You might expect that Australia would generate most of its power from renewables. In fact it relies heavily on fossil fuels. CC-licensed photo by Nigel Hoult on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Puffing away. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Link rot and digital decay on government, news and other webpages • Pew Research Center
Athena Chapekis, Samuel Bestvater, Emma Remy and Gonzalo Rivero:
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A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, as of October 2023. In most cases, this is because an individual page was deleted or removed on an otherwise functional website.
For older content, this trend is even starker. Some 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are not available today, compared with 8% of pages that existed in 2023.
This “digital decay” occurs in many different online spaces. We examined the links that appear on government and news websites, as well as in the “References” section of Wikipedia pages as of spring 2023. This analysis found that:
• 23% of news webpages contain at least one broken link, as do 21% of webpages from government sites. News sites with a high level of site traffic and those with less are about equally likely to contain broken links. Local-level government webpages (those belonging to city governments) are especially likely to have broken links.• 54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their “References” section that points to a page that no longer exists.
To see how digital decay plays out on social media, we also collected a real-time sample of tweets during spring 2023 on the social media platform X (then known as Twitter) and followed them for three months. We found that:
• Nearly one-in-five tweets are no longer publicly visible on the site just months after being posted. In 60% of these cases, the account that originally posted the tweet was made private, suspended or deleted entirely. In the other 40%, the account holder deleted the individual tweet, but the account itself still existed.• Certain types of tweets tend to go away more often than others. More than 40% of tweets written in Turkish or Arabic are no longer visible on the site within three months of being posted. And tweets from accounts with the default profile settings are especially likely to disappear from public view.
…We found that 25% of all the pages we collected from 2013 through 2023 were no longer accessible as of October 2023. This figure is the sum of two different types of broken pages: 16% of pages are individually inaccessible but come from an otherwise functional root-level domain; the other 9% are inaccessible because their entire root domain is no longer functional.
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Depressing, if you view the internet as somehow representing the sum of our knowledge. What we don’t know, of course, is how much of the lost content is actually accretively useful in some way, rather than being repetition or plain noise.
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Brazil is reeling from catastrophic floods. What went wrong – and what does the future hold? • The Guardian
Jore Carrasco:
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Rio Grande do Sul, a state home to almost 11 million people, has witnessed the most extensive climate catastrophe in its history and one of the greatest in Brazil’s recent history.
Over the course of 10 days at the end of April and beginning of May, the region recorded between a third and almost half of the yearly rainfall predicted – between 500 and 700 millimetres, depending on the area, according to measurements by Metsul Meteorologia.
The storm caused the Taquari, Caí, Pardo, Jacuí, Sinos, and Gravataí rivers – tributaries of the Guaíba – to overflow.
According to the Civil Defence, there are more than 100 people dead, more than 130 missing, and nearly 400 people injured in 425 affected municipalities.
At least 232,125 people have left their homes: 67,542 are in shelters, and 164,583 are homeless or temporarily staying with family or friends. Cities such as Eldorado do Sul, Roca Sales, and Canoas were partly flooded, and villages such as Cruzeiro do Sul were devastated in what the state governor, Eduardo Leite, described as “the greatest catastrophe of all”.
Porto Alegre, the state capital and one of Brazil’s largest urban centres, is one of the worst-affected cities. On 5 May, the level of the Guaíba River, which runs through the city, reached a record of 5.35 meters, surpassing the 4.76 meters reached during the historic floods of 1941.
Neighbourhoods close to the river were submerged. The airport closed, and power and water-treatment plants went down, causing electricity and drinking water shortages in several areas. A dam in a northern suburb failed and flooded a large portion of the city.
Viewed from an army helicopter, the neighbouring city of Eldorado do Sul looks like a set of canals stretching along narrow strips of land and buildings. About 90% of the city is underwater. Along the BR-290 highway, one of the most critical roads in the country’s south, hundreds of people are waiting for transport to shelters.
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A quarter of a million people displaced by ten days of rain.
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Wegovy and the others are becoming too essential for its elite price • FT
John Gapper:
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everything comes at a price, and the one attached to the GLP-1 agonist drugs is enormous. Indeed, the more effective they turn out to be in treating a variety of chronic and life-shortening ailments, the higher the looming costs to health insurers and governments. Battles about the prices of innovative drugs are nothing new, but this one is on another financial scale.
The drugs are now testing the rule that no product can be too successful. If they were as cheap and convenient as blood pressure pills and statins, they might soon be routinely prescribed. But they are far from it: Wegovy’s list price in the US is $15,600 per year, although insurers obtain discounts. There is a widening gulf between benefit and affordability.
Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist US senator, this week released a study that claimed these drugs had “the potential to bankrupt Medicare, Medicaid and the entire [US] healthcare system”. He wants Novo Nordisk to reduce the US price of Wegovy to the much lower one in Denmark but, even there, the government only provides limited coverage for severe obesity.
It was easier for governments and insurers to hold the financial line before studies showed benefits beyond simply curbing obesity. But the US Food and Drug Administration approved Wegovy for heart disease risk in March, opening coverage for older Americans under Medicare. If it does what trials show, cost alone may become the chief obstacle to mass adoption.
Still, the fact that something is useful does not make it worth the price. It is extremely valuable to an individual to avoid a heart attack that debilitates or kills them, but that does not mean a government should provide the same treatment more widely to limit the risk to millions of people. There is a hard financial calculation to be made.
…The potential cost of prescribing such drugs to all obese Americans could exceed $1tn, [economics professor Jonathan] Gruber has estimated. Yet obesity also has high costs, not just to healthcare systems but to societies and economies.
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OpenAI’s long-term AI risk team has disbanded • WIRED
Will Knight:
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In July last year, OpenAI announced the formation of a new research team that would prepare for the advent of supersmart artificial intelligence capable of outwitting and overpowering its creators. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist and one of the company’s cofounders, was named as the colead of this new team. OpenAI said the team would receive 20% of its computing power.
Now OpenAI’s “superalignment team” is no more, the company confirms. That comes after the departures of several researchers involved, Tuesday’s news that Sutskever was leaving the company, and the resignation of the team’s other colead. The group’s work will be absorbed into OpenAI’s other research efforts.
Sutskever’s departure made headlines because although he’d helped CEO Sam Altman start OpenAI in 2015 and set the direction of the research that led to ChatGPT, he was also one of the four board members who fired Altman in November. Altman was restored as CEO five chaotic days later after a mass revolt by OpenAI staff and the brokering of a deal in which Sutskever and two other company directors left the board.
Hours after Sutskever’s departure was announced on Tuesday, Jan Leike, the former DeepMind researcher who was the superalignment team’s other colead, posted on X that he had resigned.
Neither Sutskever nor Leike responded to requests for comment. Sutskever did not offer an explanation for his decision to leave but offered support for OpenAI’s current path in a post on X. “The company’s trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous, and I’m confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial” under its current leadership, he wrote.
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But did he really write it.. or was it the AI?
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February 2024: Opinion: how a16z gamed the NYT Bestseller list • Protos
Cas Piancey, a couple of months ago:
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Entrepreneur and Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon recently released a book espousing the benefits of the blockchain, NFTs, and web3, entitled Read Write Own — and it’s getting mixed reviews.
From the highly critical Molly White complaining that “Dixon fails to identify a single blockchain project that has successfully provided a non-speculative service at any kind of scale,” to the more commendatory by David Z. Morris calling it “an optimistic read,” it’s safe to say Dixons literary efforts are dividing opinion.
However, regardless of how you feel about a16z, Dixon, or the future of web3, what’s clear is that the book did some serious numbers in its first week on bookshelves and via ebook sales. Indeed, the nonfiction title sold more copies this week than Britney Spears’ autobiography, The Woman in Me, and slightly fewer than bestselling author Donald L. Miller’s Masters of the Air, landing at number nine on the New York Times (NYT) Best Seller list.
Unfortunately, the revered ranking comes with a very serious caveat, namely that the NYT itself suspects that the title managed to get ranked by gaming the system.
The list only adds a ‘dagger’ to titles it believes have, in some way, attempted to present more sales than real demand, a concept a16z is extremely familiar with.
…The NYT states that including a dagger on the Best Seller list implies “institutional, special interest, group or bulk purchases,” and that such a dubious distinction only comes after “proprietary vetting and audit protocols, corroborative reporting and other statistical determinations.”
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Wondered how this might have turned out.
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Nuclear option costs ‘six times more’ than renewables, study finds • RenewEconomy
Marion Rae:
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The high upfront costs and burden on consumers of adding nuclear to Australia’s energy mix have been confirmed in an independent review.
Building nuclear reactors would cost six times more than wind and solar power firmed up with batteries, according to the independent report released on Saturday by the Clean Energy Council.
“We support a clear-eyed view of the costs and time required to decarbonise Australia and right now, nuclear simply doesn’t stack up,” the industry body’s chief executive Kane Thornton said.
Taxpayers needed to understand the decades of costs if they were forced to foot the bill for building a nuclear industry from scratch, Mr Thornton warned.
The analysis prepared by construction and engineering experts Egis also found nuclear energy had poor economic viability in a grid dominated by renewable energy.
Renewable energy will provide 82% of the national electricity market under current targets for 2030, which is at least a decade before any nuclear could theoretically be operational.
Further, nuclear power stations are not designed to ramp up and down to align with renewable energy generation.
Adding to the cost challenges, Australia has no nuclear energy industry because it is prohibited under commonwealth and state laws, which would all need to be changed.
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Amazing: Australia has one – count it! – nuclear power plant, but it isn’t used to generate power. Renewables are only 32% of Australia’s power generation. Incredible.
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One flu over the cuckoo’s nest • Logging The World
Oliver Johnson on avian flu mortality rates in human:
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Take COVID for example. If I go to the UKHSA dashboard then I will see that the latest figures are 2,343 cases and 92 deaths in a week. Crudely dividing one by another suggests a case fatality rate of about 5%. Doing a better estimate, taking into account lags and rising and falling trajectories, the most recent deaths probably relate to a time around early April when cases were perhaps half that. So we could perhaps even argue for a case fatality rate in the 8-10% region.
And yet …pre-vaccine the COVID infection fatality rate was much lower than this (perhaps of the order of 1%). Now, it’s likely that the true value is perhaps somewhere in the 0.01-0.05% range. In other words, our dashboard-derived case fatality rate estimate is something like 200 to 500 times too high.
There’s a simple explanation for this: nobody is testing any more! The vast majority of reported cases arise at the hospital admissions stage, so are hugely skewed to the most serious infections and the most vulnerable people. People for whom COVID is somewhat like a case of flu don’t tend to show up in the data – even those who do take an lateral flow test don’t have an easy mechanism for reporting the result.
So, returning to bird flu, I believe that it’s likely that similar things are going on (as Whipple suggested). Looking again at the WHO table you can see that the vast majority of the reported cases (861 out of 888) took place before 2014, the majority of them in countries like Indonesia, Vietnam and Egypt which locally reported a very high case fatality rate at the time. While this data is valid in a sense, it’s not clear to me that an estimate which is heavily weighted to decade-old estimates of a healthcare-dependent quantity (dominated by these kinds of countries) is representative of what the experience might be in the UK now.
Indeed, [Times science editor Tom] Whipple suggests that the estimate might be lower if we did surveillance of all farm workers, rather than just picking up the most serious cases. But that has been happening! For example, the most recent UKHSA surveillance report describes four cases picked up by random sampling: three did not even show symptoms, and one reported a sore throat and myalgia. While four people is a small sample, and so random chance will play a role, it seems hard to reconcile these numbers with a true fatality rate of the claimed 50%.
…So it’s definitely right that we take bird flu seriously, and that infectious disease experts should be planning ahead to mitigate the risks. But equally I don’t think it helps anyone to be routinely quoting a science fiction sounding fatality rate, without at least thinking a little bit about what that means and how it is derived.
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Watching brief! But also, that’s a killer pun in the title.
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What I got wrong in a decade of predicting the future of tech • WSJ
Christopher Mims:
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after almost 500 articles in The Wall Street Journal, one thing I’ve learned from covering the tech industry is that failures are far more instructive. Especially when they’re the kind of errors made by many people.
Here’s what I’ve learned from a decade of embarrassing myself in public—and having the privilege of getting an earful about it from readers.
1. Disruption is overrated
Why are three of the most valuable companies of 2014—Microsoft, Apple, and Google—bigger than ever? How is Meta doing so well even as people have for years been abandoning Facebook, its core product? Why is Twitter still chugging along, no matter what its new owner gets up to?The short answer is that disruption is overrated. The most-worshiped idol in all of tech—the notion that any sufficiently nimble upstart can defeat bigger, slower, sclerotic competitors—has proved to be a false one.
It’s not that disruption never happens. It just doesn’t happen nearly as often as we’ve been led to believe. There are many reasons for this. One is that many tech leaders have internalized a hypercompetitive paranoia—what Amazon founder Jeff Bezos called “Day 1” thinking—that inspires them to either acquire or copy and kill every possible upstart.
Economic historians have been picking apart the notion of business-model disruption for a long time, and yet hardly a day goes by when a startup, investor, or journalist—including yours truly—doesn’t trumpet the power of a new technology to completely upend even the biggest and most hidebound of industries.
Don’t believe it. In a world in which companies learn from one another faster than ever, incumbents have an ability to reinvent themselves at a pace that simply wasn’t possible in the past.
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That’s only the first; he has four more (human factors, we lie to ourselves about tech’s potential, bubbles can be useful, we need to take charge of tech). [The link should be free to read.]
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AI’s next big step: detecting human emotion and expression • Big Technology
Alex Kantrowitz:
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Alan Cowen, CEO of Hume AI, is a former Meta and Google researcher who’s built AI technology that can read the tune, timber, and rhythm of your voice, as well as your facial expressions, to discern your emotions.
As you speak with Hume’s bot, EVI, it processes the emotions you’re showing — like excitement, surprise, joy, anger, and awkwardness — and expresses its responses with ’emotions’ of its own. Yell at it, for instance, and it will get sheepish and try to diffuse the situation. It will display its calculations on screen, indicating what it’s reading in your voice and what it’s giving back. And it’s quite sticky. Across 100,000 unique conversations, the average interaction between humans and EVI is ten minutes long, a company spokesperson said.
“Every word carries not just the phonetics, but also a ton of detail in its tune, rhythm, and timbre that is very informative in a lot of different ways,” Cowen told me on Big Technology Podcast last week. “You can predict a lot of things. You can predict whether somebody has depression or Parkinson’s to some extent, not perfectly… You can predict in a customer service call, whether somebody’s having a good or bad call much more accurately.”
Hume, which raised $50m in March, already offers the technology that reads emotion in voices via its API, and it has working tech that reads facial expressions that it has yet to release. The idea is to deliver much more data to AI models than they would get by simply transcribing text, enabling them to do a better job of making the end user happy. “Pretty much any outcome,” Cowen said, “it benefits to include measures of voice modulation and not just language.”
…To program ’emotional intelligence’ into machine learning models, the Hume team had more than 1 million people use survey platforms and rate how they’re feeling, and connected that to their facial expressions and speech. “We had people recording themselves and rating their expressions, and what they’re feeling, and responding to music, and videos, and talking to other participants,” Cowen said. “Across all of this data, we just look at what’s consistent between different people.”
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Can’t human operators tell if it’s a bad call? Oh, we want to get rid of them. And how well do we trust the survey platforms? Not that deeply, personally.
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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 