Book sales generally follower a power law – a small number of authors are very successful, but most aren’t. CC-licensed photo by Shou-Hui Wang on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Cont’d p94. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Inside TSMC’s Phoenix, Arizona expansion struggles • Rest of World
Viola Zhou:
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The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company; Taiwanese TSMC veterans described their American counterparts as lacking the kind of dedication and obedience they believe to be the foundation of their company’s world-leading success.
Some 2,200 employees now work at TSMC’s Arizona plant, with about half of them deployed from Taiwan. While tension at the plant simmers, TSMC has been ramping up its investments, recently securing billions of dollars in grants and loans from the US government. Whether or not the plant succeeds in making cutting-edge chips with the same speed, efficiency, and profitability as facilities in Asia remains to be seen, with many skeptical about a US workforce under TSMC’s army-like command system. “[The company] tried to make Arizona Taiwanese,” G. Dan Hutcheson, a semiconductor industry analyst at the research firm TechInsights, told Rest of World. “And it’s just not going to work.”
TSMC did not respond to a detailed list of questions from Rest of World.
…But both American and Taiwanese engineers said that the training for new hires was largely insufficient. Managers excluded Americans from higher-level meetings conducted in Mandarin, according to one ex-TSMC engineer. Some of the Americans said that they rarely had a chance to handle problems themselves, and were mostly tasked with observing. “It’s like math in school,” Bruce said. “You can watch your teacher do 500 practice problems on the chalkboard, but if you don’t do some problems on your own, you are going to fail the test.”
As training went on, tensions mounted. US engineers told Rest of World that some Taiwanese male engineers had calendars with bikini models on their desks and occasionally shared sexual memes in group chats. A female American colleague, according to an American trainee who witnessed the conversation, asked a Taiwanese engineer to remove his computer wallpaper depicting a bikini model. One former American engineer said some local co-workers referred to him as a “white breeding pig,” implying he was only in Taiwan to sleep with local women. At a meeting, a manager said Americans were less desirable than Taiwanese and Indian workers, according to people who saw leaked notes, which circulated among trainees.
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The most amazing culture clash, which also points to some of why the US relies on Taiwan and China to do everything.
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AI is poisoning Reddit to promote products and game Google with ‘parasite SEO’ • 404 Media
Jason Koebler:
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For years, people who have found Google search frustrating have been adding “Reddit” to the end of their search queries. This practice is so common that Google even acknowledged the phenomenon in a post announcing that it will be scraping Reddit posts to train its AI. And so, naturally, there are now services that will poison Reddit threads with AI-generated posts designed to promote products.
A service called ReplyGuy advertises itself as “the AI that plugs your product on Reddit” and which automatically “mentions your product in conversations naturally.” Examples on the site show two different Redditors being controlled by AI posting plugs for a text-to-voice product called “AnySpeech” and a bot writing a long comment about a debt consolidation program called Debt Freedom Now.
A video demo shows a dashboard where a user adds the name of their company and URL they want to direct users to. It then auto-suggests keywords that “help the bot know what types of subreddits and tweets to look for and when to respond.” Moments later, the dashboard shows how Reply Guy is “already in the responses” of the comments section of different Reddit posts. “Many of our responses will get lots of upvotes and will be well-liked.”
The creator of the company, Alexander Belogubov, has also posted screenshots of other bot-controlled accounts responding all over Reddit. Begolubov has another startup called “Stealth Marketing” that also seeks to manipulate the platform by promising to “turn Reddit into a steady stream of customers for your startup.” Belogubov did not respond to requests for comment.
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SEO, the perfect poison.
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California just went 9.25 hours using only renewable energy • Fast Company
Adele Peters:
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California first hit the milestone of running on 100% clean power in 2022, but it was only temporary. “In past years, it was only for one or two days, and not consecutively,” says Mark Jacobson, a Stanford professor who has been posting updates about the state’s grid each day on X. “And all of a sudden we’re having now 37 of the last 45 days, and the last nine days straight.”
There’s a caveat: California also has natural gas plants that keep running at low levels in case backup power is needed. Even when the state is producing more than enough renewable energy to cover all of its needs, it’s still exporting some gas power to other states. But it also exports solar power, helping make other grids cleaner. And it keeps getting closer to its overall goals for renewable energy. By 2030, the state plans to run on 60% renewable energy. It’s likely to hit that goal early. By 2045, the state plans to run on 100% zero-carbon energy, and Jacobson argues it’s technically possible to also accomplish that goal faster.
The state now has nearly 47 gigawatts of solar installed, both on rooftops and in sprawling, utility-scale solar farms. Rooftop solar helps reduce demand from the grid, since homeowners can use that power directly. And on sunny April days, when it usually isn’t hot enough to need air conditioning, renewables on the grid can produce more electricity than Californians need.
…The state has added a significant amount of battery storage in the last few years. California is now home to the world’s largest lithium-ion battery storage system for the grid, with more storage projects opening soon. Last Sunday, the state stored a record amount of power [6GW].
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Apple announces ‘Let Loose’ event on May 7 amid rumours of new iPads • MacRumors
Joe Rossignol:
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Apple is expected to announce new iPad Pro and iPad Air models, along with updated Apple Pencil and Magic Keyboard accessories.
Here is everything that has been rumoured:
• Two new iPad Pro models with the M3 chip, OLED displays, a thinner enclosure, thinner bezels, a matte screen option, a landscape-oriented front camera, other design changes, and possibly MagSafe wireless charging
• Two new iPad Air models with the M2 chip and a landscape-oriented front camera, including a first-ever 12.9-inch iPad Air with a mini-LED display
• A new Magic Keyboard for the iPad Pro with an aluminum enclosure, larger trackpad, and other design tweaks
• A new Apple Pencil, which may have a new “squeeze” gesture for certain actions and support visionOS eventuallyApple has not released any new iPads since late 2022, so this event has been a long time coming.
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Correction: a VERY long time coming. Samsung (which makes OLED panels) introduced its first OLED tablet in 2014. Yes, ten years ago.
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Apple cuts 2024 & 2025 Vision Pro shipment forecasts, unfavorable to MR headset, Pancake, and Micro OLED trends • Medium
Ming-Chi Kuo:
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My latest survey is as follows:
• Apple has cut its 2024 Vision Pro shipments to 400–450k units (vs. market consensus of 700–800k units or more).
• Apple cut orders before launching Vision Pro in non-US markets, which means that demand in the US market has fallen sharply beyond expectations, making Apple take a conservative view of demand in non-US markets.
• Apple is reviewing and adjusting its head-mounted display (HMD) product roadmap, so there may be no new Vision Pro model in 2025 (the previous expectation was that there would be a new model in 2H25/4Q25). Apple now expects Vision Pro shipments to decline YoY in 2025.
The weak-than-expected Vision Pro demand means that the following new trends are likely to be below market expectations.
• MR [mixed reality] headset devices. The challenge for Vision Pro is to address the lack of key applications, price, and headset comfort without sacrificing the see-through user experience. In contrast, VR is also a niche market, but at least there are proven successful applications (games), and trend visibility is better than MR.
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There’s more, but those are the principal ones. Half as much as forecast (by the market). At a guess, Apple thought there would be more enthusiasm too, but got the developer story completely wrong, and has also got the content story terribly wrong too.
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Taser company Axon is selling AI that turns body cam audio into police reports • Forbes
Thomas Brewster:
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American cops are increasingly leaning on artificial intelligence to assist with policing, from AI models that analyze criminal patterns to drones that can fly themselves. Now, a GPT-4 powered AI can do one of their less appealing jobs: filing paperwork.
On Tuesday, Axon, the $22bn police contractor best known for manufacturing the Taser electric weapon, launched a new tool called Draft One that it says can transcribe audio from body cameras and automatically turn it into a police report. Cops can then review the document to ensure accuracy, Axon CEO Rick Smith told Forbes. Axon claims one early tester of the tool, Fort Collins Colorado Police Department, has seen an 82% decrease in time spent writing reports. “If an officer spends half their day reporting, and we can cut that in half, we have an opportunity to potentially free up 25% of an officer’s time to be back out policing,” Smith said.
These reports, though, are often used as evidence in criminal trials, and critics are concerned that relying on AI could put people at risk by depending on language models that are known to “hallucinate,” or make things up, as well as display racial bias, either blatantly or unconsciously.
“It’s kind of a nightmare,” said Dave Maass, surveillance technologies investigations director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Police, who aren’t specialists in AI, and aren’t going to be specialists in recognizing the problems with AI, are going to use these systems to generate language that could affect millions of people in their involvement with the criminal justice system. What could go wrong?”
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You know that the answer is “everything”, which is going to mean that the bodycam videos will have to be evidence, and that’s going to be a whole new mess.
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The world’s electric car fleet continues to grow strongly, with 2024 sales set to reach 17 million • International Energy Authority
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Despite near-term challenges in some markets, based on today’s policy settings, almost 1 in 3 cars on the roads in China by 2030 is set to be electric, and almost 1 in 5 in both United States and European Union.
More than one in five cars sold worldwide this year is expected to be electric, with surging demand projected over the next decade set to remake the global auto industry and significantly reduce oil consumption for road transport, according to the new edition of the IEA’s annual Global EV Outlook.
The latest Outlook, published today, finds that global electric car sales are set to remain robust in 2024, reaching around 17m by the end of the year. In the first quarter, sales grew by about 25% compared with the same period in 2023 – similar to the growth rate seen in the same period a year earlier, but from a larger base. The number of electric cars sold globally in the first three months of this year is roughly equivalent to the number sold in all of 2020.
In 2024, electric cars sales in China are projected to leap to about 10m, accounting for about 45% of all car sales in the country. In the United States, roughly one in nine cars sold are projected to be electric – while in Europe, despite a generally weak outlook for passenger car sales and the phase-out of subsidies in some countries, electric cars are still set to represent about one in four cars sold.
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No one buys books • The Elysian
Elle Griffin:
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In 2022, Penguin Random House wanted to buy Simon & Schuster. The two publishing houses made up 37% and 11% of the market share, according to the filing, and combined they would have condensed the Big Five publishing houses into the Big Four. But the government intervened and brought an antitrust case against Penguin to determine whether that would create a monopoly.
The judge ultimately ruled that the merger would create a monopoly and blocked the $2.2bn purchase. But during the trial, the head of every major publishing house and literary agency got up on the stand to speak about the publishing industry and give numbers, giving us an eye-opening account of the industry from the inside. All of the transcripts from the trial were compiled into a book called The Trial. It took me a year to read, but I’ve finally summarized my findings and pulled out all the compelling highlights.
I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Brittany Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).
But let’s dig into everything they said in detail.
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Fascinating read. Book sales by author really follow a power law. Advances, though, don’t.
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When Facebook bans the news • Matt Pearce
Matt Pearce:
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Meta banned journalism from its services in Canada in 2023 when the government passed a law in 2023 saying the Meta and Google had to pay for journalism. Google decided to settle up and fork over about $100m; Meta didn’t. The pre-print studied the impact on Canadian users and news outlets, and some of the findings were interesting:
Our key findings:
– Even six months after the ban, a large number of Canadians (approximately 33%) still say they use Meta’s flagship social media platforms Facebook or Instagram for access to Canadian political and current affairs information.
– The Facebook Pages of national news outlets lost approximately 64% of their Facebook engagement following the end of news availability for Canadian users. Local news outlets lost approximately 85%. Almost half of all local news outlets stopped posting on Facebook entirely in the four months following the ban.
– Engagement with politically relevant pages and groups has remained unchanged since the ban, suggesting politically-oriented users have not reduced their Facebook usage.
– Members of politically-oriented Facebook Groups have circumvented the ban by posting screenshots of Canadian news articles. Although there are fewer screenshots of news post-ban than there were links to news articles pre-ban, the total engagement with news content in these Groups has remained consistent…
…But in the big picture, for a journalist, this is just a different variation of the post-hyperlink, AI-driven business model that Meta and Google are already building toward, one in which the world’s internet users park in one spot, look at ads, and are passively served free content served via algorithm. Canada just got there a little earlier than the rest of us.
If you’re a journalist, in the business of finding facts and putting them in front of as many people as possible, your labour will probably still end up in front of people. If you’re a journalist, it’s the cost of the labour of journalism, not the copyrighted output, that’s the core public policy problem for you here, and it’s the component that often gets the least legal, scholarly and political attention when everybody’s throwing down stakes on these types of bills.
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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. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 