an AI tool that “helped discover 2.2 million new crystals”. The researchers examined the first 250 and found lots of bizarre misdescriptions, plus “a recurrent issue that is found throughout the GNoME database, which is that many of the entries are based upon the ordering of metal ions that are unlikely to be ordered in the real world”.
Stochastic parrots.
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The Up-Goer Five Text Editor: explain hard concepts using only the top 1,000 words
Well, this is my attempt to explain the three body problem using only the top thousand – er, the top ten hundred most-used words. I was quite surprised that the last word was allowed. See how you get on explaining things as if to simpletons.
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‘3 Body Problem’: what social media reaction says about China • The New York Times
Li Yuan:
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The Netflix series portrays China as a scientific giant, speaking to the universe. Mr. Liu’s vast imagination and his probing of the nature of good and evil are key to his books’ success.
He doesn’t seem to view China or even the Earth as exceptional. In a television interview in 2022, he said that the crises described in any science fiction novel are shared “by humanity as a whole.” He added, “From the perspective of the universe, we are all part of a whole.”
The Netflix series adopted a Chinese word – “Santi,” or three body – as the alien’s name. The book’s English translation uses “Trisolarian.” When was the last time that a Chinese word made it into the global pop culture? But few people celebrated that on Chinese social media.
Instead, many comments zeroed in on how unflatteringly China is portrayed and how few Chinese elements are included in the series. Netflix isn’t available in China but viewers flocked to see pirated versions of “3 Body Problem.”
The story in the Netflix version takes place mainly in Britain, not Beijing. The actors are racially diverse, including Latino, Black, white, South Asian and Chinese. Some comments call the diverse casting “American-style political correctness,” while others question why the series casts ethnic Chinese only as villains or poor people, which is not true.
If their main complaint about the Netflix adaptation is that the creators took too much liberty with the plot and the main characters, their other major complaint is that the opening scene about the Cultural Revolution is too truthful or too violent.
Some doubted the necessity of mentioning the political event at all. Others accused the show of exaggerating the level of violence in the struggle session [shown at the start of the first episode, showing a professor being beaten and killed in front of a crowd during the Cultural Revolution].
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Rather like the events of Tiananmen Square, there’s a desire not to remember the brutal acts that have led to the present day. Everything is techno-utopian, as the writer says.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 
Donald trump explains everything using only the top 5 hundred words. 10 hundred – luxury.