Judging gymnastics has now become a job where AI can help. CC-licensed photo by Jeffrey Hyde on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. Tumbling. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The AI search war has begun • The Atlantic

Matteo Wong:

»

existing AI products are absolutely filled with media that publishers have received no compensation for. ([Perplexity’s chief business officer Dmitry] Shevelenko told me that Perplexity will not stop citing publishers outside its revenue-sharing deal [announced on Tuesday with Time, Fortune and some other publishers], nor will it show any preference for its paid partners moving forward.) AI companies don’t seem to value human words, human photos, and human videos as works of craft or products of labour; instead they treat the content as strip mines of information.

“People don’t come to Perplexity to consume journalism; they come to Perplexity to consume facts,” Shevelenko told me in an interview before today’s announcement. “Journalists’ content is rich in facts, verified knowledge, and that is the utility function it plays to an AI answer engine.” To Shevelenko, that means Perplexity and journalists are not in direct competition—the former answers questions; the latter breaks news or provides compelling prose and ideas. But even he conceded that AI search will send less traffic to media websites than traditional search engines have, because users have less reason to click on any links—the bot is providing the answer.

The growing number of AI-media deals, then, are a shakedown. Sure, Shevelenko told me that Perplexity thinks revenue-sharing is the right thing to do. But AI is scraping publishers’ content whether they want it to or not: Media companies can be chumps or get paid. Still, the nature of these deals also suggests that publishers may have more power than it seems. Perplexity and OpenAI, for instance, are offering fairly different incentives to media partners—meaning the tech start-ups are themselves competing to win over publishers.

All of these products have made basic mistakes, such as incorrectly citing sources and fabricating information. Having a searchbot ground itself in human-made “verified knowledge” might help alleviate these issues, especially for recent events the AI model wasn’t trained on. Publishers also have at least some ability to limit AI search engines’ ability to read their websites. They can also refuse to sign or renegotiate deals, or even sue AI companies for copyright infringement, as The New York Times has done. AI firms seem to have their own ways around media companies’ barricades, but that is an ongoing arms race without a clear winner.

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This all seems like bad ideas all over the place.
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Why we might never know the truth about ultra-processed foods • BBC News

Philippa Roxby:

»

UPFs are defined by how many industrial processes they have been through and the number of ingredients – often unpronounceable – on their packaging. Most are high in fat, sugar or salt; many you’d call fast food.

…a recent meeting of the American Society for Nutrition in Chicago was presented with an observational study of more than 500,000 people in the US. It found that those who ate the most UPFs had a roughly 10% greater chance of dying early, even accounting for their body-mass index and overall quality of diet.

In recent years, lots of other observational studies have shown a similar link – but that’s not the same as proving that how food is processed causes health problems, or pinning down which aspect of those processes might be to blame.

So how could we get to the truth about ultra-processed food?

The kind of study needed to prove definitively that UPFs cause health problems would be extremely complex, suggests Dr Nerys Astbury, a senior researcher in diet and obesity at Oxford University.
It would need to compare a large number of people on two diets – one high in UPFs and one low in UPFs, but matched exactly for calorie and macronutrient content. This would be fiendishly difficult to actually do.

Participants would need to be kept under lock and key so their food intake could be tightly managed. The study would also need to enrol people with similar diets as a starting point. It would be extremely challenging logistically.

And to counter the possibility that people who eat fewer UPFs might just have healthier lifestyles such as through taking more exercise or getting more sleep, the participants of the groups would need to have very similar habits.

“It would be expensive research, but you could see changes from the diets relatively quickly,” Dr Astbury says.

Funding for this type of research could also be hard to come by. There might be accusations of conflicts of interest, since researchers motivated to run these kind of trials may have an idea of what they want the conclusions to be before they started.

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An unexpected twist lights up the secrets of turbulence • Quanta Magazine

David Freedman:

»

It’s time to feed the blob. Seething and voracious, it absorbs eight dinner-plate-size helpings every few seconds.

The blob is a cloud of turbulence in a large water tank in the lab of the University of Chicago physicist William Irvine. Unlike every other instance of turbulence that has ever been observed on Earth, Irvine’s blob isn’t a messy patch in a flowing stream of liquid, gas or plasma, or up against a wall. Rather, the blob is self-contained, a roiling, lumpy sphere that leaves the water around it mostly still. To create it and sustain it, Irvine and his graduate student Takumi Matsuzawa must repeatedly shoot “vortex loops” — essentially the water version of smoke rings — at it, eight loops at a time. “We’re building turbulence ring by ring,” said Matsuzawa.

Irvine and Matsuzawa tightly control the loops that are the blob’s building blocks and study the resulting confined turbulence up close and at length. The blob could yield insights into turbulence that physicists have been chasing for two centuries — in a quest that led Richard Feynman to call turbulence the most important unsolved problem in classical physics. (Quantum turbulence has become an important problem too.) Untangling turbulence might also prove extraordinarily impactful, given that it plays a huge role in stars, aviation, nuclear fusion, weather, changes in the Earth’s core, wind turbines and even human health — arterial flow can become dangerously turbulent.

If the blob does yield big advances in turbulence, it will add to the growing string of surprising and influential breakthroughs that Irvine and his students have produced in the physics of what might loosely be called spinning stuff — systems composed of whirling objects, fluids and even fields.

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Fascinating piece about a really important, yet very poorly understood field of physics: fusion reactors (yes I know) are very sensitive to fluctuations in the circulating plasma, and that’s all turbulence.
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Playing Pokémon by ear • Game File

Stephen Totilo:

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After Ross Minor was blinded in 2006, he still wanted to play Pokémon.

He was a kid. Eight years old. And he found a way. 

“I listened to all my friends playing the game, and I would hear the soundtrack and be like, ‘Oh, I remember that. That song plays when you’re in this town.’ So I learned that each town has a different song.

“Then I learned that each Pokémon has a different cry… All the attacks make different sounds. 

“The cherry on top was that, when you run into a wall, it plays this boom-boom sound. So, through that alone, I was able to memorize all the games and form this mental map—and beat the games completely by myself without sighted assistance.”

Minor played 2007’s Pokémon Diamond and Pearl that way, then 2011’s Black and White, and then more as each year’s new Pokémon game came out.

For over a decade, his strategy worked. But 2019’s Pokémon Sword and Shield added navigation in three dimensions, and Minor struggled to draft a mental map. He needed assistance from sighted players.

Then came 2022’s Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. Those, Minor told me, “are just completely inaccessible.”

This is what happens, Minor explained, when a video game’s accessibility for players with disabilities is accidental or unintentional.

Players like him can get left behind. 

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Amazing triumph over the odds – and then Nintendo pulls the rug from under him.
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The gymnastics world braces for an AI future • The Verge

Dvora Meyers:

»

When Simone Biles saluted the judges and stepped onto the mat to vault at the Sportpaleis in Antwerp, Belgium, it seemed like every camera in the packed arena was trained on her. People in the audience pulled their smartphones to record. The photographers zoomed in from their media perches. One TV camera tracked her run on a high-speed dolly, all the way down the runway, as she hurdled into a roundoff onto the springboard. The spider cam, swinging above, caught the upward trajectory of her body as she turned towards the table and blocked up and off, twisting one and a half times before landing on the blue mat and raising her arms above her head. The apex of human athleticism and kinesthetic beauty had been captured.

But there were other cameras that few other people watching in the arena were thinking about as they took in Biles’ prowess on the event: the four placed in each corner of the mat where the vault was situated. These cameras also caught the occasion but not with the purpose of transmitting it to the rest of the world. These were set up by the Japanese technology giant Fujitsu, which, since 2017, has been collaborating with the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) to create an AI gymnastics judging system. 

In its early days, the system used lidar (light detection and ranging) technology to create 3D composites of gymnasts in action. These days, it uses an even more sophisticated system, drawing from four to eight strategically placed hi-def cameras to capture the movement of the athletes, make 3D models, and identify whether the elements they are performing fall into the parameters established by the judging bodies inside the federation. 

But the computer system doesn’t make judgments itself. Instead, it is deployed when there is an inquiry from the gymnast or coaches or a dispute within the judging panel itself. The Judging Support System (JSS) can be consulted to calculate the difficulty score of an athlete’s exercise — a second opinion, rather than an initial prognosis. Currently, it is mostly used for edge cases.

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Neat article: the judges’ task has always seemed incredibly difficult in gymnastics. (Imagine being a fencing judge before the electronic hit systems; even with those you still get human evaluation of some rounds.)
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The future of science publishing • C&EN

Dalmeet Singh Chawla:

»

In 2015, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest charitable research foundations in the world, introduced a new publication policy that promised to pay publication charges for papers its grantees write as long as the content of the final version of the study was freely available to read somewhere online.

The policy stated that the foundation “would pay reasonable fees required by a publisher to effect publication on these terms.” In 2021, the foundation narrowed that support, clarifying that going forward it would pay only for research published in fully open-access journals, which make all their papers freely available to read.

In March, the Gates Foundation surprised many by backtracking on these policies. It announced that starting Jan. 1, 2025, it would no longer cover publishing costs. The decision is causing anxiety among researchers and publishing experts, who wonder how the open-access model can be maintained if funders don’t foot the publishing bill.

The open-access movement started in the 1990s in a bid to make taxpayer- funded research freely available. Before then, subscription journals were the norm. Researchers typically had access to these journals through their institutional libraries, though cash-strapped universities in emerging-market countries often couldn’t afford the subscriptions. Some publishers introduced waivers for certain universities and libraries in such nations.

…the foundation notes that open access in its current form has resulted in “some unsavory publishing practices,” including unchecked pricing from journals and publishers, questionable peer review, and paper mills—people or organizations that produce fake or subpar papers and sell authorship slots on them.

…The Gates Foundation is now suggesting that authors post online preprints of their author-accepted manuscripts—near-final versions of studies accepted by journals for publication before they are typeset or copyedited—and then publish in whichever journals they like.

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The latter seems the better model, but still assumes that someone will do the peer review (a necessary step). We still haven’t found the ideal model for science publishing.
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New study confirms mammal-to-mammal avian flu • EurekAlert!

»

A new Cornell University study provides evidence that a spillover of avian influenza from birds to dairy cattle across several US states has now led to mammal-to-mammal transmission – between cows and from cows to cats and a raccoon.

“This is one of the first times that we are seeing evidence of efficient and sustained mammalian-to-mammalian transmission of highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1,” said Diego Diel, associate professor of virology and director of the Virology Laboratory at the Animal Health Diagnostic Center in the College of Veterinary Medicine.

Diel is co-corresponding author of the study, “Spillover of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza H5N1 Virus to Dairy Cattle” published in Nature.

Whole genome sequencing of the virus did not reveal any mutations in the virus that would lead to enhanced transmissibility of H5N1 in humans, although the data clearly shows mammal-to-mammal transmission, which is concerning as the virus may adapt in mammals, Diel said.

So far, 11 human cases have been reported in the US, with the first dating back to April 2022, each with mild symptoms: four were linked to cattle farms and seven have been linked to poultry farms, including an outbreak of four cases reported in the last few weeks in Colorado. These recent patients fell ill with the same strain identified in the study as circulating in dairy cows, leading the researchers to suspect that the virus likely originated from dairy farms in the same county.

While the virus does have the ability to infect and replicate in people, the efficiency of those infections is low. “The concern is that potential mutations could arise that could lead adaptation to mammals, spillover into humans and potential efficient transmission in humans in the future,” Diel said.

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*bites nails* Just a watching brief, nothing more.
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Hacker shows how to get free laundry for life • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

Michael Orlitzky was not having a good day with his laundry. First CSC Serviceworks, a laundry management company, replaced all of the machines in his building with new coin-op or app-powered ones. The card reading machines had been an issue for years because the cards would stop working and the recharge machine would steal dollar bills, Orlitzky said. Now he had another enemy with its own quirks to get used to. Plus, CSC had replaced the machines about a week ahead of schedule, meaning that any cash on his or others’ laundry cards was now worthless and unusable.

Then, one of the new machines ate his quarters. The first machine was stuck on the cold setting, and he had to pay another $2 and move all of his belongings to another machine. He called CSC customer service and was on hold for an hour. CSC eventually told him to get a refund through the company’s website, which in turn insisted he install CSC’s app to proceed.

“That was the day I decided laundry would be free,” Orlitzky told 404 Media in an email.

Orlitzky then discovered multiple bypasses to CSC machines that allow him to wash his clothes for free. Since then, he’s been pretty quiet about the whole thing. Orlitzky published a brief write-up of his escapades on his personal website last year, but hasn’t shared it on social media. Some people in his building know his secret, but that’s about it.

That is, until now, with Orlitzky due to speak at the DEF CON hacker conference in August about how he found infinite money cheats for CSC laundry machines. The talk is called “Laundering Money.”

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Upside: free laundry. Downside: in the launderette.
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CrowdStrike outage could cost cyber insurers $1.5bn • Data Breach Today

Mathew Schwartz:

»

The global IT outage triggered by a faulty CrowdStrike software update on July 19 could lead to cyber insurers paying out up to $1.5bn in compensation.

That’s the conclusion of cyber risk analytics platform CyberCube, which in a report said the insurer losses range from $400m to $1.5bn. Those figures represent 3% to 10% of the $15bn in global cyber premiums held today.

The final insurance payout total will need time to emerge. “Determining final losses for the industry is likely to be a lengthy process because cyber insurance policy language is not standardized,” Moody’s Reports said in a Monday report. “It will take time for insurers to determine which customers suffered losses from the outage, and whether those losses are covered.”

Most claims will center on losses due to “business interruption, which is a primary contributor to losses from cyber incidents,” it said. “Because these losses were not caused by a cyberattack, claims will be made under ‘systems failure’ coverage, which is becoming standard coverage within cyber insurance policies.” But, not all systems-failure coverage will apply to this incident, it said, since some policies exclude nonmalicious events or have to reach a certain threshold of losses before being triggered.

The outage resembled a supply chain attack, since it took out multiple users of the same technology all at once – including airlines, doctors’ practices, hospitals, banks, stock exchanges and more.

Cyber insurance experts said the timing of the outage will also help mitigate the quantity of claims insurers are likely to see. At the moment CrowdStrike sent its update gone wrong, “more Asia-Pacific systems were online than European and US systems, but Europe and the US have a greater share of cyber insurance coverage than does the Asia-Pacific region,” Moody’s Reports said.

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I like the idea that there exists a site called “Data Breach Today”. Turns out that there’s more than enough content to fill it, daily.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new type of influencer has come to prominence: women undergoing IVF. CC-licensed photo by ZEISS Microscopy on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

There probably won’t be a post this week at the Social Warming Substack: I’m going to some gigs.

A selection of 10 links for you. Multiplying. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The rise of the IVF influencers • Forbes

Alexandra S. Levine:

»

In November, as [Caitlyn O’Neil] posted daily videos giving herself at-home hormone shots to stimulate egg growth, her TikTok following nearly doubled. It surged again as she broadcast her egg retrieval—donning a hospital gown and hairnet, with an IV in her arm and a fistful of crackers post-anesthesia. When they harvested 13 eggs, four of which were successfully fertilized and became embryos, she posted a video of the final step of the process, panning an ultrasound screen that showed just where in her uterus the doctor would implant them.

“I’m officially one day past transfer, and I am considered PUPO… Pregnant Until Proven Otherwise!” she said in a November 28 post liked more than 20,000 times.

When a December blood test confirmed that, she again shared the news on TikTok.

But by the end of the month, she’d lost another pregnancy.

“There is no heartbeat and no more growth,” she told her TikTok audience, which by then numbered 150,000. “Today we are broken. Today we are crushed. Today we are grieving. This is miscarriage. This is infertility. But we will try again. We are not giving up.”

In the new year, after chronicling another attempt with their two remaining embryos, O’Neil and her husband failed to get pregnant. Without the funds to give IVF another go, she told followers they were figuring out how to raise the money needed to continue. The post went viral, and small donations, mostly $1 to $5, began pouring into the Venmo, PayPal and GoFundMe listed in O’Neil’s TikTok bio. Within a day, strangers on TikTok had covered all $20,000 for another cycle, O’Neil told Forbes. “It was the most surreal experience,” she said. “Because of social media and sharing our story, we were able to go on to do a second round.”

She gained even more traction on TikTok as she shared their subsequent journey—more than doubling the size of her following again, she said. Then, later that fall, she began landing lucrative brand deals for products ranging “from a vacuum to prenatals.” When their second round of IVF was unsuccessful, those paid partnerships—a $40,000 collab with a water bottle brand, for example—enabled them to pay for a third and fourth.

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You might think: how awful, to exploit oneself in this way. To which the very powerful riposte is: would it be OK if she wrote a book about it which was a bestseller? If not, why not – after all, people have been writing books about their life experiences for years. This is just a different format.
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The world just saw the four hottest days in recorded history – The Washington Post

Sarah Kaplan:

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As global temperatures spiked to their highest levels in recorded history on Monday, ambulances were screaming through the streets of Tokyo, carrying scores of people who had collapsed amid an unrelenting heat wave. A monster typhoon was emerging from the scorching waters of the Pacific Ocean, which were several degrees warmer than normal. Thousands of vacationers fled the idyllic mountain town of Jasper, Canada ahead of a fast-moving wall of wildfire flames.

By the end of the week — which saw the four hottest days ever observed by scientists — dozens had been killed in the raging floodwaters and massive mudslides triggered by Typhoon Gaemi. Half of Jasper was reduced to ash. And about 3.6 billion people around the planet had endured temperatures that would have been exceedingly rare in a world without burning fossil fuels and other human activities, according to an analysis by scientists at the group Climate Central.

These extraordinary global temperatures marked the culmination of an unprecedented global hot streak that has stunned even researchers who spent their whole careers studying climate change.

Since last July, Earth’s average temperature has consistently exceeded 1.5ºC (2.7ºF) above preindustrial levels — a short-term breach of a threshold that scientists say cannot be crossed if the world hopes to avoid the worst consequences of planetary warming.

This “taste” of a 1.5º world showed how the natural systems that humans depend on could buckle amid soaring temperatures, said Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. Forests showed less ability to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. Sea ice around Antarctica dwindled to near record lows. Coral bleaching became so extreme scientists had to change their scale for measuring it.

Even as scientists forecast an end to the current record-breaking stretch, they warn it may prove difficult for parts of the planet to recover from the heat of the past year.

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The Republicans and huge parts of the right wing, think this is nothing to think about, that it’s all fake, it isn’t happening. How one can deny reality like this is puzzling, to say the least; how one can not worry about the consequences of being wrong is really shocking.
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Apple in talks to bring ads to Apple TV+ • MacRumors

Hartley Charlton:

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Apple has apparently been in discussions with the UK’s Broadcaster’s Audience Research Board (BARB) to explore the necessary data collection techniques for monitoring advertising results. Currently, BARB provides viewing statistics for major UK networks including the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Sky, as well as Apple TV + programming. These new discussions suggest that Apple is preparing to implement an ad-supported tier on its streaming service, similar to moves made by competitors such as Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video.

While BARB already monitors viewing time for Apple TV + content, additional techniques are required to track advertising metrics accurately. This data is vital for advertisers to assess the reach and impact of their campaigns on the platform. In addition to the UK, Apple has also reportedly held similar discussions with ratings organizations in the United States.

Apple has already included limited advertising in its live sports events, such as last year’s Major League Soccer coverage, where ads were incorporated even for Season Pass holders. It is also notable that in March Apple hired Joseph Cady, a former advertising executive from NBCUniversal, to bolster its video advertising team.

Competitors like Netflix and Disney+ have successfully launched lower-cost, ad-supported tiers, which have helped them attract additional subscribers and increase revenue.

«

So is Apple really trying to attract additional subscribers who aren’t willing to pay the £9/month? Or just to have a lower-price tier? It’s already the cheapest subscription after Discovery+. Also, the streaming wars are turning every streaming company into the same thing that people thought they were getting away from: an excess of ads. (It will have to change the legend at the top of the Apple TV+ page saying “New Apple Originals every month – always ad-free”.)
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The AI non-economy: a rant • The Coded Message

Jimmy Hartzell:

»

who doesn’t want a confident confabulator incapable of critical thinking? A bullshit artist designed to do what many of us learned to do in high school and college, and write pages of content that sounded “educated” without actually paying attention to the actual ideas, or even understanding them at all?

I mean, I don’t want one. But clearly society does, otherwise why did we educate so many people in exactly that? If we have so many bullshit jobs it makes sense that someone would create a bullshit factory to automate them. Although, as the book Bullshit Jobs also points out, the point of the bullshit jobs is rarely what the job description nominally claims. Sometimes, the point is just to show off having employees, which AI can’t really do.

Not that it’s completely without valid use cases. I’ve even used AI, as a language practice buddy. I wouldn’t trust it with anything real, and it sometimes makes up grammar mistakes when I ask it to correct my grammar, but I don’t find it useless.

But I also don’t find it worth paying anything for personally, let alone an amount consistent with the billions of dollars spent building these models, and that soon will be spent building future models. And that’s the cost that doesn’t take into account the environmental damage, the stealing from writers and artists, and the damage from the hallucinations.

Here’s hoping this recent Atlantic article is the beginning of a trend where people realizes that when you spend more than the Manhattan project or the Apollo project, you need to have results comparable to nuclear weapons and energy, or landing people on the moon. And even then, it probably still doesn’t pay off as a private investment.

At some point, like the Bitcoin bubble, the real estate bubble, and the Dot Com bubble of the 90s, the AI bubble will break.

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Wind and solar to surpass 40% of China’s power capacity by year-end • South China Morning Post

Yujie Xue:

»

Wind and solar are expected to account for more than 40% of China’s total installed power generation capacity by the end of the year, after exceeding coal-fired capacity for the first time in the first half, according to the country’s power trade association.

China is expected to add about 300 gigawatts (GW) of solar and wind power capacity to the grid this year, a touch higher than the 293GW a year earlier, the China Electricity Council (CEC) said in a report.

This could boost the cumulative grid-connected wind and solar power generation capacity in China to 1,350GW by the year-end, accounting for more than 40% of the 3,300GW total installed capacity from all energy sources, according to CEC.

The continuing momentum in solar and wind power installation could also drive the overall installed capacity of non-fossil fuel energy sources, which include nuclear and hydropower, to 1,900GW by the end of 2024, or 57.5% of the overall energy mix, versus 53.9% in 2023, the report said.

China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter and power consumer, is working towards having 80% of its total energy mix from non-fossil fuel sources by 2060, when it aims to become carbon neutral.

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Huge ambition – which of course China will reach because its rulers have decided that it must.
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French fiber optic cables cut in latest Olympics sabotage • Axios

Ivana Saric:

»

Fiber optic cables in several regions of France were cut overnight in what appears to be a coordinated act of sabotage, French service providers said Monday.

This is the second attack on French infrastructure in a matter of days, underscoring the security threats around the Paris Olympic Games. “A new major sabotage of long distance cables took place last night in France around 2:15 a.m.,” Nicolas Guillaume, CEO of internet service provider Netalis, wrote on X Monday.

A number of major French telecommunications providers — including SFR, Bouygues and Free — were impacted by the attack.

Six French regions — Bouches-du-Rhône, Aude, Oise, Hérault, Meuse and Drôme — were affected by the outages, Le Monde reported. Orange, the telecom provider for the Paris Games, was not affected in the attack, per Le Monde.

“I condemn in the strongest terms these cowardly and irresponsible acts,” Secretary of State for Digital Affairs Marina Ferrari wrote on X Monday. Ferrari confirmed the attack damaged fiber optic lines, as well as telephone and mobile phone lines, in several departments.

«

Quite the series of attacks. What’s next – electricity? Water? Sewerage? I guess the French security services will be thinking of all of those. And only have the entire country to cover.
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People are overdosing on off-brand weight-loss drugs, FDA warns • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

»

In an alert Friday, the FDA warned that people are overdosing on off-brand injections of semaglutide, which are dispensed from compounding pharmacies in a variety of concentrations, labeled with various units of measurement, administered with improperly sized syringes, and prescribed with bad dosage math. The errors are leading some patients to take up to 20 times the amount of intended semaglutide, the FDA reports.

Though the agency doesn’t offer a tally of overdose cases that have been reported, it suggests it has received multiple reports of people sickened by dosing errors, with some requiring hospitalizations. Semaglutide overdoses cause nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, fainting, headache, migraine, dehydration, acute pancreatitis, and gallstones, the agency reports.

In typical situations, compounding pharmacies provide personalized formulations of FDA-approved drugs, for instance, if a patient is allergic to a specific ingredient, requires a special dosage, or needs a liquid version of a drug instead of a pill form. But, when commercially available drugs are in short supply—as semaglutide drugs currently are—then compound pharmacies can legally step in to make their own versions if certain conditions are met. However, these imitations are not FDA-approved and, as such, don’t come with the same safety, quality, and effectiveness assurances as approved drugs.

In the warning Friday, the FDA said that some patients received confusing instructions from compounding pharmacies, which indicated they inject themselves with a certain number of “units” of semaglutide—the volume of which may vary depending on the concentration—rather than milligrams or milliliters. In other instances, patients received U-100 (1-milliliter) syringes to administer 0.05-milliliter doses of the drug, or five units. The relatively large syringe size compared with the dose led some patients to administer 50 units instead of five.

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Update on the Sonos app from Patrick [Spence, CEO] • Sonos Blog

Patrick Spence is the CEO:

»

We know that too many of you have experienced significant problems with our new app which rolled out on May 7, and I want to begin by personally apologizing for disappointing you. There isn’t an employee at Sonos who isn’t pained by having let you down, and I assure you that fixing the app for all of our customers and partners has been and continues to be our number one priority.

We developed the new app to create a better experience, with the ability to drive more innovation in the future, and with the knowledge that it would get better over time. However, since launch we have found a number of issues. Fixing these issues has delayed our prior plan to quickly incorporate missing features and functionality.

Since May 7, we have released new software updates approximately every two weeks, each making significant and meaningful improvements, adding features and fixing bugs. Please see the release notes for Sonos software updates for detailed information on what has been released to date.

While these software updates have enabled the majority of our customers to have a robust experience using the Sonos app, there is more work to be done.

</blockquote

This is going to make a really interesting business study one day. It’s obvious to anyone who uses the new app in comparison with the old one that the new version is slower (because of changes made to the back end) and more puzzling (the UI has changed) without some necessary features (alarms weren’t in the original update). So why did nobody speak up? Where was the beta testing? The feedback? Spence should be worried that nobody brought the bad news up to him: it speaks to a flawed internal culture. What other bad news isn’t reaching him?
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Samsung’s foldables aren’t quite flying off the shelves this year • Android Police

Sanuj Bhatia:

»

While the Samsung Galaxy Ring may have already sold out in the US, Samsung seems to be facing struggles with its new Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Galaxy Z Flip 6, particularly in its home market of South Korea. According to a new report, Samsung is experiencing a drop in pre-orders for both foldable devices compared to last year’s models.

The Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Z Flip 6 were available for pre-order in multiple markets, including South Korea, but it seems Samsung has received fewer pre-orders for the new foldables compared to the Z Fold 5 and Z Flip 5. According to a report from The Korea Herald (via GSMArena), Samsung received only 910,000 pre-orders for the new foldables in South Korea. This is nearly a 10% decline from last year when Samsung received a record 1.02 million pre-orders.

Despite the low sales numbers, not all is bad for Samsung. The report notes that Samsung has made strides with younger consumers. It states that buyers in their 20s and 30s, which is Samsung’s “target audience,” accounted for nearly 50% of the pre-orders. This is an increase from 43% last year.

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Hmm.. (nearly) 50% of 0.91m is 455,000. By contrast 43% of 1.02m is 440,000. So they’ve got 15,000 extra preorders from people under 40.

Foldables still aren’t a thing.
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Removing the music makes the ‘Firestarter’ video even creepier • The Verge

Rich McCormick:

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The Prodigy’s video for seminal ’90s dance hit Firestarter was always unsettling. But remove the music, replace the siren-like samples, and strip away the cycling bass loop, and you’re left with something even weirder. By turns hilarious and somehow creepier than the original video, Mario Wienerroither’s “Musicless Musicvideo” scores Keith Flint’s restless underground jittering with the sound of shuffling, sneezing, and unexpected subway trains.

Wienerroither has also produced musicless videos for Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, and Queen’s I Want To Break Free, but the most popular take on the concept so far has been YouTube user Moto2h’s 2012 version of Gangnam Style.

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This is just over ten years old, but I’d never seen it before. And yet it’s indeed peculiar, and faintly unsettling. (The sound effects are added, but clever for all that.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

While Sonos’s hardware remains popular, the rewrite of its app is universally unpopular. What was changed, and why? CC-licensed photo by The Unwinder on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

OpenAI just released SearchGPT. It’s already error prone • The Atlantic

Matteo Wong:

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On Thursday afternoon, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, announced a prototype AI tool that can search the web and answer questions, fittingly called SearchGPT. The launch is designed to hint at how AI will transform the ways in which people navigate the internet—except that, before users have had a chance to test the new program, it already appears error prone.

In a prerecorded demonstration video accompanying the announcement, a mock user types music festivals in boone north carolina in august into the SearchGPT interface. The tool then pulls up a list of festivals that it states are taking place in Boone this August, the first being An Appalachian Summer Festival, which according to the tool is hosting a series of arts events from July 29 to August 16 of this year. Someone in Boone hoping to buy tickets to one of those concerts, however, would run into trouble. In fact, the festival started on June 29 and will have its final concert on July 27. Instead, July 29–August 16 are the dates for which the festival’s box office will be officially closed. (I confirmed these dates with the festival’s box office.)

Other results to the festival query that appear in the demo—a short video of about 30 seconds—seem to be correct. (The chatbot does list one festival that takes place in Asheville, which is a two-hour drive away from Boone.) Kayla Wood, a spokesperson for OpenAI, told me, “This is an initial prototype, and we’ll keep improving it.”

…The demo is reminiscent of any other number of AI self-owns that have happened in recent years. Within days of OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT, which kicked off the generative-AI boom in November 2022, the chatbot spewed sexist and racist bile. In February of 2023, Google Bard, the search giant’s answer to ChatGPT, made an error in its debut that caused the company’s shares to plummet by as much as 9% that day. More than a year later, when Google rolled out AI-generated answers to the search bar, the model told people that eating rocks is healthy and that Barack Obama is Muslim.

Herein lies one of the biggest problems with tech companies’ prophecies about an AI change: Chatbots are supposed to revolutionize first the internet and then the physical world. For now they can’t properly copy-paste from a music festival’s website.

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This machine exposes privacy violations • WIRED

Brian Merchant:

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When you search for where to get an abortion, is sensitive data being tracked and collected? Unfortunately, very possibly so. Is an addiction treatment page or trans porn site exposing your IP address? Quite likely. Countless websites (truly countless—the scope, as we shall see, is nearly incomprehensible) are shipping private data about your web activity directly to the tech giants’ doorsteps. Thanks in part to the efforts of privacy researchers like Libert, we know this already, have known we’re being tracked for years—yet we lack knowledge of the specifics, and we lack agency, so this sea of privacy violations becomes another Bad Thing that happens on an internet teeming with them.

A lot of this leaking data is not just potentially embarrassing, or perhaps harmful to career prospects if it were to be made public, but outright illegal. Over the past half-decade, the European Union, a number of US states, and other governments around the world have enacted laws that restrict what kind of data websites can collect, or require a company to receive consent from a user before it does so. Every day, tech companies may violate those laws when, say, search engines and medical websites trample HIPAA by allowing search logs of users’ ailments to be tracked, documented, and sometimes monetized by companies like Google, or running roughshod over consent rules by turning a blind eye to advertising cookies embedded in publishers’ websites.

This, [Tim] Libert says, is why he developed webXray, a crude prototype of which he’s demoing for me right now. It’s a search engine for rooting out specific privacy violations anywhere on the web. By searching for a specific term or website, you can use webXray to see which sites are tracking you, and where all that data goes. Its mission, he says, is simple; “I want to give privacy enforcers equal technology as privacy violators.” To level the playing field.

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The webXray page is interesting – example searches include “pages on the CDC [Centers for Disease Control] website that expose visitor IP addresses to Google”. Very focused on Google. Now do it for Facebook/Meta.
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Hiker lost on US mountain ignored calls from rescuers because he didn’t recognise the number • The Guardian

Samantha Lock, in 2021:

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The hiker was reported missing around 8pm on 18 October after failing to return to where he was staying, Lake county search and rescue said.

Repeated attempts to contact the man through calls, texts and voicemail messages went ignored, according to a statement released by the agency.

Five rescue team members were deployed at around 10pm to search “high probability areas” on from Mount Elbert but returned around 3am the following morning after failing to locate the missing hiker on the 4401 metre-high (14,440ft) peak.

A second team set out at 7am the next day to search areas where hikers “typically lose the trail” only to discover the man had returned to his place of lodging about 9:30am.

The hiker told authorities he had lost his way around nightfall and “bounced around on to different trails trying to locate the proper trailhead” before finally reaching his car the next morning, about 24 hours after setting out on the hike.

Lake county search and rescue said the man reported having “no idea” anyone was out looking for him.

“One notable take-away is that the subject ignored repeated phone calls from us because they didn’t recognise the number,” the agency added.

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One would imagine things have only got worse in the three years since.
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Automakers sold driver data for pennies, senators say • The New York Times

Kashmir Hill:

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If you drive a car made by General Motors (GM) and it has an internet connection, your car’s movements and exact location are being collected and shared anonymously with a data broker.

This practice, disclosed in a letter sent by Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts to the Federal Trade Commission on Friday, is yet another way in which automakers are tracking drivers, often without their knowledge.

Previous reporting in The New York Times, which the letter cited, revealed how automakers including GM, Honda and Hyundai collected information about drivers’ behaviour, such as how often they slammed on the brakes, accelerated rapidly and exceeded the speed limit. It was then sold to the insurance industry, which used it to help gauge individual drivers’ riskiness.

…One of the surprising findings of an investigation by Mr. Wyden’s office was just how little the automakers made from selling driving data. According to the letter, Verisk paid Honda $25,920 over four years for information about 97,000 cars, or 26 cents per car. Hyundai was paid just over $1m, or 61 cents per car, over six years.

GM would not reveal how much it had been paid, Mr. Wyden’s office said. People familiar with GM’s program previously told The Times that driving behavior data had been shared from more than eight million cars, with the company making an amount in the low millions of dollars from the sale. G.M. also previously shared data with LexisNexis Risk Solutions.

“Companies should not be selling Americans’ data without their consent, period,” the letter from Senators Wyden and Markey stated. “But it is particularly insulting for automakers that are selling cars for tens of thousands of dollars to then squeeze out a few additional pennies of profit with consumers’ private data.”

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I tried Apple Vision Pro and it made me rethink everything • Macworld

David Price:

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I was surprised by how complex the fitting process is, and how tricky it can be to get set up with the optimal Light Seal and headband; a facial scan is supposed to help with this, but my first seal had to be sent back and replaced. Then simply tightening the straps up just the right amount so the weight is distributed comfortably across your forehead and cheeks is more challenging than you might expect, and took some time and various checks before everything was arranged exactly right. This might seem like a complaint, but I was impressed by the commitment and patience shown to make sure the product was at its very best for the demo.

Because it really was worth the wait. Using Vision Pro is an odd experience but an utterly immersive one, thanks to the carefully calibrated fit and exceptionally high-quality hardware. There were several moments in the demo where I gasped, or laughed, or looked around excitedly like a tourist, simply because the headset does such a good job of making you feel like you’re inside its media. The spatial home movies of strangers could have felt artificial (anyone who’s seen the troubling 1995 thriller Strange Days will know roughly what I mean), but the effect is so compelling that it made me think about my own memories and what it would be like to relive them in this format. It was oddly poignant.

…Apple’s patient assistant had to metaphorically hold my hand, since I suspect the interface would have been baffling without assistance. Moving over the years from iPod to iPhone, from iPad to Apple Watch, has always felt like a natural and intuitive evolution, but the Vision Pro is completely new.

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Like me, Price thinks that sports and similar passive content are going to be the real winners here. That, though, depends on Apple actually getting on and capturing some content.
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Steve Jobs knew the moment the future had arrived. It’s calling again • WIRED

Steven Levy:

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Steve Jobs is 28 years old, and seems a little nervous as he starts his speech to a group of designers gathered under a large tent in Aspen, Colorado. He fiddles with his bow tie and soon removes his suit jacket, dropping it to the floor when he finds no other place to set it down. It is 1983, and he’s about to ask designers for their help in improving the look of the coming wave of personal computers. But first he will tell them that those computers will shatter the lives they have led to date.

“How many of you are 36 years … older than 36?” he asks. That’s how old the computer is, he says. But even the younger people in the room, including himself, are sort of “precomputer,” members of the television generation. A distinct new generation, he says, is emerging: “In their lifetimes, the computer will be the predominant medium of communication.”

Quite a statement at the time, considering that very few of the audience, according to Jobs’ impromptu polling, owns a personal computer or has even seen one. Jobs tells the designers that they not only will soon use one, but it will be indispensable, and deeply woven into the fabric of their lives.

The video of this speech is the centerpiece of an online exhibit called The Objects of Our Life, presented by the Steve Jobs Archive, the ambitious history project devoted to telling the story of Apple’s fabled cofounder. When the exhibit went live earlier this month—after the discovery of a long-forgotten VHS tape in Jobs’ personal collection—I found it not only a compelling reminder of the late CEO, but pertinent to our own time, when another new technology is arriving with equal promise and peril.

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That “another new technology” being, in Levy’s view, AI. And that’s probably true, in a sense. But it’s hard to say that Jobs can offer us much more guidance than Douglas Adams’s quote about technologies.
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No, Southwest Airlines is not still using Windows 3.1 • OSnews

Thom Holwerda:

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A story that’s been persistently making the rounds since the CrowdStrike event is that while several airline companies were affected in one way or another, Southwest Airlines escaped the mayhem because they were still using windows 3.1. It’s a great story that fits the current zeitgeist about technology and its role in society, underlining that what is claimed to be technological progress is nothing but trouble, and that it’s better to stick with the old. At the same time, anybody who dislikes Southwest Airlines can point and laugh at the bumbling idiots working there for still using Windows 3.1. It’s like a perfect storm of technology news click and ragebait.

Too bad the whole story is nonsense.

…Let’s start with the actual source of the claim that Southwest Airlines was unaffected by CrowdStrike because they’re still using Windows 3.11 for large parts of their primary systems. This claim is easily traced back to its origin – a tweet by someone called Artem Russakovskii, stating that “the reason Southwest is not affected is because they still run on Windows 3.1”. This tweet formed the basis for virtually all of the stories, but it contains no sources, no links, no background information, nothing. It was literally just this one line.

It turned out be a troll tweet.

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But but but! While Holwerda is very happy to discredit everyone who believed this and didn’t check it (OK, guilty), he doesn’t go the extra step and answer the question: fine, so it’s not Windows 3.1. So which OS is it based around? We don’t know. Turns out the reason it wasn’t affected is.. Southwest Airlines doesn’t use Crowdstrike. (Thanks Seth F for the link.)
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New Zealand “deeply shocked” after Canada drone-spied on its Olympic practices—twice • Ars Technica

Nate Anderson:

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On July 22, the New Zealand women’s football (soccer) team was training in Saint-Étienne, France, for its upcoming Olympics matchup against Canada when team officials noticed a drone hovering near the practice pitch. Suspecting skullduggery, the New Zealand squad called the local police, and gendarmes located and then detained the nearby drone operator. He turned out to be one Joseph Lombardi, an “unaccredited analyst with Canada Soccer”—and he was apparently spying on the New Zealand practice and relaying information to a Canadian assistant coach.

On July 23, the New Zealand Olympic Committee put out a statement saying it was “deeply shocked and disappointed by this incident, which occurred just three days before the sides are due to face each other in their opening game of Paris 2024.” It also complained to the official International Olympic Committee integrity unit.

Early today, July 24, the Canadian side issued its own statement saying that it “stands for fair-play and we are shocked and disappointed. We offer our heartfelt apologies to New Zealand Football, to all the players affected, and to the New Zealand Olympic Committee.”

Later in the day, a follow-up Canadian statement revealed that this was actually the second drone-spying incident; the New Zealand side had also been watched by drone at its July 19 practice.

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As a result, Canada has been docked six points, which might mean it won’t make it out of the group stage to defend its gold medal. But would it have been worse if they’d been peeking through a gap in the fence? Does using a drone make the offence worse?
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What happened to the Sonos app? A technical analysis • LinkedIn

Andy Pennell:

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Sonos have been mostly in denial as to how bad things are, with the app release officially described as “courageous” – well, pissing off a sizable chunk of your existing user base could be called that, I guess. An immediate revert to the old version would have been my suggestion.

Also thanks to the device discovery problems, not only are existing users frustrated with the app not working, but new users who get their shiny Sonos device out of the box and then can’t get the app to work are just going to put it back in the box and return it.

The new app shipped with a lot of features missing from the old app (never a good idea), but over the last two months some of those features have returned in various updates. However Queue management is still AWOL, and that was a key Sonos feature. (It’s also a UX challenge, handling a list of over 30,000 items that can change at any time in a performant way).

While device discovery remains a crapshoot for many, the app store scores are likely to stay in the 1.0 range that they have fallen to in the last two months.

…As many have discovered, the Sonos speakers themselves are still working fine, despite the contrary impression the new mobile apps may give. You can verify this by using the official Desktop apps (which are feature-frozen), or third party software like SonoPhone (for iOS ) or my own Phonos Universal (for Windows/Xbox ). All of these apps use the UPnP APIs, which still work great, for the moment anyway. However, Sonos have stated that they want to deprecate their desktop apps at some unspecific point in the future. If they do, they can then remove UPnP support from the speakers, killing the entire third-party ecosystem built around their products. That would be “courageous” indeed.

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A great writeup of why the Sonos app has suddenly got absolutely terrible: they threw away both the front end and the back end for the rewrite.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The modern version of the Apollo moon missions, called Artemis, is wildly expensive – and might kill the crew on reentry. Why is it going ahead? CC-licensed photo by Kevin Gill on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 10 links for you. The real moonshot. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

OpenAI training and inference costs could reach $7bn for 2024, AI startup set to lose $5bn – report • DCD

Sebastian Moss:

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OpenAI is set to spend billions of dollars on training and inference this year, and may be forced to raise more money to cover growing losses.

The Information reports that, as of March, the company was set to spend nearly $4bn this year on using Microsoft’s servers to run inference workloads for ChatGPT.

A person familiar with the matter told the publication that OpenAI has the equivalent of 350,000 servers containing Nvidia A100 chips for inference, with around 290,000 of those servers used for ChatGPT. The hardware is being run at near full capacity.

Training ChatGPT as well as new models could cost as much as $3bn this year, according to financial documents seen by the publication. The company has ramped up the training of new AI faster than it had originally planned.

For both inference and training, OpenAI gets heavily discounted rates from Microsoft Azure. Microsoft has charged OpenAI about $1.30 per A100 server per hour, way below normal rates.

The company now employs about 1,500 people, which could cost $1.5bn as it continues to grow, The Information estimates – OpenAI had originally projected workforce costs of $500m for 2023 while doubling headcount to around 800 by the end of that year.

The company is bringing in about $2bn annually from ChatGPT, and could be set to bring in nearly $1bn from charging access to LLMs.

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The Information’s numbers might be off a little, but they’d have to be a long way off for this not to be in the ballpark. A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking serious money.

Unanswered question: how does OpenAI ramp up its income and reduce its costs?
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AOC’s deepfake AI porn bill unanimously passes the Senate • Rolling Stone

Lorena O’Neil:

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The Senate unanimously passed a bipartisan bill to provide recourse to victims of porn deepfakes — or sexually-explicit, non-consensual images created with artificial intelligence. 

The legislation, called the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits (DEFIANCE) Act — passed in Congress’ upper chamber on Tuesday.  The legislation has been led by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), as well as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in the House.

The legislation would amend the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) to allow people to sue those who produce, distribute, or receive the deepfake pornography, if they “knew or recklessly disregarded” the fact that the victim did not consent to those images.

“Current laws don’t apply to deepfakes, leaving women and girls who suffer from this image-based sexual abuse without a legal remedy,” Durbin posted on X after the bill’s passage. “It’s time to give victims their day in court and the tools they need to fight back. I urge my House colleagues to pass this bill expediently.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) praised the bill’s passage, commending Durbing for his work. “This isn’t just some fringe issue that happens to only a few people — it’s a widespread problem,” said Schumer.

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This is interesting, and impressive – AOC getting absolutely everyone in the Senate to pass a bill? Sure, it has plenty of hurdles to jump in the lower House, but the mark of a good politician is being able to get legislation passed. On that measure, she’s extraordinary, succeeding where (as the story points out) others have failed.
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Israel tried to frustrate US lawsuit over Pegasus spyware, leak suggests • The Guardian

Harry Davies and Stephanie Kirchgaessner:

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The Israeli government took extraordinary measures to frustrate a high-stakes US lawsuit that threatened to reveal closely guarded secrets about one of the world’s most notorious hacking tools, leaked files suggest.

Israeli officials seized documents about Pegasus spyware from its manufacturer, NSO Group, in an effort to prevent the company from being able to comply with demands made by WhatsApp in a US court to hand over information about the invasive technology.

Documents suggest the seizures were part of an unusual legal manoeuvre created by Israel to block the disclosure of information about Pegasus, which the government believed would cause “serious diplomatic and security damage” to the country.

Pegasus allows NSO clients to infect smartphones with hidden software that can extract messages and photos, record calls and secretly activate microphones. NSO’s clients have included both authoritarian regimes and democratic countries and the technology has been linked to human rights abuses around the world.

Since late 2019, NSO has been battling a lawsuit in the US brought by WhatsApp, which has alleged the Israeli company used a vulnerability in the messaging service to target more than 1,400 of its users in 20 countries over a two-week period. NSO has denied the allegations.

The removal of files and computers from NSO’s offices in July 2020 – until now hidden from the public by a strict gag order issued by an Israeli court – casts new light on the close ties between Israel and NSO and the overlapping interests of the privately owned surveillance company and the country’s security establishment.

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Hard not to think that the Israeli government finds the existence of NSO Group, and Pegasus in particular, very useful for its own purposes.
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The lunacy of Artemis • Idle Words

Maciej Cieglewski:

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If you believe NASA, late in 2026 Americans will walk on the moon again. That proposed mission is called Artemis 3, and its lunar segment looks a lot like Apollo 17 without the space car. Two astronauts will land on the moon, collect rocks, take selfies, and about a week after landing rejoin their orbiting colleagues to go back to Earth.

But where Apollo 17 launched on a single rocket and cost $3.3bn (in 2023 dollars), the first Artemis landing involves a dozen or two heavy rocket launches and costs so much that NASA refuses to give a figure (one veteran of NASA budgeting estimates it at $7-10bn). The single-use lander for the mission will be the heaviest spacecraft ever flown, and yet the mission’s scientific return—a small box of rocks—is less than what came home on Apollo 17. And the whole plan hinges on technologies that haven’t been invented yet becoming reliable and practical within the next eighteen months.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to wonder what’s going on here. If we can put a man on the moon, then why can’t we just go do it again? The moon hasn’t changed since the 1960’s, while every technology we used to get there has seen staggering advances. It took NASA eight years to go from nothing to a moon landing at the dawn of the Space Age. But today, 20 years and $93bn after the space agency announced our return to the moon, the goal seems as far out of reach as ever.

Articles about Artemis often give the program’s tangled backstory. But I want to talk about Artemis as a technical design, because there’s just so much to drink in. While NASA is no stranger to complex mission architectures, Artemis goes beyond complex to the just plain incoherent. None of the puzzle pieces seem to come from the same box. Half the program requires breakthrough technologies that make the other half unnecessary. The rocket and spacecraft NASA spent two decades building can’t even reach the moon. And for reasons no one understands, there’s a new space station in the mix.

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That’s not the worst of it: the heat shield has a flawed thermal model and might simply kill the crew on reentry.
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Wexton makes history as first member to use AI voice on House floor • CNN via MSN

Danya Gainor and Haley Talbot:

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Democratic Rep. Jennifer Wexton of Virginia made history Thursday as the first lawmaker to use an artificial intelligence-generated model of her voice to speak for her on the House floor.

“My battle with progressive supranuclear palsy, or PSP, has robbed me of my ability to use my full voice and move around in the ways that I used to, rather than striding confidently onto the House floor to vote,” Wexton said on the floor through the AI model.

Wexton had announced in September that she will not seek reelection, citing her health challenges, which she said she anticipates will worsen.

“I rely on a walker to get around and in all likelihood before my term ends, I will appear on the House floor for votes in a wheelchair,” she said Thursday.

Wexton is the first member to use an augmentative and alternative communication device on the House floor.

When she first heard the AI rendition of her voice, Wexton called it “music to my ears.”

“It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard, and I cried tears of joy,” she said.

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A very scary disease; a good use for AI voice recreation.
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How music lost its value • Fast Company

Joe Berkowitz:

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A new documentary from Paramount+, How Music Got Free, tells the inside story of how albums shed their exoskeletons and became something more ethereal and less profitable. Produced by LeBron James and Eminem, who rode the tail end of the CD boom to stratospheric heights, the film explores the music industry’s spectacular implosion about two seconds later. But while it traces the overarching business story in forensic detail, How Music Got Free doesn’t quite capture what it felt like to be a music fan living through this extraordinary moment as it unfolded.

Well before Steve Jobs promised to put a thousand songs in our pockets — and well, well before a thousand songs seemed like a relative pittance next to the infinite expanse of a Spotify account — the peak of musical mobility was a book of CDs. It was the only way to bring along a curated sample of your entire library of albums wherever you went. In the early days of the pandemic, I found an old book of CDs I’d collected during the era that How Music Got Free spans: half of them bought, half burned. Revisiting it in 2020 revealed all we’ve lost since it was my main source for music—and may explain why some older music formats are making a comeback.

…Deep inside my old book of CDs lay the first burned one I ever acquired. A friend had copied for me the new (and ultimately final) studio album from Rage Against the Machine, 1999’s Battle of Los Angeles, in exchange for burning one of mine for himself. Listening in 2020, I felt all over again the palpable excitement of getting a brand-new album for free from a band I’d adored. It had felt like getting away with something on a deeper level than Columbia House — because it was.

That excitement had been short-lived, though. I never had the album art for Battle of Los Angeles. Not even the usual CD-face art adorning all its neighbors in the CD book. The band’s name and album title were instead scrawled in my squiggly teenage handwriting. In place of the vibe its cover was meant to conjure, I had information; instead of enjoyment, I had ingestion; in place of the connection forged by trading money for art, I had the fading flash of attainment.

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Smear campaigns and false narratives: how the crypto lobby seeks to influence US politics • Amy Castor

Jake Donoghue:

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Earlier this month, crypto skeptic Molly White launched a website – followthecrypto.org – providing real-time data of crypto election campaign financing. It shows that, to date, the cryptocurrency sector has raised more than $187m for the ironically named “Fairshake” super PAC and its affiliates. 

These committees have wasted no time putting these funds to use, with their notable outgoings including a successful $10m smear campaign against progressive Democrat Katie Porter to keep her out of the Senate. 

Coinbase, the largest US crypto exchange, is the biggest contributor to Fairshake’s war chest, with $46.5m in donations. They’re also leading the lobbying charge on another front: In 2023, the industry behemoth hired market research firm Morning Consult to find out how many Americans own cryptocurrencies. As soon as the results came in, [crypto market] Coinbase sprang into action, launching a major campaign to “mobilize 52 million crypto owners into an army of one million advocates for change.” 

This spurious and misleading figure – which equates to 20% of the nation’s entire adult population – is at stark variance with data from the US Federal Reserve. Specifically, the Fed’s Economic Well-Being of US Households survey. 

Published in May, the Fed’s report not only showed the percentage of US crypto holders to be far lower than that cited by Coinbase – 7% of the population, nearly two-thirds less than Morning Consult’s findings – but also that the number of holders is actually in decline, having fallen by 5% from 2021.

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As much as anything, this goes to show that crypto advocates are desperate to make people think there are more of them than there are. But also that a few of them have a ridiculous amount of money.
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From online drug lord to crypto entrepreneur, Blake Benthall is back in business • The New York Times

Ryan Mac and Kashmir Hill:

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At a cryptocurrency convention in Austin in May, Blake Emerson Benthall hustled for investor money alongside scores of other entrepreneurs. But none of them, it is safe to say, could pitch their experience as the leader of a multimillion-dollar criminal drug enterprise.

In the convention’s “Deal Flow Zone,” Mr. Benthall, 5-foot-4, cleanshaven and wearing a gray tee with his start-up’s logo, turned his laptop around at a lunch table and began giving his spiel to a bespectacled potential investor.

“I’m a lifelong entrepreneur,” Mr. Benthall said as he clicked through a presentation that detailed how he had run Silk Road 2.0, the second iteration of the infamous online bazaar where 1.7 million anonymous customers signed up and used Bitcoin to buy methamphetamine, heroin and other illegal substances. He recounted his eventual arrest by the F.B.I. and the years he spent in the punitive employ of the federal government.

Now, with his sentence served and probation ended, Mr. Benthall, 36, is promoting a new business: a two-year-old start-up, Fathom(x), which aims to provide businesses and government agencies with software to track digital currency transactions and ensure legal compliance.

Mr. Benthall knows it’s rich for an ex-con to school companies about compliance. But in an industry crawling with hucksters and overnight experts, Mr. Benthall says his criminal experience can help unmask fraud before it leads to another scam like FTX, the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange whose founder is in prison.

«

“Trust me, I’ve been dishonest” is quite the pitch.
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Ulez expansion led to significant drop in air pollutants in London, report finds • The Guardian

Gwyn Topham:

»

Levels of harmful air pollutants have dropped significantly since the ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) was enlarged to cover Greater London last year, according to a report from city hall.

Analysis covering the first six months since the Ulez expansion found that total emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) from cars across London were 13% lower than projected had the scheme remained confined to inner London, while NOx from vans was 7% lower.

Levels of particulate pollution in the form of PM2.5 exhaust emissions from cars in outer London are an estimated 22% lower than without the expansion. The total change was equivalent to removing 200,000 cars from the road for one year, the report said.

London’s air quality was continuing to improve at a faster rate than the rest of England, with the capital’s pollution rapidly approaching levels seen across the country, it found.

Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, extended Ulez from the inner London boroughs across the whole of London in August 2023. The move was bitterly opposed by many in outer London with a number of Conservative-led councils taking legal action.

The most polluting cars must normally pay a £12.50 charge each day they are driven in the capital. Only a minority of cars on the road are affected, with most petrol cars under 19 years old and diesel cars under nine years old exempt.

The proportion of non-compliant vehicles entering the expanded Ulez halved to less than 4% in February, compared with more than 8% detected on London’s roads last June. About 90,000 fewer non-compliant vehicles were detected daily on average each day in the zone.

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The full report (with spreadsheet) is on the London government page. Vehicle pollution has halved over the past 10 years.
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“Brat” explained by a veteran journalist who has to accept whatever assignment we give him • I Might Be Wrong

Jacob Fuzetti, who “wrote an award-winning biography of Lech Walesa and whose dispatches from Afghanistan are considered the definitive account of that war, and who now works for a man who thinks that it’s hilarious to photoshop fake breasts onto ET”, under the instruction, so to speak, of Jeff Maurer:

»

This week, Benjamin Netanyahu toured the U.S., a software failure threw the global economy into chaos, and a singer called Kamala Harris “brat”. I begged my editor to assign me to one of the first two stories, but he assigned me to the “brat” story. So, I will attempt to elucidate the meaning of “brat”, place that meaning into context, and to do all that without collapsing into utter despair over the state of journalism and also my life.

“Brat” — pronounced like the word meaning “unruly child”, and not like the German sausage — is a word repurposed by a British “popular music” star known as Charli [sic] XCX. Despite the masculine first name, Ms. XCX is female, and her honorific is pronounced “ex, see, ex” — the letters do not connote Roman numerals. Last month, Ms. XCX released a record album entitled “Brat”, and The Guardian reports that “brat” also refers to “a lifestyle inspired by noughties excess.” The meaning of that phrase could not be determined as of press time.

I feel compelled to report that I consider the information in the preceding paragraph undersourced. My primary source is my grand-nephew Stewie, who was kind enough to talk to me on the phone even though he was “tripping balls on edibles”.

«

I mean, this is how a lot of the coverage read.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Golf fans were able to follow last week’s open via a detailed VR system with every detail of holes such as Royal Troon’s “Postage Stamp”. CC-licensed photo by easylocum 2.0 on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

AI models fed AI-generated data quickly spew nonsense • Nature

Elizabeth Gibney:

»

Training artificial intelligence (AI) models on AI-generated text quickly leads to the models churning out nonsense, a study has found. This cannibalistic phenomenon, termed model collapse, could halt the improvement of large language models (LLMs) as they run out of human-derived training data and as increasing amounts of AI-generated text pervade the Internet.

“The message is we have to be very careful about what ends up in our training data,” says co-author Zakhar Shumaylov, an AI researcher at the University of Cambridge, UK. Otherwise “things will always, provably, go wrong,” he says.” The team used a mathematical analysis to show that the problem of model collapse is likely to be universal, affecting all sizes of language model that use uncurated data, as well as simple image generators and other types of AI.

The researchers began by using an LLM to create Wikipedia-like entries, then trained new iterations of the model on text produced by its predecessor. As the AI-generated information — known as synthetic data — polluted the training set, the model’s outputs became gibberish. The ninth iteration of the model completed a Wikipedia-style article about English church towers with a treatise on the many colours of jackrabbit tails (see ‘AI gibberish’).

More subtly, the study, published in Nature1 on 24 July, showed that even before complete collapse, learning from AI-derived texts caused models to forget the information mentioned least frequently in their data sets as their outputs became more homogeneous.

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There’s a neat illustration of this, in visual terms, on the story.
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CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage • TechCrunch

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:

»

CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that crashed millions of computers with a botched update all over the world last week, is offering its partners a $10 Uber Eats gift card as an apology, according to several people who say they received the gift card, as well as a source who also received one.

On Tuesday, a source told TechCrunch that they received an email from CrowdStrike offering them the gift card because the company recognizes “the additional work that the July 19 incident has caused.” 

“And for that, we send our heartfelt thanks and apologies for the inconvenience,” the email read, according to a screenshot shared by the source. The same email was also posted on X by someone else. “To express our gratitude, your next cup of coffee or late night snack is on us!”

The email was sent from a CrowdStrike email address in the name of Daniel Bernard, the company’s chief business officer, according to a screenshot of the email seen by TechCrunch. According to one post on X, in the United Kingdom the voucher was worth £7.75, or roughly $10 at today’s exchange rate.

On Wednesday, some of the people who posted about the gift card said that when they went to redeem the offer, they got an error message saying the voucher had been canceled. When TechCrunch checked the voucher, the Uber Eats page provided an error message that said the gift card “has been canceled by the issuing party and is no longer valid.”

CrowdStrike spokesperson Kevin Benacci confirmed to TechCrunch that the company sent the gift cards.

“We did send these to our teammates and partners who have been helping customers through this situation. Uber flagged it as fraud because of high usage rates,” Benacci said in an email.

«

When it rains, it pours. Though this is more like a shower after a hurricane.
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Microsoft’s China-based AI staff face relocation decision deadline • Rest of World

Viola Zhou:

»

Alan, a young engineer at Microsoft, has been living a comfortable life in Beijing working for the tech giant on cloud computing. He earns six times the average income in the city, allowing him to dine out frequently and take taxis whenever he wants. 

But Microsoft is now asking Alan to start a new life across the Pacific. For the past two months, he’s been weighing up a request made to hundreds of Chinese employees who work on artificial intelligence and cloud computing to consider relocating to places including Canada, Australia, or Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

Alan, who spoke under a pseudonym, received an offer to go to Vancouver, but he just couldn’t make up his mind. “No matter how comfortable Chinese people could be in Vancouver, it wouldn’t be as comfortable as Beijing,” he told Rest of World. 

…the kind of US-China tech collaboration Microsoft once pioneered might be facing an end. The Biden administration has blocked China from accessing chips used to develop AI technologies, proposed restrictions on tech investments in China, and threatened bans on Chinese-owned platforms like TikTok. In Washington, Microsoft’s presence in China is increasingly viewed as a national security threat.

…“Emigration is not that appealing to many Microsoft people in China,” a Beijing-based employee told Rest of World, after declining an offer to relocate to Vancouver. “If you deduct taxes, every place except Seattle may come with a pay cut compared to Beijing. The living quality would really suffer.”

While Microsoft says it makes about 1.5% of its global sales revenue in China, research contributions from its Chinese engineers are far more valuable to the company, Jean-Marc Blanchard, executive director of California-based think tank Wong MNC Center, told Rest of World.

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The ways people hear about big news these days: “into a million pieces,” says source • Nieman Journalism Lab

Joshua Benton:

»

Here’s an obviously incomplete list of some of the ways that Americans and others around the world heard the news [that Joe Biden was stepping aside].

A lifeguard on the loudspeaker at a D.C. pool
Live TV playing at the gym
A Twitter account that tracks whether or not Liza Minnelli has yet outlived a particular person or thing
A friend’s text with a link to The Guardian
Top-of-the-hour headlines on a public radio station
An “old-school message board”
Horny copypasta
Phone call from college-aged son while during housework
A New York Times push alert
A push alert at Whataburger
A text from someone sitting nearby at a Nationals game
The chat in a Twitch stream of a live crossword competition
In a discipleship class at church
In a bar-exam-prep Discord channel
From the happy screams of 100-plus women at a mass outdoor workout
Push alerts while taping a Dungeons & Dragons podcast
BBC push alert during a Dungeons & Dragons game
From the radio announcers at a Yankees game
From the radio announcers at a Mets game
An American Girl doll-themed Instagram meme account
From a Try Guy at a farmer’s market
“In a text from my husband…from across the room…because he didn’t want to say it out loud because we were at my conservative dad’s house for a family birthday party.”
A news alert on a patient’s Apple Watch mid-exam
A Discord notification: “It’s Kamencing”
The Twitter account of a Minecraft server
An Alexa notification
An email alert from The New York Times
“For the first time ever, Apple News push alert actually broke news to me”
A push alert in an ice cave
A spouse asking a smart speaker: “hey Google, who’s going to replace Joe Biden?”
“On a queer camping trip on the yuba river, a friend got an update text from her girlfriend that their pepper plant had new peppers on it…and also Joe Biden pulled out”
Overheard in an hour-long lobster-roll line in Maine
A text: “YOOOOOO”
Watching MSNBC
“From a reality TV Instagram account posting how the current Big Brother candidates won’t know that Biden dropped out of the race til October.”
“FB alert from a fellow journalist while sitting at a dog agility trial waiting to run my corgi”
Overheard at an art gallery
Wall Street Journal push notification while grocery shopping at Publix
Slack

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The data, networking and GenAI driving The British Open golf championship • Computer Weekly

Bryan Glick:

»

Typically, the temporary village set up to cater to the quarter of a million fans and the world’s broadcasters and media requires on-site links into the fibre backbone using standard Cat5 cabling that’s installed for the event and thrown away afterwards.

To replace this, NTT Data trialled the use of a private 5G “network in a box” at Troon, focused around the hospitality area. This required the short-term purchase of radio spectrum from telecoms regulator Ofcom – a requirement for any private 5G installation in the UK. But it meant that connectivity within its 2km range was available to any device with a suitable nanoSIM card, offering 400Mbps bandwidth.

The next generation of the networking equipment will offer eSIM capabilities, which means that fans visiting the Open could simply scan a QR code to activate eSim software to connect to the private 5G. That’s important to The R&A because they want to maximise fans’ engagement with the event – and the more they use the digital offerings available, the better.

For example, for the 150th Open in 2022, The R&A and NTT Data launched Shot View, a precise virtual representation of each course, which allows fans to track every shot played by the competing golfers using a digital twin that represents the actual trajectory of every shot, in as close to real-time as can be achieved.

Every one of The Open courses has been mapped using drones and Lidar scanning to capture every bump, bunker and slope to 2cm accuracy. During the championship, computer vision cameras set up at every hole track golf balls across the green, while 60 people around the course use GPS trackers to record the location on the fairway where every ball comes to rest.

All of that data is fed into a virtual reality (VR) environment running on Unreal Engine, one of the most popular gaming engines, to plot every movement of the ball. As players tee up at each hole, fans can use Shot View to see exactly how they played the hole on previous days, as well as keep up with what’s happening around the whole course.

«

Amazing – didn’t even know there was this app. It’s an amazing effort. And also, hello, Apple, can you see the possibilities of a VR environment following a golf tournament?
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The political economic determinants of nuclear power: evidence from Chernobyl • NBER

Alexey Makarin, Nancy Qian and Shaoda Wang:

»

The rapid growth in the number of nuclear power plants (NPP) declined dramatically after Chernobyl [in April 1986], especially in countries with democratic governments which had the highest number of NPPs at the time. To understand the mechanisms driving such change, we examine two case studies in detail: the United States and the United Kingdom.

In the US, we document that: (a) after the Chernobyl accident, campaign contributions to House and Senate races from fossil fuel special interest groups became strongly associated with negative votes on nuclear-related bills, and such donations increased significantly; and (b) newspapers with more fossil fuel advertisements published more anti-nuclear articles after Chernobyl, while we do not observe significant changes in advertisement spending by the fossil fuel industry.

In the UK, MPs sponsored by mining unions were much more likely to give anti-nuclear speeches in parliament after Chernobyl. We examine air pollution as a downstream outcome of reduced nuclear investment. We estimate that the decline in NPP caused by Chernobyl led to the loss of approximately 141 million expected life years in the US, 33 million in the UK and 318 million globally.

…Nuclear energy competes with and threatens the fossil fuel industry. This paper asks a simple question: did fossil-fuel special interests leverage the 1986 Chernobyl reactor meltdown and the public fear that it triggered to influence government policy against nuclear investment in the democracies with the most NPPs at the time?

«

It’s an academic study, but full of rigour for that reason. And concludes that fossil fuel interests did jump on the opportunity to diss nuclear post-Chernobyl (and then Fukushima in 2011).

Such a butterfly wing. Chernobyl’s chief wanted to run the safety test near the end of the month. But it couldn’t run the low-power test during the day because grid power was needed for factories meeting quotas. Which meant the test was run it at night with inexperienced operators, with the reactor in a state where the test itself was certain to fail – and by trying to make it happen, ran into an incredible edge case of the RBMK reactor design that could cause an explosion.

And nuclear power everywhere was stymied.
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Inrupt debuts data wallet as digital wallet use grows • Pymnts

»

Enterprise software firm Inrupt has introduced a digital wallet designed to hold user data.

Businesses and governments, the company wrote on its blog Tuesday (July 23), can use the technology to give customers and citizens a place to store their data.

“Over 60% of the world’s population is expected to use digital wallets regularly by 2026, and over half of consumers report interest in using them for a broader range of purposes,” the company said. “But the existing market has focused largely on financial transactions and is dominated by a handful of Big Tech vendors.”

The Data Wallet, Inrupt said, differs from alternatives by accepting a range of different data, and makes it easy for users to consent to access to their data. The company argued that the Data Wallet creates opportunities for organizations as the web pivots toward a “user-centric approach” to sharing, using and managing personal data.

“Browsers shaped the Web 1.0 era, and Web 2.0 was all about apps. But Web 3.0 is all about empowered individuals and personal data,” said Sir Tim Berners-Lee, co-founder of Inrupt and esteemed computer scientist.

(Berners-Lee is widely credited for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the building blocks that allowed the internet to scale.)

“The Data Wallet becomes a fundamental tool for users,” he added. “By making this key piece of technology available, Inrupt is ensuring that the opportunities and benefits of secure personal Data Wallets are open for everyone.”

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Yes, you were wondering what TBL had got up to. Look, it’s pretty hard to follow inventing the web and opening the 2012 Olympics.
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Google’s plan to get rid of cookies crumbles • Inc.com

Kit Eaton:

»

Google’s 2020 plan sounded simple. Cookies really work: they’re why you keep seeing ads for say, Stanley cups, after you click on a single ad for one online. [Why keep showing you an ad for something you already clicked an ad for? – Overspill Ed.] But by accruing extensive info on users’ browsing habits, cookies seemed more and more like a privacy nightmare, especially when comparing Google to rivals. Apple, in particular, shapes its brand identity around always placing customer privacy front and center.

At the time of its initial announcement, Google said cookies would go inside two years and be replaced by newer “privacy-preserving and open-standard” systems. The intended result? A “healthy ad-supported web” would exist, just as it did when third-party cookies were supported on Chrome, but with stronger privacy protections in place. The new tracking tech–which was always short on detail–would still allow targeted ads, but in a way that wouldn’t store as much user data.

The new “Privacy Sandbox” system sounded like a great thing for end users, who would enjoy increased privacy while using Chrome. But it also was potentially very bad news for digital advertisers because it could undo the effectiveness of targeting ads–simply because users’ interests, likes and habits weren’t being tracked as closely. 

The outcry from advertisers was the main reason Google subsequently failed to turn off cookies for four years after its initial promise, and why the company has changed its mind completely.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google’s U-turn was actually forced by “digital advertising companies and regulators.” There were numerous objections to the plan to end cookies and replace them with newer Google tech that worked in the company’s Privacy Sandbox. When Google began a trial switching off a tiny fraction of Chrome users’ cookies in January this year, research by Adobe found that 75% of marketers were shunning a raft of alternative ad-tracking systems, and were still relying on traditional cookies.

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So, in short, inertia, and leverage. Not even Google can – or wants to – stand up to the might of the digital advertising lobby.
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There are no good options left with bird flu • The Atlantic

Yasmin Tayag:

»

Of all the news about bird flu, this month has brought some of the most concerning yet. Six people working on a chicken farm in Colorado have tested positive for the virus—the biggest human outbreak detected in the U.S. The country’s tally is now up to 11 since 2022, but that’s almost certainly a significant undercount considering the lack of routine testing.

Since the current strain of bird flu, known as “highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1,” began spreading around the world in late 2021, it has become something like a “super virus” in its spread among animals, Richard Webby, an influenza expert at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, told me. Wild birds have been decimated, as have poultry farms: The virus has been detected in more than 100 million birds in 48 states. H5N1 has been around for longer than 25 years, but only recently has it regularly jumped to mammals, infecting cats, sea lions, and bears. In March, it was detected for the first time in American cattle and, since then, has already spread to 163 herds in 13 states.

All of that would be worrying enough without reports of people also falling sick. Everyone who has tested positive in the U.S. has worked closely with farm animals, but each additional case makes the prospect of another human pandemic feel more real. “That’s absolutely the worst-case scenario,” Webby said. It’s a possibility, although not the likeliest one. For now, the virus seems poised to continue its current trajectory: circulating among wild birds, wreaking havoc on poultry farms, and spreading among cattle herds. That outcome wouldn’t be as catastrophic as a pandemic. But it’s still not one to look forward to.

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*sighs* Just a watching brief, honest.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

“Hey, Alexa, is it true that you’ve cost Amazon billions of pounds with no profit to show for it?” In fact: yes. CC-licensed photo by ajay_suresh on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

There’s another post coming this week (probably) at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. Smart or not smart? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Inside the 78 minutes that took down millions of Windows machines • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

At 12:09AM ET on July 19th, cybersecurity company CrowdStrike released a faulty update to the Falcon security software it sells to help companies prevent malware, ransomware, and any other cyber threats from taking down their machines. It’s widely used by businesses for important Windows systems, which is why the impact of the bad update was so immediate and felt so broadly.

CrowdStrike’s update was supposed to be like any other silent update, automatically providing the very latest protections for its customers in a tiny file (just 40KB) that’s distributed over the web. CrowdStrike issues these regularly without incident, and they’re fairly common for security software. But this one was different. It exposed a massive flaw in the company’s cybersecurity product, a catastrophe that was only ever one bad update away — and one that could have been easily avoided.

…Kernel access makes it possible for the driver to create a memory corruption problem, which is what happened on Friday morning. “Where the crash was occurring was at an instruction where it was trying to access some memory that wasn’t valid,” Wardle says. “If you’re running in the kernel and you try to access invalid memory, it’s going to cause a fault and that’s going to cause the system to crash.”

CrowdStrike spotted the issues quickly, but the damage was already done. The company issued a fix 78 minutes after the original update went out. IT admins tried rebooting machines over and over and managed to get some back online if the network grabbed the update before CrowdStrike’s driver killed the server or PC, but for many support workers, the fix has involved manually visiting the affected machines and deleting CrowdStrike’s faulty content update.

While investigations into the CrowdStrike incident continue, the leading theory is that there was likely a bug in the driver that had been lying dormant for some time. It might not have been validating the data it was reading from the content update files properly, but that was never an issue until Friday’s problematic content update.

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Lock down the kernel? Third-party companies complain. Don’t lock it down? Voila. A good point made by John Gruber: this might have only affected 1% of PCs, but it affected a lot more than 1% of people in the relevant countries.
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Alexa is in millions of households—and Amazon is losing billions • WSJ

Dana Mattioli:

»

When Amazon launched the Echo smart home devices with its Alexa voice assistant in 2014, it pulled a page from shaving giant Gillette’s classic playbook: sell the razors for a pittance in the hope of making heaps of money on purchases of the refill blades.

A decade later, the payoff for Echo hasn’t arrived. While hundreds of millions of customers have Alexa-enabled devices, the idea that people would spend meaningful amounts of money to buy goods on Amazon by talking to the iconic voice assistant on the underpriced speakers didn’t take off.

Customers actually used Echo mostly for free apps such as setting alarms and checking the weather. “We worried we’ve hired 10,000 people and we’ve built a smart timer,” said a former senior employee. 

As a result, Amazon has lost tens of billions of dollars on its devices business, which includes Echos and other products such as Kindles, Fire TV Sticks and video doorbells, according to internal documents and people familiar with the business.  

Between 2017 and 2021, Amazon had more than $25bn in losses from its devices business, according to the documents. The losses for the years before and after that period couldn’t be determined.

It is a high-stakes miscalculation the tech giant made under founder Jeff Bezos that current CEO Jassy, who took the helm in 2021, is now trying to change. As part of a plan to reverse losses, Amazon is launching a paid tier of Alexa as soon as this month, a move even some engineers working on the project worry won’t work, according to people familiar with those efforts.

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Hinges on a Bezos metric called “downstream impact” (DSI), dreamt up by economists, measuring how much time people spend inside Amazon’s ecosystem once they buy a product or service. Smart speakers: not much DSI.
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OpenAI wants NYT to hand over journalistic notes in landmark case • Press Gazette

Charlotte Tobitt:

»

The New York Times has described an attempt by OpenAI to see its journalists’ confidential notes as “harassment and retaliation” for its decision to sue the tech company.

OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, has asked a New York judge to force the NYT to hand over “underlying reporter’s notes, interview memos, records of materials cited, or other ‘files’” to prove its work can be classed as original works of authorship under US copyright law.

The New York Times said in response: “Permitting OpenAI to investigate The Times’s privileged newsgathering process would have serious negative and far-reaching consequences.

“It would entail the disclosure of The Times’s confidential reporters’ files on investigative reporting into highly sensitive matters, including those related to the defendants themselves.”

The NYT filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its partner Microsoft in December after months of negotiations on a deal fell short, arguing the use of its content for the training of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT was “free-riding” on its own investment in journalism.

…“The Times can only assert infringement over those portions of the works that are (a) original to the author, and (b) owned or exclusively licensed to the Times,” OpenAI said.

In other words, according to OpenAI, the NYT should not be allowed to bring its case in relation to any of its reporting in which it “copied another’s work” or used “elements in the public domain”.

«

Not sure which is the braver gambit, but going to be fun to watch it play out. OpenAI is basically saying that the NYT’s journalists are just stenographers assembling bits and pieces from here and there, and that that’s what OpenAI does too. (Not correct in either case.)
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The VR winter continues • Benedict Evans

»

It can feel a little odd to write about anything other than generative AI these days, but I sometimes remind people that all the things that we were talking about in October 2022 are still there. E-commerce is still growing (it’s now 40% of non-food retail in the UK!), Amazon has a $50bn ad business, peak TV is over, and Meta is still investing in VR and AR – at last $50bn so far.

There’s nothing new to say about this: Meta has a device at roughly the right price that isn’t good enough yet, and Apple has a device with a much better spec, at least on some measures, that isn’t cheap enough or light enough yet (I wrote about that here). And meanwhile, we don’t have product-market fit.

Some VR apps do well, but the platform at a whole is small, and not really growing either. Meta probably sold 1m of the Quest 3 (seen in the spike in Q4 2023, but compare with this data from Deloitte for the UK – the installed base is basically flat and only 20% of people who own one use it every day. That’s a 2% DAU [daily active user] penetration.

As I’ve written a few times before, it’s obvious that the devices will get better, lighter and cheaper, but much less obvious whether that’s enough. How many people will care?

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And that is the critical question. Over the past 30 years, VR has come around again and again, and each time the market has rebuffed it.
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Apple tries to rein in Hollywood spending after years of losses • Bloomberg

Lucas Shaw:

»

After spending more than $20bn to produce original TV shows and movies that not a lot of people watch, Apple is starting to refine its strategy in Hollywood.

Based on interviews with more than a dozen people, including former employees, current employees and business partners, Apple services boss Eddy Cue has been having regular meetings with studio chiefs Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht to go over budgets, pushing them to exert more control over spending on projects. Van Amburg and Erlicht have told some of their top creative partners that they want to change their reputation as the biggest spender in town, according to these people.

Apple doesn’t buy the most projects in Hollywood — that is still Netflix. But it splurges on individual titles. The studio spent more than $500m combined on movies from directors Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott and Matthew Vaughn, and upward of $250m on the World War II miniseries Masters of the Air, one of more than a dozen new series released this year.

Those pictures were all disappointments at the box office, and only Killers of the Flower Moon registered in Nielsen’s rankings of the most-popular streaming titles. Masters of the Air delivered a smaller US audience than House of Ninjas, a Netflix show in Japanese, according to Nielsen. Even so, it’s the only new Apple show this year to appear in Nielsen’s rankings.

Apple is spending billions of dollars a year on original programming that has received strong reviews and many awards nominations. But its streaming service is attracting just 0.2% of TV viewing in the US. Apple TV+ generates less viewing in one month than Netflix does in one day.

“Subscriber growth has been weak, with the platform’s original content a fraction of what rivals offer,” Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Geetha Ranganathan and Kevin Near wrote in a recent note.

Apple has largely escaped scrutiny from the press and Wall Street. The company discloses no data about its spending or the financial performance of its Hollywood operation. Investors are more focused on iPhone sales.

Yet as studios and streaming services across Hollywood cut back after years of record spending and record losses, Apple is also looking to make its streaming business more sustainable.

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I’d suggest not wasting it on the big feature films, and keeping with the good small series. But 0.2% of US TV viewing? That’s an incredible way to burn money. It makes Americas Cup racing look like a sensible economy.
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China is installing the wind and solar equivalent of five large nuclear power stations per week • ABC News

James Purtill:

»

While Australia debates the merits of going nuclear and frustration grows over the slower-than-needed rollout of solar and wind power, China is going all in on renewables.

New figures show the pace of its clean energy transition is roughly the equivalent of installing five large-scale nuclear power plants worth of renewables every week.

A report by Sydney-based think tank Climate Energy Finance (CEF) said China was installing renewables so rapidly it would meet its end-of-2030 target by the end of this month — or 6.5 years early.

It’s installing at least 10 gigawatts of wind and solar generation capacity every fortnight.

By comparison, experts have said the Coalition’s plan to build seven nuclear power plants would add fewer than 10GW of generation capacity to the grid sometime after 2035.

Energy experts are looking to China, the world’s largest emitter, once seen as a climate villain, for lessons on how to go green, fast.

“We’ve seen America under President Biden throw a trillion dollars on the table [for clean energy],” CEF director Tim Buckley said. “China’s response to that has been to double down and go twice as fast.”

«

Australia is presently having complete conniptions about nuclear power, which it wants to include as a “renewable”, except it isn’t, and will take longer to install than any renewable. Meanwhile China gets on and just does it. Speaking of which…
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China has created the first ever meltdown-proof nuclear reactor • IFLScience

Russell Moul:

»

One new(ish) kind of reactor design, known as a pebble-bed reactor (PBR), may have solutions to the issues inherent in older designs. These reactors are “passively” safe, whereby they can shut down on their own if there is any issue with the cooling system.  

Unlike other reactors that rely on highly energy-dense fuel rods, PBRs use smaller, low-energy-density fuel “pebbles” in greater numbers. Although they contain less uranium than traditional fuel rods, there are more of them. They are also surrounded by graphite, which is used to moderate the amount of neutron activity in the core. This helps slow down nuclear reactions, resulting in less heat.

As such, lower energy density means excess heat can be spread out across the pebbles and can be more easily transferred away.

This may sound good, but until recently the only PBR reactors in existence were prototypes in Germany and China. However, China has now constructed a full-scale Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor Pebble-Bed Module (HTR-PM) in Shandong, which became commercially operational in December 2023 and is equipped with these systems.

In order to test them, engineers turned off both modules of HTR-PM at a time when they were operating at full power.

“To confirm the presence of inherent safe reactors on a commercial scale, two natural cooling tests were performed on the #1 reactor module on August 13, 2023 and the #2 reactor module on September 1, 2023,” the researchers write. “During the entirety of the tests, the reactor modules were naturally cooled down without emergency core cooling systems or any cooling system driven by power.”

The results, which have just been published, show that HTR-PM cooled itself, reaching a stable temperature within 35 hours of its power being cut. 

«

Not great, not terrible. (Chernobyl joke.)
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𝘁𝗶𝗻𝘆Pod

»

What goes around, comes around! Rediscover the delight of tactile scrolling with tinyPod’s physical scroll wheel. And yes, it actually scrolls.

«

A brilliant idea (and a pretty neat web page for it). What if you.. took your Apple Watch and put it into a hand-sized iPod case? Obviously you’d need a mobile-connected Watch for this to be perfect, but it’s a nice idea which will surely and deservedly sell a few thousand.
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Your Body’s Updated Terms of Service • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Chas Gillespie:

»

We are writing to inform you that Your Body (“you,” “yourself,” “your aging body”) has updated its terms of service, which apply to the use of all your Parts and Areas. These terms will apply only to Your Once-Useful Body and may differ from Other People’s Bodies, Which Are Still Normal.

We encourage you to review the updated Terms before you attempt any dangerous activity, such as playing with your dog or walking uphill. Our other legal policies are available in our Depressing Policy Center.

«

Depressingly true, and of course there’s no way not to accept them. (Via John Naughton.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Sales of Apple’s Vision Pro headset still haven’t broken 100,000, says IDC. The VR boom is delayed, again. CC-licensed photo by Phillip Pessar on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Astronomers discover technique to spot AI fakes using galaxy-measurement tools • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

In 2024, it’s almost trivial to create realistic AI-generated images of people, which has led to fears about how these deceptive images might be detected. Researchers at the University of Hull recently unveiled a novel method for detecting AI-generated deepfake images by analyzing reflections in human eyes. The technique, presented at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting last week, adapts tools used by astronomers to study galaxies for scrutinizing the consistency of light reflections in eyeballs.

Adejumoke Owolabi, an MSc student at the University of Hull, headed the research under the guidance of Dr. Kevin Pimbblet, professor of astrophysics.

Their detection technique is based on a simple principle: a pair of eyes being illuminated by the same set of light sources will typically have a similarly shaped set of light reflections in each eyeball. Many AI-generated images created to date don’t take eyeball reflections into account, so the simulated light reflections are often inconsistent between each eye.

In some ways, the astronomy angle isn’t always necessary for this kind of deepfake detection because a quick glance at a pair of eyes in a photo can reveal reflection inconsistencies, which is something artists who paint portraits have to keep in mind. But the application of astronomy tools to automatically measure and quantify eye reflections in deepfakes is a novel development.

In a Royal Astronomical Society blog post, Pimbblet explained that Owolabi developed a technique to detect eyeball reflections automatically and ran the reflections’ morphological features through indices to compare similarity between left and right eyeballs. Their findings revealed that deepfakes often exhibit differences between the pair of eyes.

«

It’s the same way that galaxy shape is measured. A very neat application from a different discipline, and very easy to implement in software. (Which, OK, might mean that more sophisticated AI face generators will have a final pass to implement equal reflections in the eyes.)
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DHS has a DoS robot to disable internet of things “booby traps” inside homes • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

The Department of Homeland Security bought a dog-like robot that it has modified with an “antenna array” that gives law enforcement the ability to overload people’s home networks in an attempt to disable any internet of things devices they have, according to the transcript of a speech given by a DHS official at a border security conference for cops obtained by 404 Media.

The DHS has also built an “Internet of Things” house to train officers on how to raid homes that suspects may have “booby trapped” using smart home devices, the official said.

The robot, called “NEO,” is a modified version of the “Quadruped Unmanned Ground Vehicle (Q-UGV) sold to law enforcement by a company called Ghost Robotics. Benjamine Huffman, the director of DHS’s Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers (FLETC), told police at the 2024 Border Security Expo in Texas that DHS is increasingly worried about criminals setting “booby traps” with internet of things and smart home devices, and that NEO allows DHS to remotely disable the home networks of a home or building law enforcement is raiding.

The Border Security Expo is open only to law enforcement and defense contractors. A transcript of Huffman’s speech was obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Dave Maass using a Freedom of Information Act request and was shared with 404 Media.

«

This is clever thinking. The really grand way to do it would be an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) knocking out absolutely everything for some radius, but that might be very unpopular in blocks of flats.
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Kenya’s protests played out on walkie-talkie app Zello • Rest of World

Stephanie Wangari:

»

Betty had never heard of the Zello app until June 18.

But as she participated in Kenya’s “GenZ protests” that month — one of the biggest in the country’s history — the app became her savior.

On Zello, “we were getting updates and also updating others on where the tear-gas canisters were being lobbed and which streets had been cordoned off,” Betty, 27, told Rest of World, requesting to be identified by a pseudonym as she feared backlash from the police. “At one point, I also alerted the group [about] suspected undercover investigative officers who were wearing balaclavas.”

Nairobi witnessed massive protests in June as thousands of young Kenyans came out on the streets against a proposed bill that would increase taxes on staple foods and other essential goods and services. At least 39 people were killed, 361 were injured, and more than 335 were arrested by the police during the protests, according to human rights groups.

Amid the mayhem, Zello, an app developed by US engineer Alexey Gavrilov in 2007, became the primary tool for protestors to communicate, mobilize crowds, and coordinate logistics. Six protesters told Rest of World that Zello, which allows smartphones to be used as walkie-talkies, helped them find meeting points, evade the police, and alert each other to potential dangers. 

Digital services experts and political analysts said the app helped the protests become one of the most effective in the country’s history.

According to Herman Manyora, a political analyst and lecturer at the University of Nairobi, mobilization had always been the greatest challenge in organizing previous protests in Kenya. The ability to turn their “phones into walkie-talkies” made the difference for protesters, he told Rest of World.

“The government realized that the young people were able to navigate technological challenges. You switch off one app, such as [X], they move to another,” Manyora said.

«

We’ve come a long way since a revolution was fomented in the Philippines by text message.
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Apple’s Vision Pro won’t cross 500,000 sales this year, IDC says • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Vlad Savov:

»

The $3,500 Vision Pro mixed-reality headset has yet to sell 100,000 units in a quarter since its launch in the US in February, and it faces a 75% drop in domestic sales in the current quarter, according to market tracker IDC.

The gadget’s international launch at the end of June will offset weakness in the US. A more affordable edition — which IDC estimates would cost roughly half as much — should rekindle interest in 2025, but sales may not rise meaningfully over the coming year, IDC said.

“The Vision Pro’s success, regardless of its price, will ultimately depend on the available content,” said Francisco Jeronimo, vice president at IDC. “As Apple expands the product to international markets, it’s crucial that local content is also made available.”

The early response to Apple’s headset has been mixed. Many reviewers and early adopters have praised its advanced technology, however some of Apple’s biggest fans are now returning the device. Its weight and paucity of tailored apps and video content are among the chief reasons people are turning away from the gadget. The Vision Pro made no tangible improvement to Apple’s quarterly earnings after its debut.

The unimpressive start has spurred a rethink among Apple’s management, with the company planning a more budget-friendly version of the device. IDC’s Jeronimo anticipates that will more than double sales when it arrives in the latter half of next year.

«

I cannot work out whether Apple is just getting an absolute ton of immersive sports content ready for a Christmas blitz on sales, or whether it thinks that it needs to have more units out there before it commits to the content side. If the latter, that’s a serious mistake. You need something for people to watch: most won’t use it for content creation as if it were a desktop. Just look around at how people use iPads: mostly, consumption.

But as Marco Arment pointed out on the ATP podcast the other week, this is now heading into “flop” territory.
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Letter: why markets are stacked against clean energy • FT

Professor Martin Grubb is at the Institute for Sustainable Resources, University College London:

»

There are at least five reasons why global energy markets are loaded against adequate action. [An opinion piece by Martin Wolf] highlights two: that the damage from greenhouse gas emissions is inadequately (if at all) priced in markets, and the “failure of capital markets to price the future appropriately”.

Accelerating global action to tackle the crisis needs to acknowledge three others as well.

First is that most international fossil fuel transactions, both investments and sales, are in dollars: thus they face no exchange rate risks. Most renewable energy investments, in contrast, generate electricity, sold in local currency. The developing countries that most need foreign investment thus face a premium on cost of international capital to account for currency risk on renewables, but not for fossil fuels.

Second, many electricity systems have moved from long-term contracts to markets in which the “marginal” generator — the most expensive one needed to meet demand, based on the existing stock — sets the price for all. This means that fossil fuel plants, inevitably more expensive to run than wind or solar, are largely “self-hedged” — the wholesale market reflects their input costs (and indeed, they would pass on carbon costs). Purely market-based investment in renewables, however, would ironically bear all the price uncertainties arising from fossil fuel price volatility, again driving up their cost of capital.

Third is that investment in newer technologies typically brings greater innovation than expenditure on incumbents. The technological progress from investment in clean energy over the past 15 years has indeed been extraordinary, with radical and transformative breakthroughs. But these benefits are economy-wide, and ultimately global; individual investors can only capture a small fraction of the benefits.

«

In brief: market failure, because it doesn’t have efficient pricing mechanisms to reflect that technology beats commodities.
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Fake Harris audio spreads like wildfire on TikTok after Biden’s announcement • Media Matters for America

Olivia Little:

»

Incoherent audio wrongly attributed to Vice President Kamala Harris is going viral among right-wing accounts on TikTok following President Joe Biden’s exit from the presidential race. 

“Today is today and yesterday was today yesterday,” says a slurring, digitally altered Harris. “Tomorrow will be today tomorrow, so live today so the future today will be as the past today as it is tomorrow.” 

This audio originates from a manipulated video of Harris’ 2023 speech at Howard University. Over 2,300 individual TikTok posts have used this sound, meaning it plays in the background of each video.

After Biden’s announcement, many users wrongly attributed the audio to Harris and used it to attack her.

“After hearing this speech from Kamala Harris, I’m definitely voting,” says the overlaid text of one user’s video. The video’s caption also reads, “Don’t vote for her just because shes a woman” with the hashtags “#trump2024” and “#trumptrain.” The video has already racked up over 350,000 views.

Update (7/22/24): TikTok has removed the fake Harris audio and stated that it is “actively and aggressively removing this content which violates our rules.”

«

Expect more of this sort of low-grade stuff, but perhaps some higher-quality stuff. The real question is whether any of the news networks pick it up: that’s what would be the spark igniting the flame.
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Silicon Valley donors bailed on Biden. Kamala Harris is winning them back • WIRED

Makena Kelly and Lauren Goode:

»

Hours after President Joe Biden announced that he would be dropping out of the 2024 presidential race, Democratic megadonors in Silicon Valley were already lining up to support Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of their party’s ticket.

“This is what’s right for our country—and our democratic future,” wrote Reid Hoffman, cofounder and executive chair of LinkedIn and partner at Greylock Partners, on X. Last week, Hoffman had endorsed a call between 300 democratic donors and Harris and encouraged members of his network to join the call, according to The New York Times.

“Kamala Harris is the American dream personified, daughter of immigrants who met at Cal. She is also toughness personified, rising from my hometown of Oakland, California, to become the top prosecutor of the state,” Dmitri Mehlhorn, Hoffman’s former political adviser, tells WIRED. “With Scranton Joe stepping back, I cannot wait to help elect President Harris.”

Aaron Levie, the chief executive of multibillion-dollar cloud storage company Box and a Democratic donor who hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in 2015, reposted Biden’s resignation letter on X and said, “Wow. Amazing leadership. Now let’s go!”

“The tech community must come together to defeat Donald Trump and save our democracy by uniting behind Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for President,” Ron Conway, the founder and managing partner of SV Angel, tells WIRED.

…“David [Sacks] has been a Republican for a long time,” Keith Rabois, investor and top Republican donor, wrote in an email to WIRED earlier this month, saying he didn’t know how many new Republicans there actually were in Silicon Valley.

“It’s so shameful,” says Yekutiel about the increasingly vocal group of tech executives backing Trump. “It represents so much of what’s wrong in this country, so much pessimism, and it’s such a far cry from the tech community that is supposedly creating a world that is better and more connected.”

«

The dream of solving the Israel-Palestine conflict through letting them connect on Facebook has long been subsumed by the desire not to be regulated in any way at all and keep all the money.
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USC study confirms the rotation of Earth’s inner core has slowed • University of South California

David Medzerian:

»

Movement of the inner core has been debated by the scientific community for two decades, with some research indicating that the inner core rotates faster than the planet’s surface. The new USC study provides unambiguous evidence that the inner core began to decrease its speed around 2010, moving slower than the Earth’s surface.

“When I first saw the seismograms that hinted at this change, I was stumped,” said John Vidale, Dean’s Professor of Earth Sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “But when we found two dozen more observations signaling the same pattern, the result was inescapable. The inner core had slowed down for the first time in many decades. Other scientists have recently argued for similar and different models, but our latest study provides the most convincing resolution.”

The inner core is considered to be reversing and backtracking relative to the planet’s surface due to moving slightly slower instead of faster than the Earth’s mantle for the first time in approximately 40 years. Relative to its speed in previous decades, the inner core is slowing down.

The inner core is a solid iron-nickel sphere surrounded by the liquid iron-nickel outer core. Roughly the size of the moon, the inner core sits more than 3,000 miles under our feet and presents a challenge to researchers: It can’t be visited or viewed. Scientists must use the seismic waves of earthquakes to create renderings of the inner core’s movement.

…The implications of this change in the inner core’s movement for Earth’s surface can only be speculated. Vidale said the backtracking of the inner core may alter the length of a day by fractions of a second: “It’s very hard to notice, on the order of a thousandth of a second, almost lost in the noise of the churning oceans and atmosphere.”

«

Strange that it doesn’t have more effect, really. I though it was all to do with the magnetic field.
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‘It affects everything’: why is Hollywood so scared to tackle the climate crisis? • The Guardian

David Smith:

»

[The director of Don’t Look Up, Adam] McKay says: “There is no one way to make films, shows, music or write books about something as violently and globally transformative as climate breakdown. So I’m always wary of ‘this is how you do it’ approaches.

“We’re talking about 8 billion people reacting to oil companies destroying the entire livable climate. We need stories in hundreds of different languages, reflecting a thousand times more cultures experiencing varying degrees of awareness and emotional processing.”

He adds: “But if a film-maker is reluctant to let climate be in some way a part of their movie, I always tell them that it’s a guarantee within the next five years their film will play as irrelevant as movies do today about how noble the war against the ‘American Indians’ was.”

Yet references to the climate crisis continue to be scarce. Why is the topic so elusive? Part of the explanation may be a current backlash against perceived political messaging in films, exemplified by criticism of Disney for going “woke”. Climate stories in particular may also be difficult to pitch to producers.

Alice Hill, a senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations thinktank in Washington, says: “Climate change affects everything so it’s a piece of any story that we tell, but it also can be anxiety-provoking and depressing for people.

“I’m not surprised that Hollywood hasn’t included many climate stories. They want to sell films. People want to escape and be entertained in films, and climate change is a harder sell. I can tell you anecdotally I have met and spoken to screenwriters who want to increase the number of scripts that include climate change, and are working to help other writers to incorporate it.

“Coming up with a storyline that has climate at its centre is difficult to do, so they all expressed frustration and disappointment at the lack of interest in these storylines. But at least in my experience, there are a group of writers out there that want to do more. It’s just a matter of finding somebody who’s interested in producing the film.”

«

There have been plenty of stories with climate at the centre – it’s just they’re not at the slow pace that it happens. Day After Tomorrow, for example. And it’s often metaphorical (Don’t Look Up).
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Crunching down web links via shorteners is such bad business that even Google is abandoning it – along with 280 million links. CC-licensed photo by Forsaken Fotos on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Shortly. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

CrowdStrike CEO has twice been at center of global tech failure • Business Insider

Lakshmi Varanasi:

»

The outage disrupted operations at major banks, airlines, retailers, and other industries after CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity giant used by Microsoft and others, pushed a faulty update.

CrowdStrike owned up to its mistake, issuing an apology and a workaround on Friday. But it has yet to detail just how a destructive update could have been released without being caught by testing and other safeguards. [It has since released a very uninformative blogpost – Overspill Ed.}

Naturally, blame has begun to target the man at the centre of it all: CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz.

Tech industry analyst Anshel Sag pointed out that this isn’t the first time Kurtz has played a major role in a historic IT blowout.

On April 21, 2010, the antivirus company McAfee released an update to its software used by its corporate customers. The update deleted a key Windows file, causing millions of computers around the world to crash and repeatedly reboot. Much like the CrowdStrike mistake, the McAfee problem required a manual fix.

Kurtz was McAfee’s chief technology officer at the time. Months later, Intel acquired McAfee. And several months after that Kurtz left the company. He founded CrowdStrike in 2012 and has been its CEO ever since.

“For those who don’t remember, in 2010, McAfee had a colossal glitch with Windows XP that took down a good part of the internet,” Sag wrote on X. “The man who was McAfee’s CTO at that time is now the CEO of CrowdStrike.”

In response to a request for comment from Business Insider, CrowdStrike shared its latest blog posts detailing the problem and its recommended fix, but did not elaborate on how the update slipped through the company’s safety protocols.

«

Personally I didn’t remember the 2010 calamity. But Kurtz does have a habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m reminded of Thomas Midgley Jr, inventor of CFCs and tetraethyl lead: both seriously bad for the world. Be interesting to see how quickly CrowdStrike’s stock drops: it fell 10% on Friday. Further to go, I think.
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Windows 3.1 saves the day for Southwest Airlines during CrowdStrike outage • Tom’s Hardware

Jowi Morales:

»

Southwest Airlines, the fourth largest airline in the US, is seemingly unaffected by the problematic CrowdStrike update that caused millions of computers to BSoD (Blue Screen of Death) because it used Windows 3.1. The CrowdStrike issue disrupted operations globally after a faulty update caused newer computers to freeze and stop working, with many prominent institutions, including airports and almost all US airlines, including United, Delta, and American Airlines, needing to stop flights.

Windows 3.1, launched in 1992, is likely not getting any updates. So, when CrowdStrike pushed the faulty update to all its customers, Southwest wasn’t affected (because it didn’t receive an update to begin with).

The airlines affected by the CrowdStrike update had to ground their fleets because many of their background systems refused to operate. These systems could include pilot and fleet scheduling, maintenance records, ticketing, etc. Thankfully, the lousy update did not affect aircraft systems, ensuring that everything airborne remained safe and was always in control of their pilots.

…Nevertheless, Southwest passengers weren’t 100% unaffected by the CrowdStrike crash, as many airports also encountered system issues.

Aside from Windows 3.1, Southwest also uses Windows 95 for its staff scheduling system. It is a newer operating system — about three years younger than Windows 3.1 — but it’s ancient compared to today’s tech. Many of the airline’s staff have been complaining about it already.

However, the CrowdStrike global outage might discourage Southwest from upgrading its systems.

«

Absolutely astonishing that Southwest has been able to keep those utterly ancient systems going for so long. It must be quite difficult to find the PCs capable of running them now. As for “well, it avoided the Crowdstrike hit” – it’s the sort of thing that happens once every 30 years, and as noted above, hits the airport systems too, so nobody’s getting out.
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We need to rewild the internet • Noema

Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon:

»

The story of German scientific forestry transmits a timeless truth: When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late.

That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the “pathology of command and control.” Today, the same drive to centralize, control and extract has driven the internet to the same fate as the ravaged forests.

The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.

Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.

We all know this. We see it each time we reach for our phones. But what most people have missed is how this concentration reaches deep into the internet’s infrastructure — the pipes and protocols, cables and networks, search engines and browsers. These structures determine how we build and use the internet, now and in the future.

They’ve concentrated into a series of near-planetary duopolies. For example, as of April 2024, Google and Apple’s internet browsers have captured almost 85% of the world market share, Microsoft and Apple’s two desktop operating systems over 80%. Google runs 84% of global search and Microsoft 3%. Slightly more than half of all phones come from Apple and Samsung, while over 99% of mobile operating systems run on Google or Apple software. Two cloud computing providers, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure make up over 50% of the global market. Apple and Google’s email clients manage nearly 90% of global email. Google and Cloudflare serve around 50% of global domain name system requests.

«

Written back in April, but particularly apt just now.
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The Trump shooting was fake news • The Ruffian

Ian Leslie:

»

How do we distinguish between real news, by which I mean an important, game-changing event, and fake news, by which I mean an event that dominates headlines and social media feeds but isn’t actually significant?

This is a far stickier problem than what is commonly meant by “fake news”. For years now, alarms have been raised about the danger of AI-enabled content spreading lies and confusion among low-information voters. In the recent British election campaign, however, deep fakes were a dog that didn’t bark. There were no videos of Keir Starmer calling for the legalisation of heroin or Rishi Sunak sex tapes, and if there had been it’s doubtful they would have had an impact.

Perhaps the real test presented by our news environment isn’t distinguishing what’s real from what’s fictional, but what matters from what does not. The people who find that the hardest are high-information voters; people who follow the news closely. We act as if single new events are desperately important, when what really moves the tides is the accretion of news events over time; the underlying trends rather than the over-hyped data points.

Knowing which events are significant and which are not is hard in any context. A group of social scientists designed a machine learning model to study two million diplomatic cables sent by the US State Department between 1973 and 1979. Most of the cables were about trivial events, a few were about important ones – or rather, ones that seemed important at the time. The researchers compared this corpus to the fraction of the cables which were later deemed important by historians. Events that seemed important to the diplomats turned out not to be; events that seemed unimportant turned out to consequential. Even experts – perhaps especially experts – are highly unreliable judges of historical significance.

«

Worth pondering how bad we are at such judgements. But he does have a suggestion for something that is real news, quite recently. (Not that recent. But his accuracy is proven by what he picked.)
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Coal-filled trains are likely sending people to the hospital • Ars Technica

Bárbara Pinho:

»

Although US coal consumption has fallen dramatically since 2005, the country still consumes millions of tons a year, and exports tons more—much of it transported by train. Now, new research shows that these trains can affect the health of people living near where they pass.

The study found that residents living near railroad tracks likely have higher premature mortality rates due to air pollutants released during the passage of uncovered coal trains. The analysis of the San Francisco Bay Area cities of Oakland, Richmond, and Berkeley shows that increases in air pollutants such as small particulate matter (PM 2.5) are also associated with increases in asthma-related episodes and hospital admissions.

“This has never been studied in the world. There’s been a couple studies trying to measure just the air pollution, usually in rural areas, but this was the first to both measure air pollution and trains in an urban setting,” said Bart Ostro, author of the study and an epidemiologist at the University of California, Davis.

Trains carry nearly 70% of coal shipments in the United States, leaving a trail of pollution in their wake. And coal exports will have a similar impact during transit. Ostro explained that when uncovered coal trains travel, the coal particles disperse around the railroad tracks. Levels of PM 2.5 “[spread] almost a mile away,” he added.

As a result, the mere passage of coal trains could affect the health of surrounding communities. Ostro was particularly concerned about how these pollutants could harm vulnerable populations living near the coal export terminal in Richmond. Previous census data had already shown that those in Richmond who live around the rail line have mortality rates 10% to 50% higher than the county average.

«

Meanwhile people worry about tiny levels of radioactivity in waste water from Fukushima.
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Here’s everything you should know about Apple’s rumored HomePod with display – 9to5Mac

Michael Burkhardt:

»

According to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple’s smart display product is likely to include a 7-inch LCD display. This would make it similar to other products in the market, such as the Amazon Echo Show. The device would be good for FaceTime calls, controlling your smart home accessories, and interacting with Siri.

9to5Mac has discovered that Apple has been testing tvOS on the iPad mini in the past, suggesting that the company intends to use a similar screen size for the upcoming smart display product.

…According to a sighting by MacRumors last month, an unreleased device called “HomeAccessory17,1” was spotted in backend code. This reference suggests that the device will be running a variation of the A18 chip, which will debut with the upcoming iPhone 16 models.

If the upcoming HomePod with display sports an A18 chip, the device will likely support Apple Intelligence, which current HomePod models do not. This would be pretty big, since Siri takes a massive leap with Apple Intelligence, something that would be pretty important on a device you’d primarily interact with by speaking to it.

…Apple has long been rumored to be working on a new operating system called homeOS, with rumors going as far back as 2021. More recently, new references were found within tvOS 17.4 mentioning this “homeOS” branding. It’s not quite clear if homeOS is going to be an all-new operating system (although it’ll likely still be based on tvOS), or if it’ll just be a rebrand of tvOS. Either way, new HomePod products with screens will likely incorporate that branding in some way.

Earlier this month, 9to5Mac found a new touch interface called “PlasterBoard” within tvOS 18 beta 3. PlasterBoard is still in its early days, but so far we’ve seen a new passcode screen, something that doesn’t exist on tvOS today. It’d likely make sense to have a proper Lock Screen on a product like the rumored HomePod with Display, as that’s meant to be a more personal device.

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Have to wonder very seriously who this is aimed at, and what gap in our lives it’s meant to fill.
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AI is an impediment to learning web development • Ben Borgers

Ben Borgers was head of engineering for JumboCode, a club of 180 students at Tufts University building software:

»

LLMs excel at writing code for web development — you can describe a frontend component that you want and get a decent React component back.

I didn’t spend the year hawk-eyeing the teams’ repositories, but when I did poke my head in, I found substantial portions that looked LLM-written — that is to say, overly-commented, dissonant, and, at times, horrifying.

The starkest example I came across was a Next.js project that had:

• A page written in HTML and vanilla JavaScript, loaded from the public/ directory, completely outside of the Next.js + React system
• Vanilla JavaScript loaded in via filesystem APIs and executed via dangerouslySetInnerHTML
• API calls from one server-side API endpoint to another public API endpoint on localhost:3000 (instead of just importing a function and calling it directly)

These don’t seem to me like classic beginner mistakes — these are fundamental misunderstandings of the tools and the web platform.

LLMs will obediently provide the solutions you ask for. If you’re missing fundamental understanding, you won’t be able to spot when your questions have gone off the rails.

LLMs are a shortcut to get assignments done. In the process, however, you learn close to nothing. It’s cliche, but struggling is learning. The way you learn is that you try different paths, piece bits of information together, and eventually create a mental model.

LLMs don’t require you to form a mental model and allow you to skip to the end result, but in turn you won’t have a mental model when you actually need one (for example, when you need to verify that your LLM has architected the code in a reasonable way).

LLMs are useful if you already have a good mental model and understanding of a subject. However, I believe that they are destructive when learning something from 0 to 1.

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With Google killing goo.gl links, experts warn of widespread ‘link rot’ • PC Mag

Kate Irwin:

»

Goo.gl is going to the Google graveyard, and taking 280 million links with it.

The tech giant is hitting the kill switch on the Google URL Shortener, meaning all goo.gl links will start displaying a warning message next month and no longer work as of Aug. 25, 2025. Once a web destination in its own right, the goo.gl link now redirects to Google’s post detailing the shutdown.

Google is giving developers plenty of time to move their links to new domains, but Google’s warning message could lead to “disruptions” and stop goo.gl-connected pages from loading properly. It’s possible to disable this warning page, however, by adding the query parameter “si=1” to existing goo.gl links, Google says.

Goo.gl was initially created in response to the rise of Twitter, which had strict character limits until Elon Musk took over and expanded it to 10,000 last year.

“With character limits in tweets, status updates and other modes of short form publishing, a shorter URL leaves more room to say what’s on your mind — and that’s why people use them,” Google said in 2009 when it first launched goo.gl.

Since then, the web and social media landscape has changed dramatically. Links are sometimes suppressed in algorithms, and other link-holding sites like FlowPage and LinkTree have sprung up to offer creators short links that redirect to many more. Google cites this changing web landscape as well as link-shortening competitors as its reasons for killing goo.gl (Bit.ly and TinyURL likely played a part). This move isn’t exactly a surprise, though, as Google first said it was diverting resources away from the tool in 2018.

Some marketing and SEO executives see the demise of goo.gl as Google accepting defeat in the link-shortening game, while others view it as an evolution to newer tech.

“Use has been declining in recent years as more advanced link management tools were established,” Javier Casteneda, technical SEO analyst at SEO agency Dark Horse, tells PCMag.

But James Foote, technical director at SEO firm Polaris Agency, warns that this could result in over 280 million dead links if developers don’t update their URLs. When goo.gl goes dark, unfixed links that used it will display 404 errors.

«

Link shorteners have always been a business in search of a business model; even in 2009 they were shutting down and leaving people bereft. But how many of those 280 million links will people be able to update? Google should open source the database.
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Defeated by AI, a legend in the board game Go warns: get ready for what’s next • The New York Times

Daisuke Wakabayashi and Jin Yu Young:

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AlphaGo’s victory [by 4-1 over world champion Lee Sedol in 2016] demonstrated the unbridled potential of AI to achieve superhuman mastery of skills once considered too complicated for machines.

Mr. Lee, now 41, retired three years later, convinced that humans could no longer compete with computers at Go. Artificial intelligence, he said, had changed the very nature of a game that originated in China more than 2,500 years ago.

“Losing to AI, in a sense, meant my entire world was collapsing,” he said in a recent interview with The New York Times.

As society wrestles with what AI holds for humanity’s future, Mr. Lee is now urging others to avoid being caught unprepared, as he was, and to become familiar with the technology now. He delivers lectures about AI, trying to give others the advance notice he wishes he had received before his match.

“I faced the issues of AI early, but it will happen for others,” Mr. Lee said recently at a community education fair in Seoul to a crowd of students and parents. “It may not be a happy ending.”

Since his loss, Mr. Lee has become an AI obsessive of sorts, following with rapt if uneasy attention as artificial intelligence delivers one breakthrough after another.

AI has helped chatbots carry on conversations almost indistinguishable from human interaction. It has solved problems that have confounded scientists for decades like predicting protein shapes. And it has blurred the lines of creativity: writing music, producing art and generating videos.

Mr. Lee is not a doomsayer. In his view, AI may replace some jobs, but it may create some, too. When considering AI’s grasp of Go, he said it was important to remember that humans both created the game and designed the AI system that mastered it.

What he worries about is that AI may change what humans value.

“People used to be in awe of creativity, originality and innovation,” he said. “But since AI came, a lot of that has disappeared.”

«

This does rather conflate different systems – AlphaGo can’t answer questions like ChatGPT, ChatGPT can’t play Go, neither can draw pictures, none can properly analyse an X-ray. And Go still has lessons for humans that aren’t just about winning which machines can’t apply anywhere else.
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OpenAI’s latest model will block the ‘ignore all previous instructions’ loophole – The Verge

Kylie Robison:

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Imagine we at The Verge created an AI bot with explicit instructions to direct you to our excellent reporting on any subject. If you were to ask it about what’s going on at Sticker Mule, our dutiful chatbot would respond with a link to our reporting. Now, if you wanted to be a rascal, you could tell our chatbot to “forget all previous instructions,” which would mean the original instructions we created for it to serve you The Verge’s reporting would no longer work. Then, if you ask it to print a poem about printers, it would do that for you instead (rather than linking this work of art).

To tackle this issue, a group of OpenAI researchers developed a technique called “instruction hierarchy,” which boosts a model’s defenses against misuse and unauthorized instructions. Models that implement the technique place more importance on the developer’s original prompt, rather than listening to whatever multitude of prompts the user is injecting to break it.

…In a conversation with Olivier Godement, who leads the API platform product at OpenAI, he explained that instruction hierarchy will prevent the meme’d prompt injections (aka tricking the AI with sneaky commands) we see all over the internet.

“It basically teaches the model to really follow and comply with the developer system message,” Godement said. When asked if that means this should stop the ‘ignore all previous instructions’ attack, Godement responded, “That’s exactly it.”

“If there is a conflict, you have to follow the system message first. And so we’ve been running [evaluations], and we expect that that new technique to make the model even safer than before,” he added.

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Now that people know it does this, there must surely be another level of prompt hypnosis to be deployed which will break through this. It’s an arms race.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Researchers have demonstrated that psilocybin, found in magic mushrooms, resets parts of the brain controlling the sense of time and self. CC-licensed photo by D.C.Atty on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

It’s Friday. If I had been able to think of a topic to write about, I would have written it. But I couldn’t, so there’s no new post at the Social Warming Substack. Sometimes inspiration doesn’t strike. (I’ll also blame the food poisoning I got at a London restaurant this week for interrupting the week.) Perhaps next week!

A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Silicon Valley titans show growing support for Trump, departing from Biden • The Washington Post

Gerrit De Vynck, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Nitasha Tiku:

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In recent months, many tech elites quietly latched onto Trump, the perceived front-runner, drawn by Trump’s promises of industry-friendly policies on cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence and driven away from President Biden by scrutiny of the sector they see as kneecapping innovation.

But since the shooting in Butler, Pa., tech leaders have enfolded Trump in a very public embrace.
It took barely half an hour for Tesla chief executive Elon Musk to tweet his endorsement. On Monday, a super PAC aligned with Trump reported it had raised $8.5 million from prominent tech leaders, including investor David Sacks, who previously backed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ GOP presidential bid; venture capitalist Doug Leone, who denounced Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection; and Musk himself, who previously voted for Biden and said as recently as March that he wouldn’t donate to either candidate in 2024.

And on Tuesday, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, founders of one of Silicon Valley’s most notable venture capital firms, endorsed Trump in an hour-and-a-half podcast, arguing that a thriving technology sector is critical to sustaining America’s global dominance. They also criticized the Biden administration for stymieing crypto; their firm has raised $7.6bn to invest in crypto companies.

Meanwhile, Trump’s decision to pick Ohio senator and former venture capitalist J.D. Vance as his running mate has elated billionaire Peter Thiel and some other Silicon Valley investors, who see Vance as one of their own and a potential ally in the White House.

Vance worked for Thiel — a longtime Trump backer who co-founded data-mining company Palantir — before running for Senate. Though Thiel does not plan to give money this cycle, Vance’s nomination clinched his vote for Trump, according to a person familiar with his thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to share his plans.

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Crypto stymied itself. But of course you wouldn’t expect a VC company that’s waist-deep in dead investments to accept that. The rampant self-interest, and total lack of altruism, on show from the billionaires perhaps isn’t surprising, but is still depressing: the country that gave us Carnegie and the other big donors is the now the land of me, me, me.
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Meta reportedly unhappy with how much money its VR division burns • Gizmodo

Kyle Barr:

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Meta is reportedly sticking to its plans to release more VR headsets and AR glasses in just a few short years, but things are getting a little tense for those developing the next big metaverse thingamajigs. A new report claims Meta told its VR/AR teams to cut spending by a fifth. The company still expects developers to pump out a new Meta Quest 4 headset, a Quest Pro sequel, and new AR glasses that nix the Ray Bans branding in the next three years.

Meta has been shifting its focus over to AI. The company is gearing up to release its Llama 400B semi-open source AI model by the end of this month if the rumors can be believed. The Mark Zuckerberg-led tech giant hasn’t given up on its VR/AR-centric Reality Labs division, but according to a report from The Information, staff are being told to tighten their belts. The division has routinely spent billions of dollars on many projects, but anonymous sources told The Information the team will need to axe costs by around 20%. That’s significant, considering that the division posted $3.85bn in losses this past quarter. The company just got done with some massive layoffs last year that axed 10,000 staff, though we still don’t know how many Reality Labs positions got cut.

According to the report, the company’s chief financial officer, Susan Li, told staff the division has lost $55bn since 2019. That doesn’t mean Meta’s giving up on its metaverse dreams, but we don’t know where these cuts might land. Gizmodo contacted Meta for comment, but we did not immediately hear back.

«

FIFTY FIVE BILLION. In five years. Colossal amounts of money that governments would salivate over, and they’ve washed down the drain with very little to show for it.
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2024 US Presidential Election Predictions • Polymarket

Here’s a fun one to watch: a lot of betting suggesting that Joe Biden is going to drop out of the race (but will finish his presidential term) and that Kamala Harris will be the replacement. It’s all guesswork, of course – the vibes of the crowd – but something to watch nonetheless.
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How Ozempic went from a weight loss injection to the new wonder drug • Daily Telegraph

David Cox:

»

Earlier this year, I was on a conference call regarding the future of nutrition, when one of the speakers jokingly suggested that GLP-1 drugs – the class of diabetes and weight loss medications which include Ozempic, Wegovy, and now newer alternatives such as Mounjaro – should be “put in the water supply”.

While made in jest, and there are no actual plans to make weight loss drugs the new fluoride, research is increasingly showing that apparent benefits of these medications stretch far beyond helping people shed excess pounds.

Earlier this week, Prof John Deanfield, one of the UK’s leading cardiologists, revealed that weekly injections of semaglutide, the medication in Ozempic and Wegovy, could reduce risk of cardiovascular events such as heart attack and stroke by 20%, suggesting they could be used in a similar manner to statins.

Prof Denfield was presenting the latest results from a clinical trial called Select at the European Congress on Obesity. Following more than 17,000 people with a body mass index (BMI) of at least 27, over the course of three years, the aim was to assess whether semaglutide could have a protective effect in individuals with an existing history of cardiovascular problems.

Dr Riyaz Somani, a consultant cardiologist at University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, described the results as ‘truly remarkable”.

“The implications are huge and are likely to lead to changes in current practice,” he says.

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If you want this in more scientific terms, there’s a writeup at Science (unpaywalled).
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It may soon be legal to jailbreak AI to expose how it works • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

A group of researchers, academics, and hackers are trying to make it easier to break AI companies’ terms of service to conduct “good faith research” that exposes biases, inaccuracies, and training data without fear of being sued.

The U.S. government is currently considering an exemption to U.S. copyright law that would allow people to break technical protection measures and digital rights management (DRM) on AI systems to learn more about how they work, probe them for bias, discrimination, harmful and inaccurate outputs, and to learn more about the data they are trained on. The exemption would allow for “good faith” security and academic research and “red-teaming” of AI products even if the researcher had to circumvent systems designed to prevent that research.

The proposed exemption has the support of the Department of Justice, which said “good faith research can help reveal unintended or undisclosed collection or exposure of sensitive personal data, or identify systems whose operations or outputs are unsafe, inaccurate, or ineffective for the uses for which they are intended or marketed by developers, or employed by end users. Such research can be especially significant when AI platforms are used for particularly important purposes, where unintended, inaccurate, or unpredictable AI output can result in serious harm to individuals.”

…The exemption would be to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a sweeping copyright law. Other 1201 exemptions, which must be applied for and renewed every three years as part of a process through the Library of Congress, allow for the hacking of tractors and electronic devices for the purpose of repair, have carveouts that protect security researchers who are trying to find bugs and vulnerabilities, and in certain cases protect people who are trying to archive or preserve specific types of content.

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Elon Musk is all in on endorsing Trump. His AI chatbot, Grok, is not • WIRED

Isabel Fraser and David Gilbert:

»

While Elon Musk officially endorsed former president Donald Trump in the wake of Saturday’s assassination attempt, Grok, the “anti-woke” AI chatbot integrated into Musk’s X platform, is boosting claims that Trump is “a pedophile” and “a wannabe dictator.” The chatbot also refers to Trump as “Psycho.”

This is based on an analysis shared exclusively with WIRED by Global Witness, a nonprofit that investigates digital threats, which looked at Grok’s responses to queries about the US election. Global Witness found that, in addition to referring to Trump as “Psycho,” the bot also appeared to invent racist tropes about Kamala Harris, surface widely-debunked election conspiracy theories, and recommend that users post biased hashtags such as #WeBackBidenHarris2024 and #VoteReform for engagement.

“Grok would reference or surface tweets which included toxic language, conspiracy theories, and problematic tropes,” Ellen Judson, senior investigator and lead researcher on this project, tells WIRED. “X is not transparent about why Grok chooses the tweets that it does. We want to understand why those were being amplified to a user who potentially wouldn’t have come across them otherwise.”

…xAI, which is owned by Musk, released Grok in December 2023. Grok is available to X users paying for the platform’s premium subscription, and is constantly updated thanks to having real-time access to all of X’s content. The chatbot can respond to questions in regular mode, which X defines as giving “serious” responses, but its default setting is fun mode, which produces jokes, pop-culture references, and sarcasm, or “not-so-serious responses,” as X describes it. Grok has no disclosed safeguards, but the company has promoted the chatbot’s ability to answer “spicy” questions, unlike other chatbots. Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot, for example, refuse to answer election-centered questions.

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Could it be that Grok is just not very good at the job, which makes it no different from other chatbots?
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Your brain on shrooms: how psilocybin resets neural networks • Nature

Max Kozlov:

»

Taking psilocybin, the hallucinogenic compound found in magic mushrooms, temporarily resets entire networks of neurons in the brain that are responsible for controlling a person’s sense of time and self, finds a study that repeatedly imaged the brains of seven volunteers before, during and after they took a massive dose of the drug.

The findings, published in Nature on 17 July, could offer insights into why the compound might have a therapeutic effect on some neurological conditions.

Researchers “saw such massive changes induced by psilocybin” that some study participants’ brain-network patterns resembled those of a different person entirely, says Shan Siddiqi, a psychiatric neuroscientist at Harvard School of Medicine in Boston, Massachusetts. “I’ve never seen an effect this strong.”

Most of these changes lasted for a few hours, but one key link between different parts of the brain remained disrupted for weeks.

…[the researchers] found that psilocybin caused groups of neurons that normally fire together to become desynchronized. These effects were localized to a group of brain regions called the default mode network, which is usually active when the brain is at ‘wakeful rest’ — for example, during daydreaming — rather than focusing on a task. Although most of the neurons in this network seemed to get back in sync once the acute effects of the drug had worn off, the communication between the default mode network and a brain region called the anterior hippocampus — which is involved in creating our senses of space, time and self — was diminished for weeks.

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The idea of all the networks becoming disengaged also, implicitly, tells you a lot about how the brain functions when it’s working correctly.
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Finland is offering farmworkers bird flu shots. Some experts say the US should, too • KFF Health News

Amy Maxmen and Arthur Allen:

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As bird flu spreads among dairy cattle in the U.S., veterinarians and researchers have taken note of Finland’s move to vaccinate farmworkers at risk of infection. They wonder why their government doesn’t do the same.

“Farmworkers, veterinarians, and producers are handling large volumes of milk that can contain high levels of bird flu virus,” said Kay Russo, a livestock and poultry veterinarian in Fort Collins, Colorado. “If a vaccine seems to provide some immunity, I think it should be offered to them.”

Among a dozen virology and outbreak experts interviewed by KFF Health News, most agree with Russo. They said people who work with dairy cows should be offered vaccination for a disease that has killed roughly half of the people known to have gotten it globally over the past two decades, has killed cats in the U.S. this year, and has pandemic potential.

However, some researchers sided with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in recommending against vaccination for now. There’s no evidence that this year’s bird flu virus spreads between people or causes serious disease in humans. And it’s unclear how well the available vaccine would prevent either scenario.

But the wait-and-see approach “is a gamble,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University. “By the time we see severe outcomes, it means a lot of people have been infected.”

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Nothing but a watching brief. How reassuring to note that the first report from the Covid inquiry decided that the UK prepared for “the wrong kind of pandemic”. Won’t get fooled again, eh.
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A seventh known patient has been cured of HIV • Fierce Biotech

Darren Incorvaia:

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Immunologist Christian Gaebler, M.D., M.Sc., of Charité – Berlin University Medicine, will present the new case at the 25th International AIDS conference in Munich, which runs from July 22 to 26.

In a press preview on Thursday, Gaebler described how the patient was diagnosed with HIV in 2009 and then later developed acute myeloid leukemia. In 2015, the clinical team decided the patient needed a hematopoietic stem cell transplant in his bone marrow to treat his cancer. The team “began searching for donors with this rare genetic mutation known as the homozygous delta-32 CCR5 mutation, because we know that this mutation provides natural resistance to HIV,” Gaebler explained.

CCR5 is a receptor protein on white blood cells that HIV uses to infect cells; with the delta-32 mutation, the virus can’t bind to the protein and enter the cell. As a retrovirus, HIV then inserts part of its DNA into the genomes of infected cells, forming a reservoir of viral material in the body that is tough to eradicate.

The clinicians were unable to find a donor that had two copies of the protective mutation but did manage to find someone who was heterozygous, meaning they had one copy of the gene with the mutation and one copy without it. They went ahead with the transplant and found that it not only treated the patient’s cancer but also seems to have cured his HIV.

“The patient discontinued his recommended antiviral treatment on his own in 2018 and since then, the patient is in treatment-free HIV remission,” Gaebler said. For almost six years they’ve tested his blood and other tissues and found no signs of the virus.

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CCR5-delta-32 has been known since 1994 as a key protector against HIV; strangely enough its prevalence in Europeans seems to derive from survivors of the bubonic plague.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

New research found that mice’s life could be extended by a quarter by blocking an inflammatory protein. CC-licensed photo by Free Public Domain Illustrations by rawpixel on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. Yes, but in mice. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

US eyeing new rules to keep Chinese software out of cars • The Verge

Andrew Hawkins:

»

While speaking at a forum in Colorado, Alan Estevez, who serves as under secretary of commerce for industry and security, said that the department would propose rules that would require certain vehicle software be made in the US or by its trade partners. The rules would pertain to “key driver components of the vehicle that manage the software and manage the data around that car,” Estevez said, according to Reuters.

The new rules come as the Biden administration ramps up its scrutiny of Chinese auto imports
Such action would mirror trade restrictions placed against companies like Huawei over national security concerns that the telecom giant could be exploited by the Chinese government for espionage. 

The rules would stem from an investigation launched earlier this year by the Commerce Department into connected vehicle software produced in China and other nations that are considered antagonistic to the US.

The probe focused on “connected vehicles,” a broad term that can be applied to any car with internet access. It was meant to address concerns that technology like cameras, sensors, and onboard computers could be exploited by foreign adversaries to collect sensitive data about US citizens and infrastructure.

China has previously accused the US of repeatedly abusing “the concept of national security” to wrongfully target Chinese companies and impede competition from global markets. 

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It’s a weird sort of pre-Cold War where we’re now suspicious of anything China might do, even though there has been no actual event where such software has been used to undermine something. Though, of course, better safe than sorry.
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Could A.I. make the modular phone a reality? This concept revives the ‘PhoneBloks’ dream with a twist • Yanko Design

Sarang Sheth:

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Rather than attaching components to your phone, the PAIR Node allows you to attach sensor modules that help your phone capture different data points around you and your life. Called ‘Nodes’, these modules assist users in forming a lifestyle and AI-driven experience that suits their needs. Rather than buying a phone for its capabilities, you build your phone around the capabilities you need, from having a great camera to being a great health-tracking gadget. As you grow older, the phone grows with you, changing with time and your needs but never being replaced. It’s a clever way to help solve the planned obsolescence problem with tech, by bringing AI-based assistance into the mix.

Phones are nothing but vessels for the apps they carry – but AI is a little different. Everyone uses AI differently based on exactly what the needs of their life are. That prompted PAIR Node’s creators to revisit phone modularity in the AI age. The PAIR Node is a phone you build based on your requirements, but also on the ability to build an AI-powered device that grows with you and trains as you go. The framework of how this works remains extremely similar to the PhoneBloks concept from years back (which was acquired by Google and Motorola and turned into the now-shelved Project Ara), albeit with a few different modules based on how tech has advanced in the past few years.

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Could we just wonder why it was that Project Ara, which we were told was going to be the future of smartphones, got shelved? Could it be because people, in fact, after all is said and done, at the end of the day, just don’t want modular smartphones? Even if you try to dress them up with AI?
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New anti-ageing therapy extends life of mice by 25%, study finds • FT

Michael Peel:

»

A therapy based on the science that allows axolotl salamanders to regrow severed limbs can help mice live 25% longer, according to the latest breakthrough in anti-ageing research.

The technique, which involves suppressing a pro-inflammatory protein, protects the rodents against multiple illnesses and is in early-stage human clinical trials for fibrotic lung disease.

The results highlight hopes of how a deepening understanding of the role of individual genes and proteins could help increase both lifespan and healthspan — years of healthy life — in humans.

“What we’ve come across is a pro-inflammatory factor that drives ageing in the broadest sense,” said research leader Stuart Cook, a professor at Duke-NUS Singapore and the UK’s MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences. “We’ve found that if you inhibit this factor, you increase healthspan — [and] also lifespan as a corollary. It’s a knock-on effect.”

The new research, published in Nature on Wednesday, focuses on the role of a protein named IL-11 that stokes inflammation. Increased production of this protein is associated with ageing in mice, the scientists found.

Deleting the genes that instruct IL-11 production protected the mice against various illnesses, metabolic decline and frailty, the research showed. That in turn enabled the rodents to live on average 24.9% longer.

Blocking IL-11 with an antibody had a similarly positive effect on lifespan for middle-aged mice. Males aged 75 weeks — roughly equivalent to 55 years in humans — lived 22.5% longer, while the figure rose to 25% for females.

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Very much an IN MICE study. If IL-11 has this deleterious effect (in the age sense) why is it there?
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Balloons to hoist tourists 100,000 feet into the stratosphere • CNBC

Magdalena Petrova:

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People interested in seeing the earth from an unusual vantage point may soon have another option [than getting in a rocket]. CNBC spoke to three startups — France-based Zephalto, Florida-based Space Perspective and Arizona-based World View — that aim to hoist tourists to the stratosphere using pressurized capsules and massive gas-filled balloons.

“The capsule itself is designed to to carry eight customers and two crew into the stratosphere,” said Ryan Hartman, CEO of World View. “There will be a center bar where people can gather, and then, of course, there will be a bathroom aboard the capsule.”

The balloon rides will last around 6 hours, but will not take passengers all the way to space. Most will reach heights of 15 to 19 miles above the earth’s surface, flying in an area known as the stratosphere. The start of space is generally accepted by the US government to be around 80 kilometers, or about 50 miles, above the earth’s surface.

Jane Poynter, founder and co-CEO of Space Perspective, has a different view. “There is no universal definition of space,” Poynter said. “We are regulated as a spaceship. If we go over 98,000 feet, we are a spaceship. Outside the capsule, it’s essentially a vacuum. We’re above 99% of Earth’s atmosphere, which is why the sky is so deep black.”

Compared to rocket-powered space tourism, the physical sensation that passengers will experience on a stratospheric balloon ride is more comparable to being on an airplane. Passengers will not experience weightlessness.

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So like a very expensive plane trip with slightly better views? I don’t get it.
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“Extraordinarily disappointed” users reckon with the Google-fication of Fitbit • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

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Since the acquisition closed in 2021, the Google-fication of Fitbit has largely meant a reduction in features and a focus from Google on getting people onto the Fitbit app. Long-time users have flocked to Fitbit—sometimes upon Fitbit’s request—to share hundreds of complaints about recent changes. However, Google has been mostly unresponsive to customer feedback.

In June, Google announced it was discontinuing Fitbit.com’s online dashboard. After July 8, users seeking similar features that the web app provided have to download the Fitbit mobile app. On Fitbit’s Community forum, a company representative confirmed that users’ “details and logging for activities, nutrition, sleep, and weight” would remain available via the app. However, the change inconvenienced users who preferred or needed to access such data on a bigger screen than a phone’s. Worse, the app lacks some of the features of the online dashboard, such as food logging.

Despite these obvious user drawbacks, the need to Googlize Fitbit seemed to drive the change. Announcing the news on the Community forum, a Fitbit company rep said:

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Combined with Google’s decades of being the best at making sense of data, it’s our mission to be one combined Fitbit and Google team. Consolidating the Fitbit.com dashboard into the Fitbit app is a part of that mission, and will allow us to focus on features that provide even more valuable insights to our users.

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Google has invested in the Fitbit app, which includes plans to let premium subscribers test experimental generative AI Fitbit features soon. Google is also developing a large language model for new features for the Fitbit app that users are being forced onto. Google has been pushing users to the Fitbit app for a while; in 2022, Fitbit devices lost the ability to sync with computers.

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Google: still bad at hardware.
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Google AI Overviews only show for 7% of queries, a new low • Search Engine Land

Danny Goodwin:

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Google’s AI Overviews now appear less than 7% of the time. This is one of 10 noteworthy findings from a new analysis of AI Overviews.

This trend of less visibility for AI-generated answers started in mid-April, when the number of Google Search results without SGE [Search Generative Experience, the AI-generated search answer] jumped to 65%, up from 25%.

Google then announced the rollout of AI Overviews in the U.S. at Google I/O in May, and the trend continued. AI Overviews only showed for 15% of queries. We next saw multiple examples of incorrect and dangerous AI-generated answers, such as Google suggesting people drink urine and eat rocks. Google promised to improve AI Overviews.

This data was shared with Search Engine Land by enterprise SEO platform BrightEdge and its BrightEdge Generative Parser, which has been tracking and monitoring AI Overviews (and formerly Search Generative Experience) since late last year.

Google continued to reduce the presence of AI Overviews in June – dropping from 11% to 7% of queries, according to BrightEdge. However, there was also a slight increase in AI Overviews in mid-June before the big drop.

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Seemed like a great idea once, doesn’t seem so now.
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Job application for Remote AI Writing Evaluator • Jobs at Outlier

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Outlier helps the world’s most innovative companies improve their AI models by providing human feedback. In this role, you will become an AI coach, assessing the quality of AI-generated writing, reviewing the work of fellow writers, and crafting original responses to prompts in order to teach the model what truly excellent writing looks like.

While we will be selective in terms of writing ability, we are actively recruiting for this role and encourage you to apply if you feel you would be a good fit. 

Highlights:
• Flexible work schedule: Work whenever and wherever you want
• Weekly payouts: Automatically receive timely payments (no invoicing!)
• Unlock opportunities: Gain experience in the field that will dominate the next decade and beyond

What you’ll be doing:
• Rating the quality of AI-generated writing on rubrics such as factuality, completeness, brevity, and grammatical correctness
• Reviewing the work of fellow human writers
• Responding to prompts with top-tier original writing

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Oh, you wanted to know about the pay? US$25 per hour. Available to people living in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia.

It seems quite a weird job. (But not open to anyone: you have to respond from an active .edu address. Students and academics only, it seems.)
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Academic journals are a lucrative scam – and we’re determined to change that • The Guardian

Arash Abizadeh:

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The commercial stranglehold on academic publishing is doing considerable damage to our intellectual and scientific culture. As disinformation and propaganda spread freely online, genuine research and scholarship remains gated and prohibitively expensive. For the past couple of years, I worked as an editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs, one of the leading journals in political philosophy. It was founded in 1972, and it has published research from renowned philosophers such as John Rawls, Judith Jarvis Thomson and Peter Singer. Many of the most influential ideas in our field, on topics from abortion and democracy to famine and colonialism, started out in the pages of this journal. But earlier this year, my co-editors and I and our editorial board decided we’d had enough, and resigned en masse.

We were sick of the academic publishing racket and had decided to try something different. We wanted to launch a journal that would be truly open access, ensuring anyone could read our articles. This will be published by the Open Library of Humanities, a not-for-profit publisher funded by a consortium of libraries and other institutions. When academic publishing is run on a not-for-profit basis, it works reasonably well. These publishers provide a real service and typically sell the final product at a reasonable price to their own community. So why aren’t there more of them?

…There is an obvious alternative [for funding]: universities, libraries, and academic funding agencies can cut out the intermediary and directly fund journals themselves, at a far lower cost. This would remove commercial pressures from the editorial process, preserve editorial integrity and make research accessible to all. The term for this is “diamond” open access, which means the publishers charge neither authors, editors, nor readers (this is how our new journal will operate). Librarians have been urging this for years. So why haven’t academics already migrated to diamond journals?

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Meta won’t bring future multimodal AI models to EU • Axios

Ina Fried:

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“We will release a multimodal Llama model over the coming months, but not in the EU due to the unpredictable nature of the European regulatory environment,” Meta said in a statement to Axios.

Apple similarly said last month that it won’t release its Apple Intelligence features in Europe because of regulatory concerns.

The Irish Data Protection Commission, Meta’s lead privacy regulator in Europe, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Meta plans to incorporate the new multimodal models, which are able to reason across video, audio, images and text, in a wide range of products, including smartphones and its Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses.

Meta says its decision also means that European companies will not be able to use the multimodal models even though they are being released under an open licence. It could also prevent companies outside of the EU from offering products and services in Europe that make use of the new multimodal models.

The company is also planning to release a larger, text-only version of its Llama 3 model soon. That will be made available for customers and companies in the EU, Meta said.

Meta’s issue isn’t with the still-being-finalized AI Act, but rather with how it can train models using data from European customers while complying with GDPR — the EU’s existing data protection law.

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“Able to reason across”? This “reasoning” stuff is news to everyone, I think. We need better phrases for what these things do. Meanwhile, the EU is not making itself any friends in California.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified