A significant number of hard drives with music recordings from the 1990s are unreadable – meaning a huge amount of original sessions have been lost. CC-licensed photo by slgckgc on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Google serves AI slop as top result for one of the most famous paintings in history • 404 Media
Emanuel Maiberg:
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The first thing people saw when they searched Google for the artist Hieronymus Bosch was an AI-generated version of his Garden of Earthly Delights, one of the most famous paintings in art history.
Depending on what they are searching for, Google Search sometimes serves users a series of images above the list of links they usually see in results. As first spotted by a user on Twitter, when people searched for “Hieronymus Bosch” on Google, it included a couple of images from the real painting, but the first and largest image they saw was an AI-generated version of it.
I was able to confirm that Google Search was serving this AI-generated image to users yesterday, but Google removed it from search results at some point on Sunday night.
“Search is designed to show helpful and high quality information – including representative imagery in knowledge panels – while giving people tools to help them make sense of what they find online,” a Google spokesperson told me in an email. “Given the scale of the open web, however, it’s possible that our systems might not always select the best images regardless of how those images are produced, AI-generated or not. When we receive user feedback about potential issues, we work to make timely improvements.”
Google was pulling the image from the personal website of Andrea Concas, who according to his Linkedin is an “Art Tech Entrepreneur” and the founder of an “NFT Magazine to be read and collected on Ethereum.”
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What this is really showing is that Google Search hasn’t been reliable for a long, long time: it wasn’t necessarily linking to what was really the most authoritative site. It was more like luck, and the lack of enough AI-generated junk, that kept search looking believable. Now? All bets are off.
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Amazon mandates five days a week in office starting next year • The Guardian
Guardian staff and agencies:
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Amazon said on Monday it would require employees to return to the office five days a week, effective 2 January.
“We’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID. When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant,” Andy Jassy, the CEO, said in a note to employees.
The e-commerce giant’s previous office attendance requirement for its workers was three days a week. Amazon workers can claim “extenuating circumstances” or request exceptions from senior leadership, according to Jassy’s memo.
“If anything, the last 15 months we’ve been back in the office at least three days a week has strengthened our conviction about the benefits.” He cited improved collaboration and connection between teams as reasons for the new requirement as well as the ability to “strengthen our culture”.
As part of an organizational restructuring, Amazon is looking to reduce the number of managers in its organization and boost the number of individual contributors by the end of the first quarter of 2025 to reduce bureaucracy. Like other technology companies, Amazon grew rapidly at the start of the coronavirus pandemic then laid off wide swaths of its staff.
“We are also going to bring back assigned desk arrangements in locations that were previously organized that way, including the US headquarters locations (Puget Sound and Arlington),” Jassy said.
Since Covid lockdowns first forced workers home four years ago, employers and employees have clashed over how many days of the work week must be spent in the office. In May last year, employees at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters staged a walkout protesting against changes to the e-commerce giant’s climate policy, layoffs and a return-to-office mandate.
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A trend gathers steam.
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Exclusive: how Intel lost the Sony PlayStation business • Reuters
Max Cherney:
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Intel lost out on a contract to design and fabricate Sony’s PlayStation 6 chip in 2022, which dealt a significant blow to its effort to build its fledgling contract manufacturing business, according to three sources with knowledge of the events.
The effort by Intel to win out over Advanced Micro Devices in a competitive bidding process to supply the design for the forthcoming PlayStation 6 chip and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co as the contract manufacturer would have amounted to billions of dollars of revenue and fabricating thousands of silicon wafers a month, two sources said.
Intel and AMD were the final two contenders in the bidding process for the contract.
Winning the Sony PlayStation 6 chip design business would have been a victory for Intel’s design segment and would have doubled as a win for the company’s contract manufacturing effort, or foundry business, which was the centerpiece of Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger’s turnaround plan.
Gelsinger announced plans for Intel to create a foundry unit in 2021 and formally launched it at an event in San Jose, California, in February of this year. The PlayStation chip deal originated in Intel’s design segment, but would have been a boon to the financial performance of the foundry business after this year’s separation.
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Missed out on making 100m chips over five years or so: couldn’t agree on the price (or, perhaps a better characterisation, Intel’s profit). And Intel just had a big board meeting at which one member quit over the latest plans for the future. Things really aren’t looking good.
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The prospect of the childless city • Financial Times
Emma Jacobs:
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Randal Cremer is one of several planned primary school closures and mergers in inner London triggered by low birth rates, families moving away because of expensive childcare, Brexit, and parents re-evaluating their lives during the pandemic. The biggest factor, says Riley, is that “housing is just becoming unaffordable”. Philip Glanville, mayor of Hackney, calls it “the acute affordability crisis”. Retaining children in the area, he says, requires an intervention from central government, to provide “meaningful investment in social housing, match wel fare support with the real cost of housing, and put controls on rocketing rents”.
Hackney is not the only area in the capital that is losing children. London Councils, which represents the 32 boroughs and the City of London Corporation, predicts a 7.6% decrease in reception pupil numbers across the city between 2022-23 and 2026-27, the equivalent of about 243 classes.
A future with dwindling numbers of children is one many cities, including San Francisco, Seattle and Washington DC, are grappling with. In Hong Kong, for every adult over 65 there are, to put it crudely, 0.7 children, and in Tokyo it is even fewer (0.5).
Even before the pandemic, Joel Kotkin, author of The Human City wrote a decade ago about the prospect of a childless city, saying that US cities “have embarked on an experiment to rid our cities of children . . . The much-ballyhooed and self-celebrating ‘creative class’ — a demographic group that includes not only single professionals but also well-heeled childless couples, empty nesters, and college students — occupies much of the urban space once filled by families. Increasingly, our great American cities, from New York and Chicago to Los Angeles and Seattle, are evolving into playgrounds for the rich.”
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(Should be free to read)
Inside Iron Mountain: it’s time to talk about hard drives • Mixonline
Steve Harvey:
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A few years ago, archiving specialist Iron Mountain Media and Archive Services did a survey of its vaults and discovered an alarming trend: Of the thousands and thousands of archived hard disk drives from the 1990s that clients ask the company to work on, around one-fifth are unreadable. Iron Mountain has a broad customer base, but if you focus strictly on the music business, says Robert Koszela, Global Director Studio Growth and Strategic Initiatives, “That means there are historic sessions from the early to mid-’90s that are dying.”
Until the turn of the millennium, the workflow for record releases was simple enough. Once the multitrack was mixed, the 2-track master was turned into a piece of vinyl, a cassette tape or, starting in 1982, a compact disc, and those original tapes—by and large— then went into storage. Around 2000, with the advent of 5.1-surround releases, then in 2005 with the debut of the Guitar Hero video game, things started to get complicated. When rights holders went to the vaults to transfer, remix and repurpose some of their catalog tracks for these new platforms, they discovered that some tapes were deteriorating while others were unplayable. Not all assets had been stored under optimum conditions. Some recordings had been made on machines that were now obsolete, in formats that could no longer be easily played. And some recordings were missing.
In short, for the past 25 or more years, the music industry has been focused on its magnetic tape archives, and on the remediation, digitization and migration of assets to more accessible, reliable storage. Hard drives also became a focus of the industry during that period, ever since the emergence of the first DAWs in the late 1980s. But unlike tape, surely, all you need to do, decades later, is connect a drive and open the files. Well, not necessarily. And Iron Mountain would like to alert the music industry at large to the fact that, even though you may have followed recommended best practices at the time, those archived drives may now be no more easily playable than a 40-year-old reel of Ampex 456 tape.
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As much as anything, even if the hard drive isn’t digital mush, does the version of Pro Tools that it was recorded on still function?
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iOS 18 is a smart upgrade, even without the AI • The Verge
Allison Johnson:
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You know this is a big update when an entirely new Passwords app is only, like, the fourth most interesting thing going on. It’s self-explanatory, and after poking around for a bit, I’m convinced that this is an app for your parents who refuse to learn how to use a password manager. You can save passwords and access them from your iOS, iPad, and macOS devices, as you’d expect. But you can also share individual passwords or groups of passwords with other people, which would be handy for families and people in the same household.
The catch, of course, is that everyone needs to be in the Apple ecosystem, and since I frequently jump between iOS and Android, it’s not something I can really use in the long term. Incidentally, using a first-party Apple password manager would also make switching away from iOS in the future that much harder, which is probably no accident. But if my parents were all in on Apple, I’d absolutely make sure they were using it.
One feature I know I’ll be using for the long haul? Transcription in Voice Memos. This might be one for my fellow journalists, but friends, it is good. For years, I’ve used Pixel phones to record and transcribe interviews, and the Pixel has basically remained unchallenged as the best tool for the job. In iOS 18, Voice Memos will finally transcribe your recordings, in real time or after the fact, and it’s on par with the Pixel Recorder app as far as quality goes. It may not be a feature for the masses, but if you know, you know.
A new Control Center and a more customizable app grid don’t look like much on paper. And plenty of people will probably just leave them alone, which is fine. But if you don’t mind putting in a little effort, you’ll find iOS 18 pretty rewarding — no artificial intelligence required.
Still, AI is the big missing piece here.
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The upgrade is less and less compelling. It’s gone from “must-have” to “oh, has it?”
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Apple suddenly drops NSO Group spyware lawsuit • SecurityWeek
Ryan Naraine:
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Apple has abruptly withdrawn its lawsuit against NSO Group, citing increased risk that the legal battle might unintentionally reveal sensitive vulnerability data and difficulties in acquiring essential information from the spyware vendor.
In a court filing Friday, Apple said continuing the lawsuit now poses “too significant a risk” of exposing the anti-exploitation and threat intelligence efforts needed to fend off the very adversaries involved in the legal dispute.
“When it filed this lawsuit nearly three years ago, Apple recognized that it would involve sharing information with third parties. However, developments since then have reshaped the risk landscape associated with sharing such information,” Apple said.
“Apple knows and appreciates that this Court would take the utmost care with the sensitive information relevant to this case. But it is also aware that — now more than ever — predatory spyware companies, including those not before this Court, will use any means to obtain this information,” the company added.
“Any disclosure, even under the most stringent controls, puts this information at risk. Due to the developments since this suit was filed, proceeding forward at this time would now present too significant a risk to Apple’s threat-intelligence program.”
The case, originally filed in 2021 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, sought to to hold NSO Group accountable for hacking into Apple’s iOS platforms with so-called zero-click exploits to spy on researchers, journalists, activists, dissidents, academics, and government officials.
…On Friday, Apple also cited concerns that NSO Group and unidentified officials in Israel may have taken actions to avoid producing information during discovery. “This means that going forward with this case will potentially involve disclosure to third parties of the information Apple uses to defeat spyware while Defendants and others create significant obstacles to obtaining an effective remedy,” the company said.
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That’s certainly the problem with a lawsuit like this: you don’t trust the other side to play by the rules – and you’re suing them because they didn’t play by the rules.
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Going the distance at the tram driver Olympics • The New York Times
Amelia Nierenberg:
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The driver braked hard and came to a screeching stop. Fans gasped, awed at the precision. Referees conferred, making sure all was aboveboard.
“We’re ready to rumble,” said Markus Chencinsky, 50, a driver from Vienna.
Despite the adrenaline, the speed and the thousands of eyes, this was not a demolition derby or a stunt-driving expo. Instead, the competitors facing off on Saturday in a central square of Frankfurt were the captains of Europe’s tram systems. They had come to Germany’s financial hub to vie for the trophy at the 11th European Tramdriver Championship.
The annual public transit jamboree might best be described as tram dressage. The drivers coaxed their commuter chariots through an obstacle course meant to test their whimsy, mettle and precision.
“We try to mirror the entire range of skills a driver should have,” said Wieland Stumpf, the president of the championship.Some events focused on safety: Drivers had to emergency brake at a precise spot, just as if a cyclist had swerved in front of them. Another tested their ability to multitask: Could they remember a series of symbols that appeared on mock traffic signs? A few challenges evaluated the smoothness of their touch: Drivers had to come to a stop so gently that water did not slosh out of a bowl that was filled to the brim. (A front-mounted camera showed every lost droplet: the less spilled, the more points.)
One test was downright counterintuitive: Tram billiards, in which a driver steers the vehicle to gently knock a pool cue attached to a stand into a billiard ball on a table. (The highest possible score for the billiards portion was 500 points, awarded if the ball rolled to a stop right in the middle of the table.)
“It’s not often you’re trying to hit something with your tram,” joked Victoria Young, 39, of Edinburgh. “You’ve just got this feeling inside you that says, ‘I should be stopping now.’”
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Excel Olympics, tram Olympics. We are not short of Olympics.
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FUBAR Mode • Noan
Neal Mann works in venture capital (having formerly worked in journalism):
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If you want to understand how poorly most people have grasped the impact AI could have on business, the statement ‘AI isn’t ready for enterprise’ is the place to start. The logic goes that AI is not ready for enterprise because the output people are getting is not accurate enough to make their jobs easier and businesses more efficient. Microsoft recently had a contract for co-pilot canceled because the output was the same as a ‘middle school presentation’. Spend five minutes searching for co-pilot on social media and you’ll see similar responses.
Advocates of this position essentially believe AI will be ready for enterprise when the models have improved and are betting on those improvements solving the accuracy problem. But it’s not that AI isn’t ready for enterprise, it’s that enterprise business structures as they stand will never be ready for AI.
Most people don’t realize this because their experience of enterprise is siloed – they’ve often worked in an individual department. If they’re in the investment community, they may never have worked in an enterprise-scale organisation at all. If we start from a place of believing AI automation of a business is possible then it’s irrelevant either way.
There there is a much deeper problem that needs to be dealt with – the knowledge that underpins the organisation, that defines it, and its processes, is often a chaotic, self-contradictory mess of disconnected documents, fragmented files and siloed concepts.
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A lot of his conclusions resemble, for me, the excitement from the 1980s about expert systems – that you’d pour experts’ expertise into a computer and it would regurgitate it as required. It didn’t work out that way, though.
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Why GB News is angrier than ever • Financial Times
Henry Mance with a long read about life inside GB News:
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All the board members have actively supported conservative politics. None has prior experience in TV. Alan McCormick, the chairman, explained: “Ask anyone under 50 and almost no one receives their news and debate via television, this is fast becoming a bygone era, we need fresh thinking.” Three years after launching as a TV channel, GB News sees the future elsewhere.
Marshall and GB News’s other owner, Dubai-based investment firm Legatum, have bankrolled the broadcaster. In the year ending May 2022, its pre-tax loss was £30.7m. The following year losses widened to £42.4m. Marshall and Legatum agreed to put in a further £60m.
“It’s never going to make enough money,” says Gill Hind, a media analyst at Enders Analysis.
In the US, Fox News and other cable news channels are paid by cable companies for the right to transmit them. UK channels, in contrast, are almost entirely reliant on advertising. Financially, GB News really isn’t Fox News: its revenues were £15.5m last year, while Fox News’s were about $3bn. Total losses have now exceeded £100m.
Billionaires tend to tire of losing such sums, even on passion projects: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made cuts at The Washington Post, which he bought in 2013 and which lost $77m last year. “Paul and the Legatum guys have deep pockets, but they are not infinite,” says one person who has worked with them. “He likes new toys . . . GB News is a very demanding baby,” said another. Having bought The Spectator, Marshall is among a small group of bidders for The Telegraph, expected to cost somewhere below £600m. Those outlets have a record of profits.
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(The link should make the article free to read, at least for some of you.)
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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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