In Poland, renewable energy is making inroads into its coal-heavy electricity generation balance. CC-licensed photo by Greenpeace Polska on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Clean, honestly. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Threads blocks searches for ‘Covid’ and ‘long Covid’ • The Washington Post
Taylor Lorenz:
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Instagram’s text-based social platform Threads last week rolled out its new search function, a crucial step toward the platform’s expansion and one that would give it more parity with X, formerly known as Twitter.
Not even 24 hours later, the company was embroiled in controversy. When users went to Threads to search for content related to “covid” and “long covid,” they were met with a blank screen that showed no search results and a pop-up linking to the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Meta acknowledged in a statement to The Washington Post that Threads is intentionally blocking the search terms and said that other terms are being blocked, but the company declined to provide a list of them. A search by The Post discovered that the words “sex,” “nude,” “gore,” “porn,” “coronavirus,” “vaccines” and “vaccination” are also among blocked words.
“The search functionality temporarily doesn’t provide results for keywords that may show potentially sensitive content,” the statement said, adding that the company will add search functionality for terms only “once we are confident in the quality of the results.”
Lucky Tran, director of science communication at Columbia University, discovered this himself when he attempted to use Threads to seek out research related to covid, something he says he does every day. “I was excited by search [on Threads],” he said. “When I typed in covid, I came up with no search results.”
Other public health workers criticized the company’s decision and said its timing was especially poor, given the current coronavirus uptick.
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Just as a reminder, it was literally yesterday that Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to senators complaining about being censored over, um, Covid by the Biden administration was made public. Who needs the government to get in the way, though, when you can just do it yourself?
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Court says Section 230 doesn’t shield TikTok from Blackout Challenge death suit • Ars Technica
Ashley Belanger:
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An appeals court has revived a lawsuit against TikTok by reversing a lower court’s ruling that Section 230 immunity shielded the short video app from liability after a child died taking part in a dangerous “Blackout Challenge.”
Several kids died taking part in the “Blackout Challenge,” which Third Circuit Judge Patty Shwartz described in her opinion as encouraging users “to choke themselves with belts, purse strings, or anything similar until passing out.”
Because TikTok promoted the challenge in children’s feeds, Tawainna Anderson counted among mourning parents who attempted to sue TikTok in 2022. Ultimately, she was told that TikTok was not responsible for recommending the video that caused the death of her daughter Nylah.
In her opinion, Shwartz wrote that Section 230 does not bar Anderson from arguing that TikTok’s algorithm amalgamates third-party videos, “which results in ‘an expressive product’ that ‘communicates to users’ [that a] curated stream of videos will be interesting to them.”
The judge cited a recent Supreme Court ruling that “held that a platform’s algorithm that reflects ‘editorial judgments’ about compiling the third-party speech it wants in the way it wants’ is the platform’s own ‘expressive product’ and is therefore protected by the First Amendment,” Shwartz wrote.
Because TikTok’s For You Page (FYP) algorithm decides which third-party speech to include or exclude and organizes content, TikTok’s algorithm counts as TikTok’s own “expressive activity.” That “expressive activity” is not protected by Section 230, which only shields platforms from liability for third-party speech, not platforms’ own speech, Shwartz wrote.
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It’s taken those who don’t like it a long time to figure out an attack on Section 230, but they’ve finally worked out their angle. This is going to be interesting to watch. And uncomfortable for TikTok.
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Telegram CEO Pavel Durov charged by French prosecutors • NBC News
Kevin Collier and Rob Wile:
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Pavel Durov, the CEO and co-founder of the news and messaging app Telegram, has been charged in France with enabling various forms of criminality in the app, French prosecutors said Wednesday.
One of the charges — complicity in administering an online platform permitting illicit transactions by an organized group — carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a fine of €500,000 ($555,750), prosecutors said.
It marks one of the few instances in which the CEO of a major internet platform has been charged over alleged criminal failure to moderate what users do on its platform.
In a statement Wednesday, the Paris prosecutor’s office said that Telegram had almost completely failed to respond to its legal requests for user data in prosecuting cybercrime cases.
Prosecutors cited numerous offenses in Wednesday’s statement, including refusal to communicate with authorities, “complicity” in offenses related to child sexual abuse material and drug trafficking, and implementing encrypted technology without proper declaration.
While Durov awaits trial, his bail is set at €5m ($5.6m). He will be forbidden to leave France and will be required to report to the police twice a week, the release said.
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The point about Telegram is that the lack of encryption means it’s easy to bring this charge. Though one wonders if there’s some geopolitics going on underneath, and that France (or its allies) wants something out of Russia in return for Durov’s future release.
Also, he’s one hell of a flight risk. Got to think that there will be undercover police or similar following him around.
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Using LLMs for coding at Amazon • LinkedIn
Andrew Jassy is chief executive of Amazon:
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One of the most tedious (but critical tasks) for software development teams is updating foundational software. It’s not new feature work, and it doesn’t feel like you’re moving the experience forward. As a result, this work is either dreaded or put off for more exciting work—or both.
Amazon Q, our GenAI assistant for software development, is trying to bring some light to this heaviness. We have a new code transformation capability, and here’s what we found when we integrated it into our internal systems and applied it to our needed Java upgrades:
– The average time to upgrade an application to Java 17 plummeted from what’s typically 50 developer-days to just a few hours. We estimate this has saved us the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years of work (yes, that number is crazy but, real).
– In under six months, we’ve been able to upgrade more than 50% of our production Java systems to modernized Java versions at a fraction of the usual time and effort. And, our developers shipped 79% of the auto-generated code reviews without any additional changes.
– The benefits go beyond how much effort we’ve saved developers. The upgrades have enhanced security and reduced infrastructure costs, providing an estimated $260M in annualized efficiency gains.
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If we assume that this code is robust and tested, the question is: why are LLMs good at this? I think the answer is that coding is a very limited knowledge space, far more constrained in what is allowed than normal language (and especially English). Plus there’s a colossal amount of it online to have trained the LLM on.
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Poland is finally kicking its dirty coal habit • The Progress Playbook
Nick Hedley:
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After getting off to a late start in the energy transition, Poland is making up for lost time.
Over the first seven months of 2024, renewables comprised 30.2% of the country’s electrical output — on par with the global average, and nearly double the levels seen just three years ago, according to data collated by research group Ember.
On the other hand, coal’s share declined to 57.6% over the seven-month period, with the dirtiest fossil fuel hitting a fresh monthly low of 53% in July. As recently as 2022, coal accounted 70% of Poland’s power generation.
The rapid shift in favour of wind and solar energy was prompted, in part, by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent surge in fossil fuel prices.
More recently, the formation of a new government in December 2023, led by centrist prime minister Donald Tusk, has added new impetus to Poland’s decarbonisation drive.
Whereas the previous conservative government aimed to raise the share of renewables in the electricity mix to just 32% by 2030, Tusk is targeting a share of at least 50% by then, according to a draft update of Poland’s National Energy and Climate Plan.
To get there, his coalition government plans to rely heavily on wind energy — both onshore and offshore — while also steadily increasing solar’s contribution. Developers currently plan to build 5.9GW of offshore wind capacity by 2030, according to Reuters.
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It’s an astonishingly carbon-heavy generation picture: nuclear is basically a rounding error.
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Stolen photos of European influencers used to push Trump propaganda on X • CNN
Katie Polglase, Pallabi Munsi, Barbara Arvanitidis, and Alex Platt:
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Luna, a self-described 32-year-old “MAGA Trump supporter” from the battleground state of Wisconsin, has gained a huge following since she joined X, formerly Twitter, in March. Her timeline has become a digital bullhorn for the “Make America Great Again” movement, praising former President Donald Trump’s re-election bid, promoting conspiracy theories about his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, and touting Republican talking points to nearly 30,000 followers, who she addresses as “patriots.”
“Would You Support Trump Being The President forever? I wonder if you all support Trump for president just like me,” @Luna_2K24 posted on July 29, sharing a beach selfie in a white bikini and asking her followers to respond with an American flag emoji if they agreed. The post was viewed by around 54,000 people.
But Luna isn’t real. The photos of the smiling brunette posted periodically on @Luna_2K24’s timeline are of Debbie Nederlof, a German fashion influencer who lives across the Atlantic and won’t be voting in the US presidential election in November. When CNN reached out to the 32-year-old, a trained optician and single mother who is working two jobs – as a social media manager at an engineering firm and as a model to raise money for her child – she was angry and frustrated that her face was being used to push pro-Trump propaganda on X.
“To be honest, ‘what the f**k?’ was my reaction. That was my reaction, because I have nothing to do with the United States. With Trump, the political things over there. What the hell do I – from a small place in Germany – care about US politics?” she said.
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Quite a few of the accounts have “verified” status, which of course means a credit card – perhaps stolen – being used to pay for what used to be a mark of authenticity.
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Just four companies are hoarding tens of billions of dollars worth of Nvidia GPU chips • Sherwood News
Jon Keegan:
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Meta just announced the release of Llama 3.1, the latest iteration of their open source large language model. The long-awaited, jumbo-sized model has high scores on the same benchmarks that everyone else uses, and the company said it beats OpenAi’s ChatGPT 4o on some tests.
According to the research paper that accompanies the model release, the 405b parameter version of the model (the largest flavor) was trained using up to 16,000 of Nvidia’s popular H100 GPUs . The Nvidia H100 is one of the most expensive, and most coveted pieces of technology powering the current AI boom. Meta appears to have one of the largest hoards of the powerful GPUs.
Of course, the list of companies seeking such powerful chips for AI training is long, and likely includes most large technology companies today, but only a few companies have publicly crowed about how many H100s they have.
The H100 is estimated to cost between $20,000 and $40,000 meaning that Meta used up to $640m worth of hardware to train the model. And that’s just a small slice of the Nvidia hardware Meta has been stockpiling. Earlier this year, Meta said that it was aiming to have a stash of 350,000 H100s in its AI training infrastructure – which adds up to over $10bn worth of the specialized Nvidia chips.
Venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz is reportedly hoarding more than 20,000 of the pricey GPUs, which it is renting out to AI startups in exchange for equity, according to The Information.
Tesla has also been collecting H100s. Musk said on an earnings call in April that Tesla wants to have between 35,000 and 85,000 H100s by the end of the year.
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That’s a sneaky move by a16z. The other company which has (or wants to have by year-end) a stack of these is xAI, Musk’s company. I don’t follow what Tesla gets out of the chips – are they essential for car design or similar?
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About half of TikTok users under 30 keep up with politics, news there • Pew Research Center
Colleen McClain:
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TikTok has been so popular among young Americans that presidential campaigns are using it for voter outreach. And some young adults are using TikTok to keep up with politics or get news, a March Pew Research Center survey shows.
Our survey explored various reasons people might use TikTok and other social media platforms. Young TikTok users stand out from their older peers on several of these reasons, including:
• Keeping up with politics or political issues. For 48% of TikTok users ages 18 to 29, this is a major or minor reason why they’re on the platform.
By comparison, 36% of those ages 30 to 49 and even smaller shares of older users say the same:
• 22% of those 50 to 64
•24% of those 65 and older• Getting news. We also asked TikTok users if getting news in general is a reason they use the platform – regardless of whether that’s political news or another topic entirely. About half of those under 30 say getting news is a major or minor reason they use TikTok.
That compares with 41% of TikTok users ages 30 to 49 who say getting news is a reason they’re on it. The shares of older users saying so are even smaller:
• 29% of those 50 to 64
• 23% of those 65 and olderTikTok has increasingly become a destination for news, bucking trends on other social media sites. A 2023 Center study showed more Americans – and especially young Americans – regularly get news on the platform compared with a few years ago.
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Hang on though, 23% of TikTok users over 65 are using it for news? Though this doesn’t state what proportion or number of Americans use TikTok. (Notable social network fact: Pew found that two-thirds never post anything.) A 2023 survey suggested one-third of adults use it. That might be higher now, but unlikely to challenge Facebook, at 68%.
Even so. TikTok for news? As folks are apt to say, concerning.
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Brave lays off 27 employees • TechCrunch
Ivan Mehta:
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Web browser and search startup Brave has laid off 27 employees across the different departments, TechCrunch has learned. The company confirmed the layoffs but didn’t give more details about the total headcount left nor the reason for the layoffs. PitchBook however estimates that Brave has around 191 employees, working out to Brave cutting 14% of staff.
The new round of job cuts comes about 10 months after the company let go of 9% of its total workforce in October 2023. At that time, Brave said the cuts were due to “cost management in this challenging economic environment.”
After initially fashioning itself a ‘blockchain browser‘ and adding several crypto-related features, Brave has more recently leaned into AI with its product releases this year. The company launched its AI assistant, Leo, on desktop, Android, iPad, and iPhone in a staggered release cycle.
The company integrated its own search results with its Leo chatbot in June. Users could, for example, use the chatbot to ask about the score of a sports match, or get additional context about an article they are reading without navigating to a search page. The company is also selling a Leo Premium subscription for $14.99 per month for access to better models and higher limit rates.
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Still can’t see how a company reliant on a browser and a bit of search on the side can survive. Talking of which, Mozilla’s accounts (to the end of 2022) show it getting healthy revenue of around $600m, and spending about $425m. All fine? Except “approximately 82% of Mozilla’s revenues from customers with contracts were derived from one customer”. Ah. They’re probably sacrificing goats at Mozilla HQ against Google having to withdraw from default contracts with browsers after the DOJ antitrust verdict.
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Why Texas Republicans are souring on crypto • The Economist
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Just saying no to crypto would be an ideological swerve for Texas. When running for governor in 2014 Greg Abbott took campaign donations in bitcoin before it was cool. He has since fervently embraced miners. After Uri, the winter storm in 2021 that left 4.5m Texans without power and killed nearly 300 people, he looked to crypto as a tool to make the grid more robust. Bringing more large loads onto the grid would incentivise power stations to produce more electricity and keep the cost of energy low, he reckoned. That year Mr Patrick created a working group to “develop a master plan for the expansion of the blockchain industry in Texas”.
Around that time many crypto miners, including Riot, signed contracts with energy suppliers that locked them into fixed rates for up to a decade. Several years on, that decision looks clever. Unlike steel factories or paper mills, bitcoin miners can temporarily shut down without harming supply chains (because, although they say bitcoin is “not just magic internet beans”, there is no product that needs to get to market). That allows them to take advantage of two emergency schemes.
On the hottest and coldest days, when demand for electricity peaks and the price soars, the bitcoin miners either sell power back to providers at a profit or stop mining for a fee, paid by [Texas grid operator] Ercot. Doing so has become more lucrative than mining itself. In August 2023 Riot collected $32m from curtailing mining and just $8.6m from selling bitcoin.
The Tech Transparency Project, a non-profit organisation based in Washington, DC, accuses miners of acting as an energy-arbitrage business in disguise, holding Texas “hostage” and wasting taxpayer dollars. Their [bitcoin miners – I think? – Overspill Ed] ties to China make them more dubious. But the industry is adamant that it is a stellar corporate citizen and critical to the grid’s health. By acting as “dimmer switches”, mines offer Ercot flexibility at a price that no one else can match, says Lee Bratcher of the Texas Blockchain Council, an advocacy group. Riot reckons the industry is being unfairly targeted and that replacing mines with batteries would cost the state even more.
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So bitcoin mining encourages overcapacity in the electricity grid and that’s good? I don’t think that’s good, actually, even though Texas is adding more renewables than anywhere else.
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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 