A new type of influencer has come to prominence: women undergoing IVF. CC-licensed photo by ZEISS Microscopy on Flickr.
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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:
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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