The Ceefax system is dead, but if you’ve got enough old videotapes you can reconstruct it. Why not run a project to do so? CC-licensed photo by Andrew Bowden on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Brightly coloured. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Meta debuts augmented reality glasses and Judi Dench-voiced AI chatbot • The Guardian
Nick Robins-Early (and agencies):
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The Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, presented new augmented reality glasses at the company’s annual developer conference on Wednesday, debuting a prototype of the next phase in its expansion into smart eyewear. Zuckerberg also announced that Meta AI will be able to talk in the voice of Dame Judi Dench.
The glasses, named Orion, have the ability to project digital representations of media, people, games and communications on to the real world. Meta and Zuckerberg have framed the product as a step away from desktop computers and smartphone into eyewear that can perform similar tasks.
“A lot of people have said this is the craziest technology they’ve ever seen,” Zuckerberg boasted during his keynote speech, clad in a shirt that read “Aut Zuck aut nihil”, Latin for “Either Zuck or nothing”, substituting his own name into a motto associated with the Roman leader Julius Caesar. A pre-recorded demonstration showed some of the glasses’ capabilities, including two people playing a virtual Pong game and talking on a video chat through augmented reality.
Meta also expanded its bet on artificial intelligence, announcing a raft of new product offerings for its ChatGPT-like chatbot and plans to start automatically injecting personalized images created by the bot into people’s Facebook and Instagram feeds, as it kicked off its annual Connect conference at its California headquarters on Wednesday.
Among the AI updates announced was an audio upgrade to the digital assistant, called Meta AI, which will now respond to voice commands and offer users the option to make the assistant sound like celebrities including Judi Dench, John Cena, Keegan-Michael Key, Kristen Bell and Awkwafina.
“I think that voice is going to be a way more natural way of interacting with AI than text,” Zuckerberg said.
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When can you buy the glasses? Ah, tricky. Don’t hold your breath over “prototypes”. But look, you can get AI junk inserted into your Instagram feed right away! As for AI and voice – yes, that’s how we’ve been doing it for years already.
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BBC Sound Effects: searchable library
Yes: the BBC’s Sounds Effects library. (No results for Dalek. Boo.) The licence allows non-commercial use. Lots of fun to be had!
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Help! I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and I don’t know what to do with them • Odds and Ends of History
James O’Malley:
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Obviously, teletext was not going to stick around for the internet era. But unlike newspapers and books published in the 1980s and 90s, which historians and nostalgic millennials can go back and rediscover, nobody thought to keep an archive of teletext.
This means there is no great vault containing the millions of words that were written by thousands of people, and read by tens of millions more. A Library or Alexandria’s worth of journalism and culture, some of the most widely read works of the 80s and 90s, have disappeared forever.
Teletext Ltd, which operated the ITV and Channel 4 services, is today a holiday website. It didn’t retain an archive of its pages, because why the hell would it?
But perhaps more surprisingly, beyond holding a few representative pages of what Ceefax used to be like, the BBC didn’t either.
And in retrospect it seems like a bizarre omission. An act of cultural vandalism, akin to how the BBC famously destroyed recordings of Doctor Who, Dad’s Army and the like in the 1970s to save money.
It pains me in particularly that today that a fan archive of Digitiser, which was clearly very formative to me and is partially what inspired me to become a writer, is only about half complete.
But there is some good news for historians: There just might be a way to go back in time.
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It turns out you can pull huge chunks of Ceefax history out of videotapes of old programs. There’s software for it. But James just doesn’t have the time. If anyone knows anyone who wants to do the archiving work…
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Masimo founder Joe Kiani resigns as CEO following ouster from board • Reuters
SK Sneha:
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Masimo said on Wednesday founder Joe Kiani has decided to step down as the medical device maker’s CEO, days after shareholders voted to remove him from the company’s board following a bitter proxy battle with activist hedge fund Politan Capital Management.
The company named veteran healthcare executive, Michelle Brennan, as interim chief. Brennan was nominated by Politan for Masimo’s board last year, along with the hedge fund’s founder Quentin Koffey.
Both were subsequently elected by shareholders. Shares of the company were up 5.4% at $133 in early trade.
The stock has fallen more than 40% since Feb. 15, 2022, when Masimo announced the $1bn acquisition of audio products maker Sound United. The deal was a key factor behind Politan’s activism.
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Notable only because Masimo is the company with which Apple has had a big (losing) patent row over a blood oxygen sensor on the Apple Watch. Might this change something in the relationship? Having the anchor of an audio products maker (even if it has the Denon/HEOS, Marantz, Polk, Bowers & Wilkins, Definitive Technology brands) hasn’t been popular with the board; Apple certainly won’t have been unhappy at the tension.
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Doctors describe the horror of Israel’s pager attack in Lebanon • New Lines Magazine
Edmund Bower:
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On Sept. 17, just before 3:30 p.m., the small waiting room of Dr. Nour’s three-room pediatrics clinic in southern Beirut was packed. A mother was waiting to get preschool checkups for her three children. Two elderly patients were booked in for cataract treatments at the ophthalmologist office next door. Sitting next to them was a young couple whom Nour, whose name has been changed for security reasons, had not met before. The father bounced a 10-day-old baby on his lap. Clipped to his belt was a Gold Apollo Rugged Pager.
Nour brought the young couple into her examination room. She pulled out a blank file for the newborn and wrote his name: Aiman. She placed him on the scales: a little over seven pounds. She lay Aiman on his back on an examination table and began to record his weight. As she did so, the man’s pager beeped twice.
“Excuse me,” he said, and reached down to silence it.
As he did so, about an ounce of explosives concealed within the pager detonated, sending shards of metal and fragments of its thick plastic casing out in all directions. The shrapnel tore deep wounds in the man’s abdomen, lodged in the ceiling of the clinic and lacerated the face of the baby as he lay on his back.
…The mechanism of the explosions appears to have been designed to cause maximum damage. Most of those who were injured were men, along with a number of women and children. They tended to pick up the beeping pager and hold it toward their eyes to read the message. When it exploded, it caused damage to both hands and their face.
…Of the 160 patients who came into the emergency room, 140 suffered serious eye injuries. For almost two hours, American University of Beirut Medical Center’s head of ophthalmology, Bahaa Noureddine, conducted triage among the waiting patients to see “which were the eyes that can be salvaged,” deciding which could wait and which were beyond hope. At 7 p.m., the first case was wheeled into the operating room. Noureddine and his staff of nine surgeons did not stop operating until midnight three days later.
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The baby survived; a few minutes earlier and it wouldn’t have. I doubt that the “mechanism” was intended to maximise the damage to users, but it certainly had that effect.
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US ultrarunner Camille Herron involved in Wikipedia controversy • Canadian Running Magazine
Marley Dickinson:
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Acclaimed American ultrarunner Camille Herron, who has more than 12 ultrarunning world records to her name, along with her coach and husband, Conor Holt, have found themselves at the centre of a Wikipedia controversy. It stems from several edits to the Wikipedia pages of ultrarunners Kilian Jornet and Courtney Dauwalter, which degraded their accomplishments, while also adding accolades to Herron’s own page. The edits have been traced back to Herron’s email and Holt’s IP address.
The couple has been operating under the username “Rundbowie” since February 2024, after their previous Wikipedia account, “Temporun73,” was temporarily banned for violating Wikipedia’s conflict of interest policies for the edits to Herron’s page. Just hours after Temporun73 was banned, a new account under the name “Rundbowie” was created and resumed activity, making edits to Herron’s page and to those of other athletes.
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You’re thinking “oh, she’s only been noodling with Wikipedia pages” (the discovery of which is quite funny, really) but it points to something in her character:
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The Global Organization of Multi-day Marathoners (GOMU) president Trishul Cherns said he was appalled by the situation. “In my forty-six years of ultrarunning, I’ve never seen anyone as talented as Camille, who is so dedicated to creating division and animosity within the ultrarunning community. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia story is part of a pattern of interference. This couple has a history of trying to disrupt athletes, their reputations, races, and performances by citing World Athletics rules that do not apply to ultrarunning and multi-day running. I was appalled by Camille’s criticism directed at athletes challenging “her” records and her efforts to discredit them. This unsportsmanlike behaviour is bullying and mean-spirited and has no place in the larger ultrarunning community.”
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Maybe aggressive Wikipedia use should be taken as indicative of other behaviour.
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New study reveals positive mood changes during video game play • Oxford Internet Institute
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Playing video games can be good for your mood, according to a new international study from researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, part of the University of Oxford.
• Study looks at player data from 67,328 gaming sessions from 8,695 players in 39 countries, analysing their mood before and during gameplay
• Across 162,325 in-game mood reports from players of the popular game PowerWash Simulator (PWS), the average player reported a more positive mood during play than at the start of each session
• Researchers predict 72% of players experience this uplift in mood during the play session based on statistical modelling of player dataThe study analysed data from players in 39 countries, including the US, UK, Canada and Germany and found that PWS players’ moods rapidly increased during gameplay. Players consistently reported a higher mood after the first fifteen minutes of the play session compared to the start of each session.
The research team from the Oxford Internet Institute carried out the study to understand more about the short-term effects of playing video games.
Lead author Assistant Professor Matti Vuorre, Tilburg University and Research Associate, Oxford Internet Institute said: “At present short-term changes in video game players’ moods are poorly understood. Gameplay research frequently relies on artificial stimuli, with games created or modified by academic researchers, typically played in a lab environment rather than a natural context. Instead, we wanted to know how real play in natural contexts might predict player mood on short timescales.”
The researchers collaborated with PWS’s developer, FuturLab, to develop a research edition of the game that recorded gameplay events, game status records, participant demographics and responses to psychological survey items. This latest analysis is based on a dataset the team previously published in the journal Scientific Data last year.
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Interestingly, one of the authors is Professor Andrew Przybylski, who – in my experience – is very apt to find positive outcomes, or at least no negative ones, in studies like this.
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OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati resigns • WSJ
Deepa Seetharaman:
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OpenAI’s chief technology officer Mira Murati, said Wednesday she was resigning, the latest in a string of departures among top executives at the company behind ChatGPT.
Murati was one of chief executive Sam Altman’s top deputies and handled much of the day-to-day management of the company, according to current and former employees.
Over the past few months, OpenAI’s co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and former top researcher John Schulman, and former top researcher Jan Leike all resigned. In addition, co-founder and former president Greg Brockman recently took a leave of absence through the end of the year.
Murati’s departure comes at a critical moment for OpenAI, as it is attempting to close a funding round worth up to $6.5bn. Venture-capital firm Thrive Capital has committed about $1bn and OpenAI is in talks to get investments from longtime backer Microsoft, along with Apple, Nvidia and United Arab Emirates firm MGX, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.
Murati was a significant player in Altman’s brief ouster as CEO last year. She had previously approached some of OpenAI’s board members with concerns about Altman’s leadership, according to people close to the company. She described some of his leadership tactics as psychologically abusive and said she was likely to leave, according to people close to the company.
Murati was named interim CEO but Altman returned to the job just a few days later following pressure on the board by many of the company’s employees and investors. Murati has said she also shared her feedback directly with Altman and didn’t support the board of directors’ decision to fire him.
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Murati’s statement on Twitter isn’t very dramatic – it’s all jollity and delight. (Did she write it herself, or get ChatGPT to do it? “Write a resignation letter, formal, upbeat, 200 words.”)
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The end of the iPhone upgrade? • The New Yorker
Kyle Chayka:
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The fact that I do not need an iPhone 16 is a testament not so much to the iPhone’s failure as to its resounding success. A lot of the digital software we rely on has grown worse for users in recent years; the iPhone, by contrast, has become so good that it’s hard to imagine anything but incremental improvements. Apple’s teleological phone-design strategy may have simply reached its end point, the same way evolution in nature has repeatedly resulted in an optimized species of crab.
Other tech companies, meanwhile, are embracing radical departures in phone design. Samsung offers devices that fold in half, creating a smaller screen that’s useful for minor tasks, such as texting, and a larger one for watching videos; Huawei is upping the ante with three folds. The BOOX Palma has become a surprise hit as a smartphone-ish device with an e-ink screen, similar to Amazon’s Kindle, which uses physical pixels in its display. Dumbphones, too, are growing more popular by intentionally doing less. Apple devices, by contrast, remain effective enough that they can afford to be somewhat static.
On the way out of the Apple Store, I spoke with one of the protesters, M, a young D.C. resident who was there to speak out against the new phone launch, “because there are human-rights violations being committed in order to produce new Apple products.” She continued, “The product differences between the 15 and the 16, none of them at all justify these destructions that are occurring.” She personally used an iPhone 12 that she bought refurbished, to at least avoid contributing to the proliferation of new Apple products.
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That’s the way to show ’em, lady.
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Apple’s 80% charging limit for iPhone: how much did it help after a year? • MacRumors
Juli Clover tried the optional “only charge to 80%” method:
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I left my iPhone [15 Pro Max, ie last year’s big model] at that 80% limit and at no point turned the setting off or tweaked it. There were some days when I ran out of battery because I was without a charger for most of the day, and there were other times that I had to bring a battery along to make sure I didn’t run out of power. It wasn’t always convenient to keep it at 80%, but there were days when it didn’t have too much of an impact.
It was always a treat when the iPhone randomly decided to charge to 100%, which is something Apple has baked in to the 80% limit to ensure the battery level stays calibrated.
Current capacity (compared to when new): 94%. Cycles (no. times charged): 299.
For the most part, I charged using USB-C rather than MagSafe, but there was some MagSafe charging mixed in. There was probably a 70/30 split between wired charging and MagSafe charging. I did often let my battery get quite low before charging, and it didn’t sit on the charger for long periods of time too often. Most charging was done in a room at 72 degrees. I’m adding this context because temperature is a factor that can affect battery longevity, and wireless charging is warmer than wired charging.
You can compare your level battery to mine, but here are a couple other metrics from MacRumors staff that also have an iPhone 15 Pro Max and did not have the battery level limited.
Current capacity: 87%. Cycles: 329
Current capacity: 90%. Cycles: 271I don’t have a lot of data points for comparison, but it does seem that limiting the charge to 80% kept my maximum battery capacity higher than what my co-workers are seeing, but there isn’t a major difference.
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I’ve done the same on a 15 Pro: Current capacity 97%, Cycles: 238. I think the significant difference might come in the second year, and succeeding years, but even here I think there’s a visible difference.
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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 