When Jony Ive designs a button, you can bet it’s not like any other button. CC-licensed photo by Steven Lilley on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. All done up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
DOJ claims Google has “trifecta of monopolies” on Day 1 of ad tech trial • Ars Technica
Ashley Belanger:
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On Monday, the US Department of Justice’s next monopoly trial against Google started in Virginia—this time challenging the tech giant’s ad tech dominance.
The trial comes after Google lost two major cases that proved Google had a monopoly in both general search and the Android app store. During her opening statement, DOJ lawyer Julia Tarver Wood told US District Judge Leonie Brinkema—who will be ruling on the case after Google cut a check to avoid a jury trial—that “it’s worth saying the quiet part out loud,” AP News reported.
“One monopoly is bad enough,” Wood said. “But a trifecta of monopolies is what we have here.”
In its complaint, the DOJ argued that Google broke competition in the ad tech space “by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers, and brokers, to facilitate digital advertising.”
The result of such “insidious” allegedly anti-competitive behavior is that today Google pockets at least 30 cents “of each advertising dollar flowing from advertisers to website publishers through Google’s ad tech tools … and sometimes far more,” the DOJ alleged.
Meanwhile, as Google profits off both advertisers and publishers, “website creators earn less, and advertisers pay more” than “they would in a market where unfettered competitive pressure could discipline prices and lead to more innovative ad tech tools,” the DOJ alleged.
On Monday, Wood told Brinkema that Google intentionally put itself in this position to “manipulate the rules of ad auctions to its own benefit,” The Washington Post reported.
“Publishers were understandably furious,” Wood said. “The evidence will show that they could do nothing.”
Wood confirmed that the DOJ planned to call several publishers as witnesses in the coming weeks to explain the harms caused. Expected to take the stand will be “executives from companies including USA Today, [Wall Street] Journal parent company News Corp., and the Daily Mail,” the Post reported.
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Apple’s iPhone 16 event: the eight biggest announcements • The Verge
Emma Roth:
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In addition to inheriting the iPhone 15 Pro’s Action Button, the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus now come equipped with a handy new DSLR-like button that you can use to take pictures and videos as well as adjust settings. They also have rear cameras stacked atop one another that support spatial video recording for viewing on the Apple Vision Pro.
The iPhone 16 has a faster A18 processor to handle new AI features coming to the device. The 6.1-inch iPhone 16 starts at $799 and $899 for the 6.7-inch Plus version. They are available in white, black, green, pink, and blue and start shipping on September 20th.
…All of the iPhone 16 models are ready for Apple Intelligence — the new AI features Apple is launching in beta next month starting in English. These features include the ability to search for images in your library by describing them and creating custom emoji.
Yet Apple is also outfitting the iPhone 16’s Camera Control button with a new feature, called Visual Intelligence, which will automatically search for things you take photos of. You can also use it to perform actions, such as snapping a photo of a concert poster and easily adding it to your calendar.
…Later this year, Apple will make the AirPods Pro 2 available as an over-the-counter hearing aid. Apple is launching a couple of other hearing-focused features on the AirPods Pro 2, including a feature designed to protect hearing and a clinical-grade hearing test. These features become available in a free software update in more than 100 countries and regions this fall.
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Of the three picked out there, I’d say the hearing aids is the most interesting, given the ageing population: Apple is moving right to where its customers are going to be. Or possibly are.
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DOJ: Russia aimed propaganda at gamers, minorities to swing 2024 election • WIRED
David Gilbert:
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In late August 2023, Ilya Gambashidze was in a conference room at the office of Social Design Agency, a Russian IT company he founded that is based in Moscow, close to the world-renowned Moscow Conservatory. Gambashidze was relatively unknown in Russian politics at the time, but just a month earlier his name had appeared on a Council of the European Union’s list of Russian nationals subjected to sanctions for playing a central role in a sprawling disinformation campaign against Ukraine.
In the conference room, Gambashidze was laying out his plans for a new target: Along with his colleagues, he began drafting what would become known as the Good Old USA Project. The project was supposed to influence the outcome of the US presidential election in favor of former president Donald Trump, specifically targeting certain minorities, swing-state residents, and online gamers, among others, in a scheme that included a full-time team dedicated to the cause.
On Wednesday, Gambashidze and his company were named by the US Department of Justice among the architects of a disinformation campaign known as Doppelganger that has for the past two years been targeting Ukraine and, more recently, US elections. The Doppelganger campaign uses AI-generated content on dozens of fake websites designed to impersonate mainstream media outlets such as The Washington Post and Fox Business, using a network of fake social media accounts to disseminate pro-Russian narratives targeting audiences across the globe. Doppelganger is a Kremlin-aligned disinformation campaign that was first linked to the Kremlin in 2023 by the French government.
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Sure is a whole lot of disinformation going on. But.. gamers?
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EV battery makers have been doing it wrong this whole time • Clean Technica
Tina Casey:
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[The work came from] a research team based at the SLAC-Stanford Battery Center at Stanford University in California, headed up by Professor Will Chueh. The project was a collaborative effort in partnership with the Toyota Research Institute MIT, and the University of Washington.
The team took aim at the common wisdom for battery manufacturing, which holds that factories should hold a newly made lithium-ion battery for an initial charge lasting 10 hours at low current before setting it loose.
The 10-hour initial charge is costly and time-consuming, but the purpose is — or was — to reduce the loss of lithium up front, thereby increasing the lifespan of the battery.
Not so, the researchers discovered. They flipped the script and purposefully charged pouch-type EV batteries on a high current for just 20 minutes. They lost quite a bit of lithium at the outset, but they gained an average improvement of 50% in EV battery lifespan.
If you’re interested in the all the details, look up the study under the title, “Data-driven analysis of battery formation reveals the role of electrode utilization in extending cycle life,” published in the journal Joule on August 29.
The short version is that the low-current strategy was widely adopted under the assumption that minimizing lithium loss at the outset is the best way to extend battery life. The long initial charge enables a semi-solid layer to build up around the negative electrode, protecting it from side reactions that eat away at the remaining lithium with every subsequent charging cycle.
This layer, called SEI (solid electrolyte interphase), is described as “squishy,” which sounds a bit silly. However, it is not silly. Fine tuning the SEI is essential as the final, formative stage of battery manufacturing.
“Formation is the final step in the manufacturing process, so if it fails, all the value and effort invested in the battery up to that point are wasted,” explained lead researcher Xiao Cui in a press statement.
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Yuval Noah Harari’s apocalyptic vision • The Atlantic
Daniel Immerwahr:
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[Yuval Noah] Harari sits above the fray of Silicon Valley politicking. The hope is that his elevated vantage will allow him to see farther. But just as it’s possible to be too narrowly focused and miss the forest for the trees, it’s also possible to be too zoomed-out and miss the forest for the solar system. Although Harari is a good guide to how future technologies might destroy democracy (or humanity), he’s less helpful on the present-day economics bringing those technologies forth.
The economics of the Information Age have been treacherous. They’ve made content cheaper to consume but less profitable to produce. Consider the effect of the free-content and targeted-advertising models on journalism: Since 2005, the United States has lost nearly a third of its newspapers and more than two-thirds of its newspaper jobs, to the point where nearly 7% of newspaper employees now work for a single organization, The New York Times. In the 21st-century United States—at the height and center of the information revolution—we speak of “news deserts,” places where reporting has essentially vanished.
AI threatens to exacerbate this. With better chatbots, platforms won’t need to link to external content, because they’ll reproduce it synthetically. Instead of a Google search that sends users to outside sites, a chatbot query will summarize those sites, keeping users within Google’s walled garden.
The prospect isn’t a network with a million links but a Truman Show–style bubble: personally generated content, read by voices that sound real but aren’t, plus product placement. Among other problems, this would cut off writers and publishers—the ones actually generating ideas—from readers. Our intellectual institutions would wither, and the internet would devolve into a closed loop of “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four,” as the software engineer Tom Eastman puts it.
Harari has little to say about the erosion of our intellectual institutions. In a way, he is symptomatic of the trend. Although flesh and blood, Harari is Silicon Valley’s ideal of what a chatbot should be. He raids libraries, detects the patterns, and boils all of history down to bullet points. (Modernity, he writes, “can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.”) He’s written an entire book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, in the form of a list. For readers whose attention flags, he delivers amusing factoids at a rapid clip.
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Just 15 countries account for 98% of new coal-power development • Carbon Brief
Carbon Brief Staff:
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Over the past 10 years, the global energy transition away from coal has accelerated. The number of countries with coal power under development (pre-construction and construction) has nearly halved from 75 in 2014 to just 40 in 2024.
In addition, nearly all of the coal-power capacity under development (98%) is now concentrated in just 15 countries, with China and India alone accounting for 86%.
This is according to Global Energy Monitor’s latest Global Coal Plant Tracker (GCPT) results, completed in July 2024. The GCPT catalogues all coal-fired power units 30 megawatts (MW) or larger biannually, with the first survey dating back to 2014.
Despite the concentration of coal-plant development in fewer countries and projections that global coal demand could be peaking, new coal-fired power station proposals continue to outpace cancellations.
In the first half of 2024, over 60 gigawatts (GW) of coal capacity was newly proposed or revived, compared to the 33.7GW that was shelved or cancelled over the same period.
This article details some of the most significant trends driving the continued development of coal across the 15 largest markets, drawing insight from the GCPT, as well as wider context.
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It is a puzzle how the countries which are moving on a big scale towards renewables are the ones which also are using coal in a big way, and making it bigger.
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‘If journalism is going up in smoke, I might as well get high off the fumes’: confessions of a chatbot helper • The Guardian
Jack Apollo George:
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For several hours a week, I write for a technology company worth billions of dollars. Alongside me are published novelists, rising academics and several other freelance journalists. The workload is flexible, the pay better than we are used to, and the assignments never run out. But what we write will never be read by anyone outside the company.
That’s because we aren’t even writing for people. We are writing for an AI.
Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have made it possible to automate huge swaths of linguistic life, from summarising any amount of text to drafting emails, essays and even entire novels. These tools appear so good at writing that they have become synonymous with the very idea of artificial intelligence.
But before they ever risk leading to a godlike superintelligence or devastating mass unemployment, they first need training. Instead of using these grandiloquent chatbots to automate us out of our livelihoods, tech companies are contracting us to help train their models.
The core part of the job is writing pretend responses to hypothetical chatbot questions. This is the training data that the model needs to be fed. The “AI” needs an example of what “good” looks like before it can try to produce “good” writing.
As well as providing our model with such “gold standard” material, we are also helping it attempt to avoid “hallucinating” – a poetic term for telling lies. We do so by feeding it examples that use a search engine and cite sources. Without seeing writing that does this, it cannot learn to do so by itself.
Without better language data, these language models simply cannot improve. Their world is our word.
Hold on. Aren’t these machines trained on billions and billions of words and sentences? What would they need us fleshy scribes for?
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Entertaining. Also slightly worrying. Until the LLMs figure out how to interview people, though, journalism ought to survive.
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Inside the rise of bitcoin-powered pools and bathhouses • TIME
Andrew R. Chow:
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The scene inside Bathhouse, a spa in Manhattan, is one of complete serenity. Visitors recline in 105ºF pools, surrounded by cedar tiles and elegant marble slabs from Brazil. But just beyond closed doors, in harshly-lit back rooms, an unexpected source helps forge the bliss: rows and rows of continuously-running bitcoin mining computers.
The idea of a bitcoin mine heating a pool sounds strange. The machines run constantly to find new bitcoin and safeguard the bitcoin network. The heat they generate from their activity is extracted via pipes, and powers the Bathhouse’s heated pools and marble stones. Co-owner Jason Goodman says the technique allows him to warm his pools more efficiently than traditional methods, while also accruing a stockpile of bitcoin he hopes will increase in value going forward.
Around the world, a handful of establishments are turning to the same methods in an attempt to harness energy from intensive computing for greater societal use, including to heat a town in Finland and an Olympic pool in Paris.
But while proponents argue that these solutions could lower local energy costs and reduce electricity and water usage, some environmentalists worry these small-scale methods obscure much bigger problems. Data centres use a massive and increasing amount of energy, with many of them powered by fossil fuels—and most of their heat waste isn’t being channelled into productive uses at all.
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Long past the point at which bitcoin doesn’t make any sense now. Also, do data centres need spas and outdoor pools?
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The Texas billionaire who has Greenpeace USA on the verge of bankruptcy • WSJ
Benoît Morenne:
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Energy Transfer’s lawsuit [led by fossil fuel billionaire Kelcy Warren] alleges several Greenpeace entities incited the Dakota Access protests, funded attacks to damage the pipeline, and spread misinformation about the company and its project. The case is set for trial in February in a North Dakota state court, where both sides expect a fossil-fuel-friendly jury. Energy Transfer is seeking $300m in damages, which would likely wipe out Greenpeace USA, according to the group’s leadership.
Deepa Padmanabha, Greenpeace USA’s acting co-executive director, said the lawsuit is “an existential threat” to the group.
In court papers, Greenpeace says it played a limited role in the protests, which it says were organized by Native American groups, and never took part in any property destruction or violence.
The litigation is unlikely to affect Greenpeace’s international operations. While the Greenpeace network’s coordinating body in the Netherlands is also a defendant, Energy Transfer may struggle to enforce any award against it because it doesn’t own assets in the U.S. But Greenpeace says losing its affiliate—and influence—in the U.S. would have a profound impact on the group’s ability to address climate change.
Environmental leaders fear the demise of Greenpeace USA would send a chilling message to their movement. Josh Galperin, an associate professor of law at Pace University, said that environmentalists have long recognized that they can choke off pipelines by challenging them on legal grounds. Now, some oil-and-gas companies are realizing they can use litigation to stop green activists.
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Jony made a button • On my Om
Om Malik:
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Moncler is a luxury ski-apparel company that now makes all sorts of clothing — but is mostly known for its jackets and puffers with a big M logo. LoveFrom, Jony Ive’s design firm, and Moncler started working together four years ago and have come up with “LoveFrom, Moncler,” a three-in-one shell jacket that goes on sale later this month.
At its core is Moncore, a down-filled vest to which you can add a field jacket, a parka or a hooded poncho. None of this is new — companies have built layered outerwear for a long time. What’s new is how it all comes together — with a brand-new kind of button.
Sometimes a button is not just a button — it’s how you build the entire system. Ive focused on a button because that’s how every layer of the “four-in-one jacket” system comes together.
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“How could you connect something where you didn’t have to pay attention? Velcro’s sort of ingenious in that way. But I don’t think it’s satisfying,” Ive told Fast Company. “Explorations into all methods of attachment followed. “I tried to do better zippers, and zippers are really hard.”
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Ergo, buttons!
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“There wasn’t some arrogant ambition around disruption [of buttons]. It was a very gentle, humble exploration.”
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It’s a two-part design — one half of the button is on the base layer, Moncore vest. The other half, shaped like a donut, is on the other layers. To the touch, they feel solid, but there’s a piston inside the base layer. When the two halves come close, magnets inside the donut engage, pulling out the piston from the base layer and locking the two halves. To unlock, simply press the center. The result is a pressable button.
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Magnets, huh. Velcro isn’t good enough, pop-connection isn’t good enough.
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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. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 