The EU regulation that requires the tops to be attached to plastic bottles affects the UK, because why wouldn’t it, logically? CC-licensed photo by an.difal on Flickr.
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A selection of 8 links for you. Undetachable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
A first look at Apple Intelligence and its (slightly) smarter Siri • The Verge
Allison Johnson:
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A splash screen reintroduces you to the virtual assistant once you enable Apple Intelligence, an early version of which is now available on the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max in a developer beta. You’ll know Siri is listening when the edges of the screen glow, making it pretty obvious that something different is going on.
The big Siri AI update is still months away. This version comes with meaningful improvements to language understanding, but future updates will add features like awareness of what’s on your screen and the ability to take action on your behalf. Meanwhile, the rest of the Apple Intelligence feature set previewed in this update feels like a party waiting for the guest of honor.
That said, Siri’s improvements in this update are useful. Tapping the bottom of the screen twice will bring up a new way to interact with the assistant: through text. It’s also much better at parsing natural language, waiting more patiently through hesitations and “um”s as I stumble through questions. It also understands when I’m asking a follow-up question.
New Siri understands context in follow-up questions, like this one after I asked for the weather in Olympia.
Outside of Siri, it’s kind of an Easter egg hunt finding bits of Apple Intelligence sprinkled throughout the OS. They’re in the mail app, with a summarize button at the top of each email now. And anywhere you can type and highlight text, you’ll find a new option called “writing tools” with AI proofreading, writing suggestions, and summaries.…In iOS 18, voice recordings finally come with automatic transcriptions, which is not an Apple Intelligence feature since it also works on my iPhone 13 Mini. But Apple Intelligence will let you turn a recording transcript into a summary or a checklist. This is helpful if you want to just free-associate while recording a memo and list a bunch of things you need to pack for an upcoming trip; Apple Intelligence turns it into a list that actually makes sense.
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So the real interesting stuff is still some way off. And quite a lot of the things people think are impressive are there already.
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The climate is changing so fast that we haven’t seen how bad extreme weather could get • The Conversation
Hayley Fowler, Simon Lee and Paul Davies:
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Typically, meteorologists and climate scientists use a 30-year period to represent the climate, which is updated every ten years. The most recent climate period is 1991-2020. The difference between each successive 30-year climate period serves as a very literal record of climate change.
This way of thinking about the climate falls short when the climate itself is rapidly changing. Global average temperatures have increased at around 0.2°C per decade over the past 30 years, meaning that the global climate of 1991 was around 0.6°C cooler than that in 2020 (when accounting for other year-to-year fluctuations), and even more so than the present day.
If the climate is a range of possible weather events, then this rapid change has two implications. First, it means that part of the distribution of weather events comprising a 30-year climate period occurred in a very different background global climate: for example, northerly winds in the 1990s were much colder than those in the 2020s in north-west Europe, thanks to the Arctic warming nearly four times faster than the global average. Statistics from three decades ago no longer represent what is possible in the present day.
Second, the rapidly changing climate means we have not necessarily experienced the extremes that modern-day atmospheric and oceanic warmth can produce. In a stable climate, scientists would have multiple decades for the atmosphere to get into its various configurations and drive extreme events, such as heatwaves, floods or droughts. We could then use these observations to build up an understanding of what the climate is capable of. But in our rapidly changing climate, we effectively have only a few years – not enough to experience everything the climate has to offer.
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(The authors are academics in climate change, meteorology and atmospheric science.)
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Xbox console sales continue to crater with massive 42% revenue drop • Ars Technica
Kyle Orland:
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Microsoft’s revenue from Xbox console sales was down a whopping 42% on a year-over-year basis for the quarter ending in June, the company announced in its latest earnings report.
The massive drop continues a long, pronounced slide for sales of Microsoft’s gaming hardware—the Xbox line has now shown year-over-year declines in hardware sales revenue in six of the last seven calendar quarters (and seven of the last nine). And Microsoft CFO Amy Hood told investors in a follow-up call (as reported by GamesIndustry.biz) to expect hardware sales to decline yet again in the coming fiscal quarter, which ends in September.
The 42% drop for quarterly hardware revenue—by far the largest such drop since the introduction of the Xbox Series X/S in 2020—follows an 11% year-over-year decline in the second calendar quarter of 2023.
Microsoft no longer shares raw console shipment numbers like its competitors, so we don’t know how many Xbox consoles are selling on an absolute basis. But industry analyst Daniel Ahmad estimates that Microsoft sold less than 900,000 Xbox units for the quarter ending in March, compared to 4.5 million PS5 units shipped in the same period.
Overall, the reported revenue numbers suggest that sales of the Xbox Series X/S line peaked sometime in 2022, during the console’s second full year on store shelves. That’s extremely rare for a market where sales for successful console hardware usually see a peak in the fourth or fifth year on the market before a slow decline in the run-up to a successor.
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There’s an article putting this in context, but even so: consoles long ago peaked.
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A hill to die on • Jonty’s Jottings
Jonty Bloom:
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Who would have thought that plastic bottle tops were a perfect illustration of Brexit and also a hill to die on for the Brexiteers?
As you may have noticed plastic bottle tops now stay attached to the bottle, to prevent billions of the little beggars getting loose and polluting the world. This is apparently, and this is news to me, the result of an EU directive. A wise move to try to reduce pollution across the EU you might think, but it also applies in the UK, or to be precise, it doesn’t.
Because we have left the EU the directive does not affect us, (a classic case of regulatory divergence by inertia, which I have mentioned before). But any British manufacturer of plastic bottle who wants to sell in the EU has to follow the EU rules.
As British industry, Remain and anyone with an ounce of common sense has been pointing out for years now, no company is going to run two production lines – one that meets EU standards, and a British one that meets lower UK standards. They will run the one with higher standards and sell them in the UK and the rest of Europe.
Hey presto! The Brexit fools have discovered that these new bottle tops have been “imposed” on the UK by the EU, we are not free or sovereign, EU regulations still apply, we are still in the dead clutch of Brussels, chained to a corpse and so on, all in a constant whining voice. .
Well, welcome to the real world, fools!
These bottle tops are not imposed on us, we are not subject to EU directives, but we will now use them because it is common sense. There is little or no advantage in setting UK only standards, there is no economic boost from so doing, only considerable cost. The EU is a regulatory superpower, we are not. Real life economics trumps sad fantasies. You had better get to like it.
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Not surprising, but obvious enough really.
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Japan’s rice stocks drop to lowest level in decades amid tourist boom and poor crop yields • The Guardian
Timothy Hornyak and AFP:
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Japan’s rice stockpile has fallen to the lowest level this century, with a tourism boom part of the cause, government officials say.
Private-sector inventories of rice fell to 1.56m tons in June, down 20% from a year earlier and the lowest since 1999, when comparable data was first gathered, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. It attributed the decrease to the high temperatures that hit crops in 2023 as well as demand from inbound visitors. Last year Japan recorded its hottest September since records began 125 years ago.
“The chief reasons behind the record-low inventory is a decline in production last year due to high temperatures combined with water shortages, and the relative cheapness of rice prices compared to prices of other crops such as wheat,” farm ministry official Hiroshi Itakura told Agence France-Presse. “The increase in demand by foreign tourists has also contributed,” Itakura said, and added that “we are not in a situation of facing shortages of rice”.
The trading price for rice has hit a 30-year high, wholesalers are running low on stock and some supermarkets have decided to further raise prices and limit purchases, according to Japanese news reports. The situation is expected to continue until September, when rice from this year’s harvest will become available.
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Water shortages and high temperatures? Not the.. climate then?
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Websites are blocking the wrong AI scrapers (because AI companies keep making new ones) • 404 Media
Jason Koebler:
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Hundreds of websites trying to block the AI company Anthropic from scraping their content are blocking the wrong bots, seemingly because they are copy/pasting outdated instructions to their robots.txt files, and because companies are constantly launching new AI crawler bots with different names that will only be blocked if website owners update their robots.txt.
In particular, these sites are blocking two bots no longer used by the company, while unknowingly leaving Anthropic’s real (and new) scraper bot unblocked.
This is an example of “how much of a mess the robots.txt landscape is right now,” the anonymous operator of Dark Visitors told 404 Media. Dark Visitors is a website that tracks the constantly-shifting landscape of web crawlers and scrapers—many of them operated by AI companies—and which helps website owners regularly update their robots.txt files to prevent specific types of scraping. The site has seen a huge increase in popularity as more people try to block AI from scraping their work.
“The ecosystem of agents is changing quickly, so it’s basically impossible for website owners to manually keep up. For example, Apple (Applebot-Extended) and Meta (Meta-ExternalAgent) just added new ones last month and last week, respectively,” they added.
Dark Visitors tracks hundreds of web crawlers and scrapers, attempts to explain what each scraper does, and lets website owners constantly update their site’s robots.txt file, which is a set of instructions that tells bots if they have permission to crawl a site. We have seen time and time again that AI companies will often find surreptitious ways of crawling sites that they aren’t supposed to, or, in some cases, they simply ignore robots.txt.
…After this story was originally published, an Anthropic spokesperson told 404 Media that CLAUDEBOT will respect block requests for its older two crawlers. “The ‘ANTHROPIC-AI’ and ‘CLAUDE-WEB’ user agents are no longer in use,” the spokesperson said. “We have configured ClaudeBot, our centralized user agent, to respect any existing robots.txt directives that were previously set for these deprecated user agents. This attempts to respect website owners’ preferences, even if they haven’t updated their robots.txt files.”
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The preachers behind Kenya’s online-only churches • Rest of World
Vincent Owino:
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Standing behind a podium in a first-floor apartment in Nairobi’s Embakasi estate, Kenyan preacher Jeffter Wekesa speaks into a wireless microphone. His gaze alternates between a Samsung phone recording from a tripod to his left and a webcam on another stand before him. It’s past midnight, and the city’s near-constant pandemonium has given way to a mortal stillness.
Wekesa, 31, stands five-foot-four with a clean-shaven head and is dressed in a sleek, cream-and-maroon Ankara suit. He has the air of a man at ease before a congregation of thousands. But he’s alone in his living room, facing a coffee table and empty couch. The webcam is broadcasting his nightly sermon live on Facebook, the Samsung live on TikTok, and another phone live on a messaging app called Imo. In total, close to 500 people are following along. “Some of us, if it were not for God, we would have been defeated [a] long time ago,” he tells them.
Behind him, a 75in flatscreen TV displays a photo of a lion, while two speakers play soft gospel instrumentals that blend into the stentorian sound of his voice. The room is illuminated by a pair of LED tube lights, creating a sense of a tranquil, sunlit afternoon. “There was a day, child of God, I was a nobody,” he intones. “It is important to remember that — if it were not for God — at some point you would have fallen. At some point, child of God, you would’ve ended up to be a nobody.”
The comment sections of his livestreams buzz with activity as followers type “Amen!”
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Well, why shouldn’t a church be online? The community is the thing.
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Delta CEO says CrowdStrike tech outage cost it $500m • WSJ
Alison Sider:
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Delta Air Lines chief executive Ed Bastian said the carrier took a $500m hit from the CrowdStrike technology outage that hurt its operations.
With more than 5,000 flight cancellations over several days, Delta faced deeper disruption and took days longer than rivals to get back on track after the outage knocked key systems offline. The US Department of Transportation is investigating how the airline handled the disruption and its customer response.
Delta has hired prominent litigator David Boies, chairman of the firm Boies Schiller Flexner, and notified CrowdStrike and Microsoft to prepare for litigation, according to letters reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Bastian said in a CNBC interview Wednesday from Paris that the airline has no choice but to seek to recover its losses.
“Between not just the loss of revenue, but the tens of millions of dollars per day in compensation and hotels. We did everything we could to take care of our customers over that time,” he said.
CrowdStrike said in a statement: “We are aware of the reporting, but have no knowledge of a lawsuit and have no further comment.” Microsoft didn’t comment.
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Not sure that Microsoft deserves any of the blame here, but of course that won’t stop David Boies, who has a long history of suing Microsoft: he was a lead prosecutor for the DOJ antitrust trial in the 1990s.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 