Huge areas of land in London currently used for golf could be turned into housing, but who would have the political will?CC-licensed photo by It’s No Game on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Fore, possibly foive. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Why everything is becoming a game • Gurwinder
“Gurwinder”:
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Some people began to consider whether games could be used to make people do other things. In the Seventies, the American management consultant Charles Coonradt wondered why people work harder at games they pay to play than at work they’re paid to do. Like [BF] Skinner, Coonradt saw that a defining feature of compelling games was immediate rewards. Most of the feedback loops in employment — from salary payments to annual performance appraisals — were torturously long. So Coonradt proposed shortening them by introducing daily targets, points systems, and leaderboards. These conditioned reinforcers would transform work from a series of monthly slogs into daily status games, in which employees competed to fulfil the company’s goals.
In the 21st century, advances in technology made it easy to add game mechanics to almost any activity, and a new term — “gamification” — became a buzzword in Silicon Valley. By 2008, business consultants were giving presentations about leveraging fun to shape behavior, while futurists gave TED Talks speculating on the social implications of a gamified world. Underpinning every speech was a single, momentous question: if gamification could make people buy more stuff and work more hours, what else could it be used to make people do?
…back then gamification seemed to be mostly a force for good. In 2007, for instance, the online word quiz FreeRice gamified famine relief: for every correct answer, 10 grains of rice were given to the UN World Food Programme. Within six months it had already given away over 20 billion grains of rice.
Meanwhile, the SaaS company, Opower, had gamified going green. It turned eco-friendliness into a contest, showing each person how much energy they were using compared with their neighbors, and displaying a leaderboard of the top 10 least wasteful. The app has since saved over $3bn worth of energy. And then there was Foldit, a game developed by University of Washington biochemists who’d struggled for 15 years to discern the structure of an Aids virus protein. They reasoned that, if they turned the search into a game, someone might do what they couldn’t. It took gamers just 10 days.
…It all seemed so simple: if we could only create the right games, we could make humanity fitter, greener, kinder, smarter. We could repopulate forests and even cure cancers simply by making it fun.
Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Instead, gamification took a less wholesome route.
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Could olivine weathering work for carbon capture? • Works in Progress
Campbell Nilsen on the possibility of carbon sequestration using olivine, an inert material formed by a chemical reaction in the sea with carbon dioxide and silicate rocks:
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In 2007, however, the Dutch press began entertaining a rather more sensational idea: the carbon emissions of the Netherlands, and perhaps the world, could be effectively and cheaply offset by spreading huge amounts of ground olivine rock – a commonly found, mostly worthless silicate rock composed mainly of forsterite, Mg₂SiO₄ – onto the shores of the North Sea, producing mile after aesthetically intriguing mile of green sand beaches as a side effect. The author of the proposal, Olaf Schuiling, envisioned repurposing thousands of tankers and trucks to ship ground rock from mines in Norway, covering the coast of the North Sea with shimmering golden-green sand and saving the human race from the consequences of the Industrial Revolution.
It seemed too good to be true – so in 2009 the geoscientists Suzanne Hangx and Chris Spiers published a rebuttal. While it was true that ground forsterite has significant sequestration potential on paper (each tonne of forsterite ultimately sequestering 1.25 tonnes of CO₂), Hangx and Spiers concluded that the logistics of Schuiling’s proposal would make the project an unworkable boondoggle.
Start with transport requirements. For the past two decades, the Netherlands has emitted about 170 megatonnes of CO₂ a year on average; each year, around 136 megatonnes of olivine would be needed to sequester Dutch emissions in full. The nearest major olivine mine, Gusdal, is located in Norway, around a thousand kilometers away. Transporting the required olivine by sea with the most commonly-used cargo ship (the $150m Handysize vessel, with a capacity of about 25 kilotonnes) for example, would require over 100 trips a week – 5% of the world’s Handysize fleet – further clogging some of the world’s busiest waters for shipping. And that’s just for the Netherlands, which is only responsible for about 0.5% of the world’s carbon emissions.
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So it’s another unworkable idea: initially promising but can’t scale. Seems like we’ll have to rely on the atmosphere and the sea to deal with it.
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Oxford shuts down institute run by Elon Musk-backed philosopher • The Guardian
Nick Robins-Early:
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Oxford University this week shut down an academic institute run by one of Elon Musk’s favorite philosophers. The Future of Humanity Institute, dedicated to the long-termism movement and other Silicon Valley-endorsed ideas such as effective altruism, closed this week after 19 years of operation. Musk had donated £1m to the FHI in 2015 through a sister organization to research the threat of artificial intelligence. He had also boosted the ideas of its leader for nearly a decade on X, formerly Twitter.
The center was run by Nick Bostrom, a Swedish-born philosopher whose writings about the long-term threat of AI replacing humanity turned him into a celebrity figure among the tech elite and routinely landed him on lists of top global thinkers. Sam Altman of OpenAI, Bill Gates of Microsoft and Musk all wrote blurbs for his 2014 bestselling book Superintelligence.
“Worth reading Superintelligence by Bostrom. We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes,” Musk tweeted in 2014.
Bostrom resigned from Oxford following the institute’s closure, he said.
The closure of Bostrom’s centre is a further blow to the effective altruism and long-termism movements that the philosopher had spent decades championing, and which in recent years have become mired in scandals related to racism, sexual harassment and financial fraud. Bostrom himself issued an apology last year after a decades-old email surfaced in which he claimed “Blacks are more stupid than whites” and used the N-word.
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Hack attack! • The World of Edrith
“Edrith”:
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It began one Tuesday afternoon. I briefly checked my personal email to see several emails from Facebook saying that an unfamiliar person had logged in and changedmy password – and to click on a particular link to notify them if it wasn’t me. I was at work at the time, so I only had time to quickly do that. Facebook locked the account and that – for the time being – was that.
On my way home, I saw the same thing happening to LinkedIn. This time I was on it more quickly and was able to notify them, get in myself and change the password. I got a few more emails for sites I don’t use – Tictoc, Tinder, a couple of others – that suggested the hacker was trying out a number of popular sites to see if I was on them. That evening I spent about two hours going through all the accounts that had the same – or similar – password to the one that had been compromised, changing it and, where possible, turning on two-factor authentication. I submitted a request to Facebook to get my account back and thought I’d come off lightly.
Unfortunately, I’d forgotten something fairly crucial. My email account had the same password as Facebook.
…Shortly after this, the most disturbing bit happened. I received an email, from the hacker – but sent as if it was from myself to myself – which claimed he had implanted a Trojan into my computer and had control over. Unless I paid him $200 in bitcoin, he was threatening to delete files, reveal my personal information and online. The email was cleverly worded to get under skin and make you worry – clearly hoping people would pay up quickly to make them go away.
The one silver lining in all of this was that my phone seemed to be uncompromised. I was able to look up what was happening and found that this was a common scam: the most likely circumstance was that the hacker wasn’t actually in my computer, but just pretending to be.
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One big change in the past decade is that your computer might have a virus, but your phone won’t. But in the name of everything, don’t use the same passwords for important sites. And turn on 2FA.
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Doordarshan anchor faints during live news reading of heatwave updates: “teleprompter faded away” • NDTV
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Parts of India are being seared under a heatwave with maximum temperatures ranging from 40 degrees celsius to 46 degrees celsius in many areas. Amid the intense heat, a TV anchor recently fainted while reading heatwave updates live on air as her blood pressure suddenly fell. Lopamudra Sinha, an anchor with the Kolkata branch of Doordarshan, could be heard slurring while reading out the information before she blacked out. “The teleprompter faded away and I blacked out… I collapsed on my chair,” she said in a video shared on her Facebook page.
Ms Sinha said she fainted “due to intense heat and because her blood pressure plummeted suddenly”. The anchor also said that due to some snag in the cooling system, there was extreme heat inside the studio.
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Obviously, it’s very hot in a TV studio. But India is experiencing a heatwave which is even interfering with the election. We overlook extremes of climate when they’re far enough away.
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Apple reportedly stops production of FineWoven accessories • MacRumors
Hartley Charlton:
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In a post on X (formerly Twitter), [news leaker] Kosutami explained that Apple has stopped production of FineWoven accessories due to its poor durability. The company may move to another non-leather material for its premium accessories in the future.
Kosutami has revealed accurate information about FineWoven accessories in the past. The leaker unveiled Apple’s plans to introduce new Apple Watch bands made of a “woven fabric material” over a month before they debuted, as well as matching iPhone cases. Kosutami also revealed the very first images of FineWoven accessories shortly before the event in which they were officially announced. MacRumors understands the source of this latest information regarding the cessation of production to be the same as these previous FineWoven rumors that were ultimately accurate, so it should be taken seriously until we know more.
Apple stopped selling leather accessories in September last year, replacing them with a more environmentally friendly “FineWoven” material that the company describes as “luxurious and durable microtwill” made from 68% post-consumer recycled polyester. FineWoven iPhone cases are priced at $59, MagSafe Wallets at $59, AirTag holders at $35, and Apple Watch bands at $99.
Accessories made of the material have been very poorly received by customers, citing poor durability and disappointing quality. FineWoven accessories in new color options were noticeably absent from Apple’s spring refresh. If Apple has indeed stopped production of FineWoven accessories, it may be some time before the company’s existing stock inventory begins to noticeably deplete.
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Cardboard next?
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Newsweek is making generative AI a fixture in its newsroom • Nieman Journalism Lab
Andrew Deck:
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If you scroll down to the end of almost any article on Newsweek.com right now — past the headline, the article copy, several programmatic ads, and the author bio — you’ll find a short note. “To read how Newsweek uses AI, click here,” reads the text box. The link leads to Newsweek’s editorial standards page, where several paragraphs now outline how generative AI tools are being folded into the publication’s editorial process.
The disclosure is just one signal of a larger experiment with AI-assisted editorial work happening right now at the 90-year-old brand.
Newsweek first announced changes to its AI policy in September 2023, just as heated debates over early AI adoption in journalism began to boil over. Sports Illustrated and Gizmodo were among several publications criticized late last year for their shoddy use of generative AI tools to write articles. Publications, like Wired, responded by largely denouncing tools like ChatGPT in editorial work, promising to never publish text written or edited by AI.
Newsweek, meanwhile, has joined competitors like Business Insider in taking a relatively bullish view on the technology. “Newsweek believes that AI tools can help journalists work faster, smarter and more creatively,” reads the updated standards page. “We firmly believe that soon all journalists will be working with AI in some form and we want our newsroom to embrace these technologies as quickly as is possible in an ethical way.”
Six months into this new policy, staff writers and editors have not been required to use AI, but they are being encouraged to experiment with it to boost speed and efficiency. Newsweek has also rolled out a custom-built AI video production tool and is currently on a hiring spree for a new AI-focused Live News desk to cover breaking stories.
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Question is whether AI in this context is like a word processor, or like a cheaper replacement.
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The Golf Belt: how sustainable development on London’s golf courses can help address the housing crisis
Russell Curtis:
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Britain has a lot of golf courses: over a quarter of Europe’s courses are located within the United Kingdom. That’s two-and-a-half times that of the next most numerous country: 1,800 compared to Germany’s 731 – or one course for every 37,000 people, with each German course serving 113,500.
Imagine a typical golf course and your mind might conjure up images of rolling, emerald fairways of the home counties or rugged, windswept heathlands of the Scottish coast. Yet it might be surprising to learn that, despite London taking up around 0.65% of the UK’s total area, over 1 in 20 of the country’s golf courses lie within it. There are no fewer than 94 active golf courses (excluding driving ranges and courses with fewer than 9 holes) located within the Greater London area, together covering an area of 4,331 hectares. 21 of London’s boroughs have at least one course; some, such as Enfield, have seven.
For regular players, golf represents an opportunity to spend time outside with friends and colleagues, taking in the fresh air and exercise. Yet given the capital’s myriad constraints on development, it’s surely a stretch to claim that a leisure activity enjoyed by around 1% of the national population (a figure which is likely far less when only the population of London is taken into account) requires such huge tracts of land within a city which is in such dire need of homes?
Below I have set out how I believe that limited, sensitive, development of a small proportion of London’s golf courses could make a significant impact on meeting the city’s housing need as well enhancing biodiversity and opening up vital green space for the benefit of all Londoners.
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Putting this one right up there in the “bold ideas” category. Though for ownership, quite a few are owned by councils.
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Post News: the end
Noam Bardin, “Chief Poster”:
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It is with a heavy heart that I share this sad news with you. Despite how much we’ve accomplished together, we will be shutting down Post News within the next few weeks.
We have done many great things together. We built a toxicity-free community, a platform where Publishers engage, and an app that validated many theories around Micropayments and consumers’ willingness to purchase individual articles. We even managed to cultivate a phenomenal tipping ecosystem for creators and commenters.
But, at the end of the day, our service is not growing fast enough to become a real business or a significant platform.
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Exit yet another would-be Twitter rival. Wonder if some of the Mastodon servers will shut down due to lack of funding and growth of traffic.
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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 