Gold nuggets are typically found in quartz because of earthquakes, a new theory says. CC-licensed photo by Dave Bezaire on Flickr.

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

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A selection of 9 links for you. Not fooled. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

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OSOM, the company formed from Essential’s ashes, is apparently in shambles • Android Authority

Mishaal Rahman:

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OSOM Products rose from the ashes of Essential in late 2020. Its founder and “Chief Hooligan,” Jason Keats, wanted to build something new without the involvement (and associated baggage) of Essential’s previous founder, Andy Rubin. The company hired several people who previously worked at Essential, including camera engineer Nick Franco, programmers Gary Anderson and Jean-Baptiste Théou, and marketing officer Wolfgang Muller.

OSOM, which the company says stands for “Out of Sight, Out of Mind,” stated that one of its goals was to create privacy-focused products. To lead those efforts, the company hired Mary Stone Ross in early 2021 to be their “Chief Privacy Officer.”

In 2022, the company launched its first product: the Saga, an Android smartphone backed by the large cryptocurrency and blockchain platform company named Solana. It released its second product, the OSOM Privacy Cable, in 2023 and seemingly held talks with Solana Mobile later that year to create a successor to the Saga. However, it seems that not only has the Solana Saga Two been canceled, but its entire smartphone venture might be over.

In a lawsuit docketed on Friday, August 30, 2024, in the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware (C.A. No. 2024-0894-BWD), Mary Ross, who left the company in May 2024 according to her LinkedIn, asked the court to compel OSOM Products, Inc. to grant her access to the company’s books and records. She filed this lawsuit in an attempt to prove her many allegations of financial mismanagement by Jason Keats.

The allegations she highlights in the lawsuit, detailed in court records seen by Android Authority, are incredibly damning if true. Shockingly, the lawsuit alleges, citing several meetings with the company’s Board and internal documents provided by former CMO Muller, that Keats misused company funds to purchase two Lamborghinis, pay for his racing hobby, pay for his racing partner’s salary, expense multiple first-class travel tickets, pay his mortgage, and more. The suit suggests that the company’s previous Head of Finance may have resigned due to these practices and that the company’s replacement was brought on board to process payments for Keats’ personal expenses.

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Where are the VCs while all this is going on? Perhaps OSOM applies to their view about this too.
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Overview: AI-implanted false memories • MIT Media Lab

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Participants (N=200) watched a crime video, then interacted with their assigned AI interviewer or survey, answering questions including five misleading ones. False memories were assessed immediately and after one week.

Results show the generative chatbot condition significantly increased false memory formation, inducing over 3 times more immediate false memories than the control and 1.7 times more than the survey method. 36.4% of users’ responses to the generative chatbot were misled through the interaction.

After one week, the number of false memories induced by generative chatbots remained constant. However, confidence in these false memories remained higher than the control after one week. Moderating factors were explored: users who were less familiar with chatbots but more familiar with AI technology, and more interested in crime investigations, were more susceptible to false memories. These findings highlight the potential risks of using advanced AI in sensitive contexts, like police interviews, emphasizing the need for ethical considerations.

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This is quite a clever study, and a concerning finding: if a chatbot misleads you, even over content that you’ve seen independently, then it can persuade you that something which didn’t happen did happen, or vice versa.
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Escaping a hostage situation • Five Good Hours

“Five” is a PhD candidate at Princeton (subject not stated) and has thoughts about Ted Chiang’s article (linked here yesterday) about AI v art:

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In art, we don’t begin from choice, but from cliché, from a position of determination and dependency. And every proper choice we make in the production of an artwork is achieved by consciously cultivated tactics of resistance to this cliché. In Bacon, one such tactic was actually the restriction of his subjective “choice” in the process of painting, the introduction of chance into the making of the work, the use of materials that did not easily respond to the painter’s hand, the defacing of the face in his great portraits.

A radically “chosen” artwork, an artwork that is actually composed entirely of free “choices” made by the artist is inconceivable. We begin with our given materials, our shared language, our common history, and the overdetermined conditions of our socialization into that history. Only within and against that background of this shared meaning, only by knowing it well enough to navigate the many traps and alleys that may first appear as lines of flight, can we strike out on our own and invent something new—which if we are lucky will integrate itself into the tradition and perhaps even one day become a cliché of its own to be overcome.

A defense of art-making in purely humanist-voluntarist terms will collapse under its own weight when placed under scrutiny, especially when we consider the extent to which so much writing produced by human beings, with human hands and human minds, is as automatic as that of LLMs. I’ve been hesitant to confront students about suspected AI-use because I simply cannot tell if the generic quality of their arguments and phrasing is the product of algorithmic flattening or of the quotidian automaticity of college-writing that has been around at least since Aquinas led disputations at the University of Paris.

…It is not theoretically or practically productive to think along the voluntarist lines that Chiang lays out—between “choice” and “non-choice,” or between different quantities of choices. The better distinction is between abject dependency upon the machine and the relative autonomy achieved by the cultivation of knowledge and skills. We need to create room to maneuver, to create the possibility of a creative life that isn’t utterly parasitized by these tools.

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There’s also a discussion of the Chiang article on Hacker News, if you wanted to know what brogrammers think of it.
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Hewlett Packard to pursue Mike Lynch’s estate for up to $4bn • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise has confirmed it will push ahead with a high court lawsuit against the estate of the deceased tech tycoon Mike Lynch in which it is seeking damages of up to $4bn (£3bn).

The US company said in a statement it would follow the legal proceedings “through to their conclusion” despite Lynch’s death last month when his yacht sank off the coast of Italy.

HPE won a civil claim against Lynch in the English high court in 2022, after accusing him and his former finance director Sushovan Hussain of fraud over its $11bn takeover of his software company Autonomy in 2011.

A ruling on damages is expected soon, although the judge presiding over the case, Mr Justice Hildyard, wrote in 2022 that he expected final damages to be “substantially less than is claimed”.

Lynch, 59, who was cleared in a separate criminal fraud trial over the Autonomy deal in the US in June, and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, were among seven people who died after the Bayesian superyacht sank off the coast of Sicily last month.

HPE said: “In 2022, an English high court judge ruled that HPE had substantially succeeded in its civil fraud claims against Dr Lynch and Mr Hussain. A damages hearing was held in February 2024 and the judge’s decision regarding damages due to HPE will arrive in due course. It is HPE’s intention to follow the proceedings through to their conclusion.”

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One’s reaction to this will tend towards the “hasn’t HP got enough money then?” but the estate might be sizeable. If it were, say, $5bn then his widow may be able to get by on the remainder. If it puts her into destitution, though, the publicity will quickly turn sour.
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How do gold nuggets form? Earthquakes may be the key • National Geographic

Robin George Andrews:

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Gold has always been a hot commodity. But these days, finding a nugget isn’t too tricky: Much of the world’s gold is mined from natural veins of quartz, a glassy mineral that streaks through large chunks of Earth’s squashed-up crust. But the geologic process that put gold nuggets there in the first place was a mystery.

Now, a new study published in Nature Geoscience has come up with a convincing, and surprising, answer: electricity, and earthquakes—lots of them.

Those nuggets owe their existence to the strange electrical properties of common quartz. When squished or jiggled, the mineral generates electricity. That drags gold particles out of fluid in Earth’s crust. The particles crystallize out as grains of gold—and, over time, with enough electrical stimulation, those grains bloom into nuggets.

“If you shake quartz, it makes electricity. If you make electricity, gold comes out,” says Christopher Voisey, a geologist at Monash University in Australia and the lead author of the new paper. Earthquakes are the most likely natural source of that shaking, and the team’s lab experiments show that earthquakes can make gold nuggets. 

The idea that gold nuggets appear because of electricity instead of a more conventional geologic process is, at first, a peculiar thought. But “it makes complete sense,” says Thomas Gernon, a geoscientist at the University of Southampton in England and who was not involved with the new work. Quartz veins host a disproportionate number of gold nuggets and their environments experience plenty of earthquakes.

…Voisey originally had this hunch that quakes and electrical fields might forge gold several years earlier as a Ph.D. student; to see it realized was an exhilarating moment. “I went nuts when that worked,” he says. “I kicked back on my chair, screaming out and stuff. Dude, I exploded.”

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Always nice to remember that scientists are human beings and get excited about their discoveries too.
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Failure to warn Oasis fans of dynamic pricing may be consumer law breach, say experts • The Guardian

Rob Davies, Josh Halliday and Shane Harrison:

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Ticketmaster may have breached consumer laws by failing to warn Oasis fans that the price of tickets might soar while they were queueing, experts have said, as it emerged that the company plans to apply “dynamic pricing” more widely.

Excitement about the Mancunian band’s long-awaited reunion tour descended into dismay and outrage over the weekend after fans complained that tickets for 17 shows in 2025, expected to make millions for the Gallagher brothers, were hiked up without warning.

Dynamic pricing, which is common in the US but relatively unusual in the UK and Ireland, meant that some fans queued [virtually] all day long only to find that £135 standing tickets had risen to £355 when the time came to confirm their purchase.

Fans said they were left with a choice of missing out or paying more than they felt able to, and that they only had minutes to decide.

The government announced on Sunday night that it would include dynamic pricing in a review of ticketing that was due to focus on Labour’s plans to ban “rip-off” resale sites and ticket touting.

But on Monday, consumer law experts said that while dynamic pricing was not illegal, the way Ticketmaster applied it may have breached consumer regulations if it was not clear to fans that the price of basic standing tickets might increase.

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It certainly looks like a bait-and-switch to entice people with low-priced items and then increase the price without warning.
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What is NaNoWriMo’s position on Artificial Intelligence (AI)? • National Novel Writing Month

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NaNoWriMo does not explicitly support any specific approach to writing, nor does it explicitly condemn any approach, including the use of AI. NaNoWriMo’s mission is to “provide the structure, community, and encouragement to help people use their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worlds—on and off the page.” We fulfill our mission by supporting the humans doing the writing. Please see this related post that speaks to our overall position on nondiscrimination with respect to approaches to creativity, writer’s resources, and personal choice. 
 
Note: we have edited this post by adding this paragraph to reflect our acknowledgment that there are bad actors in the AI space who are doing harm to writers and who are acting unethically. We want to make clear that, though we find the categorical condemnation for AI to be problematic for the reasons stated below, we are troubled by situational abuse of AI, and that certain situational abuses clearly conflict with our values. We also want to make clear that AI is a large umbrella technology and that the size and complexity of that category (which includes both non-generative and generative AI, among other uses) contributes to our belief that it is simply too big to categorically endorse or not endorse.

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NanoWriMo has been going since 1999, when it had 21 participants trying desperately to finish their novels during the month of November; it now has over 400,000 participants. But this bizarre notification about how AI is sorta kinda OK really, who are we to judge, has a lot of people puzzled – and other people thinking it must mean that it has licensed content to LLM builders.

Meanwhile, there’s also this closing paragraph, which has no further explanation:

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We believe that to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege. 

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Glad to have that sorted.
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Elon Musk vs. Brazil • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

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The exact details about what Musk wasn’t complying with has been a little fuzzy. But X launched a Twitter Files spin-off to organize their response to the Brazilian government called the Alexandre Files, named after Alexandre de Moraes, Brazil’s minister of the Supreme Federal Court and the chief architect of the country’s X ban. And according to what X has released, the conflict between the site and the Brazilian government boils down to seven users, which X, confoundingly, decided to dox in their Alexandre Files. The Brazilian supreme court wanted the users suspended, Musk didn’t. And now an estimated 40 million people can’t use X.

Now that we know the exact accounts that were ordered to be suspended, it’s extremely clear why Musk was comfortable sacrificing Brazilian users to keep them. They included Marcos Ribeiro do Val, a senator that’s been investigated for his role in Brazil’s 2023 insurrection, pro-Bolsonaro influencer Ednardo Davila Mello Raposo, and Paola Da Silva Daniel, the wife of Daniel Silveira, a former military police officer and state deputy that has been arrested several times for threatening supreme court ministers.

It should go without saying that if former Brazilian president and far-right COVID magnet Jair Bolsonaro was still in power and asking for leftist accounts to be suspended, Musk would have been more than happy to oblige. In fact, we know this because X restricted content on the request of the Turkish government in 2023 and complied with a government order to block accounts in India in 2024.

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I’d held off linking to this over the weekend because of the lack of clarity. This is clarity. And of course Musk is behaving hypocritically. Of course.
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Bluesky tops app charts and sees “all-time-highs” after Brazil bans X • TechCrunch

Anthony Ha:

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A Brazilian court’s decision to ban X (formerly Twitter) seems to be benefiting its rivals, especially Bluesky.

The microblogging platform announced late Friday that it was seeing “all-time-highs for activity” with 500,000 new users joining in the previous two days. It’s also number one on the free iPhone app chart in Brazil today, ranking just ahead of Meta’s Threads at number two.

Noting the rankings, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber wrote, “good job Brazil, you made the right choice.”

That growth is particularly impressive for a platform that only fully opened to the public in February and winkingly acknowledged its small size (especially compared to rivals X and Threads) by describing itself as “the short king of social apps.” The company says it had more than 6 million users as of May 2024.

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Given there were 40 million or so users of Twitter in Brazil, the upside for Bluesky is considerable. Once it figures out how to make money from those people, of course.
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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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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified