If you’ve used Google Maps recently, you’ve been using a motif from one of the very first arcade games. CC-licensed photo by Steven Miller on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Blast it. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Before smartphones, an army of real people helped you find stuff on Google • WIRED
Amelia Tait:
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The internet first became available on cell phones in 1996, but before affordable data plans, accidentally clicking the browser icon on your flip phone would make you sweat. In the early 2000s, accessing a single website could cost you as much as a cheeseburger, so not many people bothered to Google on the go.
Instead, a variety of services sprang up offering mobile search without the internet. Between 2007 and 2010, Americans could call GOOG-411 to find local businesses, and between 2006 and 2016, you could text 242-242 to get any question answered by the company ChaCha. Brits could call 118 118 or text AQA on 63336 for similar services. Behind the scenes, there were no artificially intelligent robots answering these questions. Instead, thousands of people were once employed to be Google.
“Some guy phoned up and asked if Guinness was made in Ireland, people asked for the circumference of the world,” says Hayley Banfield, a 42-year-old from Wales who answered 118 118 calls from 2004 to 2005. The number was first launched in 2002 as a directory enquiries service—meaning people could call up to find out phone numbers and addresses (back then calls cost an average of 55 pence). In 2008, the business started offering to answer any questions. Although Banfield worked for 118 118 before this change, customers would ask her anything and everything regardless. “We had random things like ‘How many yellow cars are on the road?’”
While directory enquiry lines still exist, Banfield worked during their boom—she answered hundreds of calls in her 5:30 pm to 2 am shifts—and quickly noticed patterns in people’s queries. “Anything past 11 pm, that’s when the drunk calls would come in,” she says. People wanted taxis and kebab shops but were so inebriated that they’d forget to finish their sentences. Sometimes, callers found Banfield so helpful that they invited her to join them on their nights out. As the evening crept on, callers asked for massage parlors or saunas—then they would call back irate after Banfield recommended an establishment that didn’t meet their needs.
The “pizza hours” were 8 pm to 10 pm—everyone wanted the number for their local takeout. Banfield had a computer in front of her in the Cardiff call center, loaded with a simple database. She’d type in a postcode (she had memorized all of the UK’s as part of her training) and then use a shortcut such as “PIZ” for pizza or “TAX” for taxi. People sometimes accused Banfield of being psychic, but if the power had gone out in a certain area, she automatically knew that most callers wanted to know why.
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It’s a lovely story of the days before mobile internet. Those companies made a killing, though. Insanely profitable, sky-high prices, only capped in 2019.
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Amid record high energy demand, America is running out of electricity • The Washington Post
Evan Halper:
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Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid.
In Georgia, demand for industrial power is surging to record highs, with the projection of new electricity use for the next decade now 17 times what it was only recently. Arizona Public Service, the largest utility in that state, is also struggling to keep up, projecting it will be out of transmission capacity before the end of the decade absent major upgrades.
Northern Virginia needs the equivalent of several large nuclear power plants to serve all the new data centers planned and under construction. Texas, where electricity shortages are already routine on hot summer days, faces the same dilemma.
The soaring demand is touching off a scramble to try to squeeze more juice out of an aging power grid while pushing commercial customers to go to extraordinary lengths to lock down energy sources, such as building their own power plants.
“When you look at the numbers, it is staggering,” said Jason Shaw, chairman of the Georgia Public Service Commission, which regulates electricity. “It makes you scratch your head and wonder how we ended up in this situation. How were the projections that far off? This has created a challenge like we have never seen before.”
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Step forward, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, and the rest. Plus all the other data centres.
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When you’re driving in Google Maps you’re re-enacting an ancient space combat sim • Interconnected
Matt Webb:
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So, that dart-shaped arrow [used by a 1985 “computer navigation system for cars” called Etak] is also the arrow used in Google Maps turn-by-turn navigation to show your current location. You can see it if you use directions in the app today. You can see it in the Google Maps Navigation launch blog post from 2009.
And what [journalist Benj] Edwards spotted is that the same Google Maps arrow was used by Etak to show the current location of your car, way back then.
To give you an idea of how much 1985 was a different era: there were no GPS satellites. So you had to put magnetic sensors in your wheels to count rotations. Map data was stored on audio cassette tapes in the back of the car. The screen didn’t have pixels. It was a vector screen, with electron beams painting lines on directly on the phosphors, like an oscilloscope.
So check out his article [about Etak], because there’s a photo of the Etak Navigator, and you can see the dart-arrow, right there in the mirror. So is that the origin?
Edwards goes further. In a follow-up article, he figured out the connection:
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To Etak’s benefit, Catalyst’s shared office building encouraged the cross-pollination of ideas between companies. Alcorn, while working at Cumma, recalls being fascinated by the activities at Etak. During development, he snuck into nearby Atari’s coin-op division building with Etak engineers to show them the hit 1979 arcade title Asteroids. The game used a vector display that produced fluid animations with low-cost hardware. It’s little surprise, then, that Etak’s final on-screen representation of the car in its shipping product was a vector triangle nearly identical to the ship from Asteroids.
– Benj Edwards, Fast Company, The Untold Story of Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell’s Visionary 1980s Tech Incubator (2017)
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Asteroids? Asteroids (Wikipedia). The break-out coin-op arcade game. The dart-arrow is the spaceship: it’s right there!
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Solar power’s giants are providing more energy than big oil • Bloomberg via The Business Standard
David Fickling:
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you can start by converting the barrels of crude and cubic meters of gas produced by the big petroleum companies into a measure of energy — exajoules. An exajoule of electricity would be able to power Australia, Italy or Taiwan for a year. And the big oil companies are making a lot of it: about 8.3 EJ annually for ExxonMobil and 6.2 EJ at Shell.
The vast majority of that is wasted, however. Only about a fifth of the chemical energy in freshly pumped crude ends up being turned into kinetic energy moving cars and trucks, because oil refineries and vehicle engines fritter most of it away as useless heat and noise. Gas turbines are a bit more efficient at turning methane into power, but still end up operating at about one-third efficiency once you account for losses from gas well to electrical socket. At a rough estimate, only about a quarter of the energy coming out of an oil company’s wells gets turned into useful power.
We can do a similar transformation with solar. Companies such as [China’s] Tongwei, GCL or Xinte that produce the polysilicon raw material for solar panels measure their output capacity in metric tons per year. It’s a simple process to convert that into gigawatts of the solar cells made by Longi, Jinko and the like, and ultimately into the exajoules that the resulting panels will generate.
Put the two side by side, and the result is striking. The biggest polysilicon producers right now can go head-to-head with some of the biggest oil companies such as BP, Eni and ConocoPhillips — and panel makers aren’t far behind. Should Tongwei go ahead with plans announced in December to build a 400,000 ton polysilicon plant in Inner Mongolia, nearly doubling its current output, it might overtake even ExxonMobil
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Someone described this transition thus: the fossil fuel age relies on commodities, the solar (and nuclear and wind) age relies on technologies. And the price of technologies plummets reliably – although in the case of nuclear, all the concerns around it have effectively halted it in the west.
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Death toll at Hajj pilgrimage rises to 1,300 amid extreme high temperatures • AP via CBS News
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More than 1,300 people died during this year’s Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia as the faithful faced extreme high temperatures at Islamic holy sites in the desert kingdom, Saudi authorities announced Sunday.
Saudi Health Minister Fahd bin Abdurrahman Al-Jalajel said that 83% of the 1,301 fatalities were unauthorized pilgrims who walked long distances in soaring temperatures to perform the Hajj rituals in and around the holy city of Mecca.
Speaking to state-owned television, the minister said 95 pilgrims were being treated in hospitals, some of whom were airlifted for treatment in the capital, Riyadh. He said the identification process was delayed because there were no identification documents with many of the dead pilgrims.
The fatalities included more than 660 Egyptians. All but 31 of them were unauthorized pilgrims, according to two officials in Cairo. Egypt has revoked the licenses of 16 travel agencies that helped unauthorized pilgrims travel to Saudi Arabia, authorities said.
…Saudi authorities cracked down on unauthorized pilgrims, expelling tens of thousands of people. But many, mostly Egyptians, managed to reach holy sites in and around Mecca, some on foot. Unlike authorized pilgrims, they had no hotels to return to to escape the scorching heat.
…During this year’s Hajj period, daily high temperatures ranged between 46ºC (117ºF) and 49ºC (120ºF) in Mecca and sacred sites in and around the city, according to the Saudi National Center for Meteorology.
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Extreme heat, extreme deaths. But:
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Islam follows a lunar calendar, so the Hajj comes around 11 days earlier each year. By 2029, the Hajj will occur in April, and for several years after that it will fall in the winter, when temperatures are milder.
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A stampede in 2015 killed more people – over 2,400. But in a couple of decades, the Hajj will occur when it’s hottest, and temperatures will have risen even further.
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Linda Yaccarino shakes up X amid pressure from Elon Musk over costs • FT
Hannah Murphy and Daniel Thomas:
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Linda Yaccarino has shaken up her inner circle at X as she faces pressure from Elon Musk to boost sales and cut costs, a year after she became chief executive.
Yaccarino fired her right-hand man and head of business operations and communications, Joe Benarroch, this month, said three people familiar with the matter.
Among other things, Yaccarino held Benarroch responsible for bungling the rollout of the platform’s new adult content policy by failing to tell clients of the changes before it became public, two X employees said.
Taking over Benarroch’s responsibilities will be global government affairs head Nick Pickles, whose role has temporarily been expanded to include directing all global communications, the people said.
This week, Pickles, one of the few top Twitter staffers who survived the billionaire’s takeover, also attended the Cannes advertising festival alongside Yaccarino and Musk for the first time, several people said.
The shake-up has been seen as a boon for British-born Pickles, who once ran for office as a Conservative MP in the UK, before rapidly rising up the ranks at the platform to oversee its public policy and relationships with governments.
The reshuffle comes amid growing tensions between Musk and Yaccarino, stemming from her struggle to steady X’s financial health a year after Musk poached her from NBCUniversal.
One X senior staffer said she had become increasingly nervous as Musk piled pressure on her to raise revenues and lower her expenses — for example cutting staff from the US and UK sales teams and reducing spending on items such as travel.
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It’s an interesting progression for Pickles, who used to be at Big Brother Watch and is also a BBC Trustee. But this doesn’t look like a company sailing along happily.
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X still has a Verified bot problem; this time they came for TechCrunch writers • TechCrunch
Rebecca Bellan:
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This week while scrolling on X, formerly Twitter, I noticed that I had reposted a series of TechCrunch articles. Except, wait, no, I hadn’t.
But someone else using my name had. I clicked on the profile, and there was another Rebecca Bellan, using the same default and header photos as my actual profile: me onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2022 and side-eye Chloe, respectively. The bio read, “@Techcrunch senior reporter | journalist,” and it had the location set to NY, where I am currently based. The account was created in May 2024.
Perhaps most surprising after realizing that someone — who? A bot?! — had created an impersonator account of me was the fact that they had ostensibly paid to do so, as evidenced by the little blue checkmark next to my name.
When X was still Twitter, the blue checkmark would let other users know that a profile had been verified as a person of note. But since Elon Musk’s hostile takeover, that checkmark now means that a user has paid at least $8 per month for a premium subscription that gets them access to longer posts, fewer ads, better algorithmic consideration and Grok. And while X changed tack in April and gave the verification badge back to some users based on number of followers, the blue checkmark could also mean someone is a fan of Musk. Don’t believe me? Just check all the zealous reply guys on any of Musk’s posts.
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The purpose is unclear, but it probably just helps the bot accounts evade the spam filters. And what motive would eX-Twitter have to remove accounts which are paying it?
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Perplexity plagiarized our story about how Perplexity is a bullshit machine • WIRED
Tim Marchman:
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Perplexity and its CEO, Aravind Srinivas, did not substantively dispute the specifics of WIRED’s reporting [last week]. “The questions from WIRED reflect a deep and fundamental misunderstanding of how Perplexity and the Internet work,” Srinivas said in a statement. Backed by Jeff Bezos’ family office and by Nvidia, among others, Perplexity has said it is worth a billion dollars based on its most recent fundraising round, and The Information reported last month that it was in talks for a new round that would value it at $3bn. (Bezos did not reply to an email; Nvidia declined to comment.)
After we published the story, I prompted three leading chatbots to tell me about the story. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude generated text offering hypotheses about the story’s subject but noted that they had no access to the article. The Perplexity chatbot produced a six-paragraph, 287-word text closely summarizing the conclusions of the story and the evidence used to reach them. (According to WIRED’s server logs, the same bot observed in our and Knight’s findings, which is almost certainly linked to Perplexity but is not in its publicly listed IP range, attempted to access the article the day it was published, but was met with a 404 response. The company doesn’t retain all its traffic logs, so this is not necessarily a complete picture of the bot’s activity, or that of other Perplexity agents.) The original story is linked at the top of the generated text, and a small gray circle links out to the original following each of the last five paragraphs. The last third of the fifth paragraph exactly reproduces a sentence from the original: “Instead, it invented a story about a young girl named Amelia who follows a trail of glowing mushrooms in a magical forest called Whisper Woods.”
This struck me and my colleagues as plagiarism.
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The evidence against Perplexity is piling up very quickly, and if the Sauron’s Eye of the big publishers turns to focus on it, there might be trouble.
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Tory MPs paid £100,000 of public funds to party’s in-house web designers • The Guardian
Jessica Elgot:
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More than 120 Conservative MPs, including Jeremy Hunt, Liz Truss, Sajid Javid and Gillian Keegan, paid £100,000 of taxpayers’ money to the Conservatives’ in-house web design services, it can be revealed.
The MPs used the Bluetree website service to design their websites. When billed by Bluetree, they would pay for the sites then claim back the costs from the public purse via expenses, prompting a complaint to parliament’s expenses watchdog about the practice.
Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) has denied Bluetree is wholly owned by the party and says it is a separate organisation, but repeatedly refused to deny the party receives income from the company, saying it has “commercial arrangements with CCHQ”.
Records show more than 330 invoices from Bluetree to Conservative MPs, including Hunt, Truss, Javid and Keegan, for web design services. Other high-profile Conservatives who have expensed services from Bluetree include Ben Wallace, Tobias Ellwood, Mark Francois and Helen Whately.
The company – which describes itself as the “Conservative party UK official website platform” and says it is run “inside the party” – has an address that is the same office as CCHQ and has been paid £100,695 in taxpayers’ money since 2019.
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It’s just amazing: as though the Tories are trying to achieve some sort of Grand Slam of corruption.
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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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