Scientists have shown – IgNobel-y – that if you flip a coin , it tends to land on the same side it started. CC-licensed photo by Nicu Buculei on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Flipping heck. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

US government pushes Nvidia and Apple to use Intel’s foundries: Department of Commerce Secretary Raimondo makes appeal for US-based chip production • Tom’s Hardware

Jowi Morales:

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During a meeting with U.S. Department of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger expressed frustration with America’s reliance on TSMC to produce advanced chips. After this, Raimondo (via CNBC) went on private meetings with some public market investors, including shareholders of tech giants Nvidia and Apple, encouraging them to push their companies to use US foundries to produce AI chips.

The discussions between the investors and the Secretary were not publicly revealed. Still, sources say that the latter highlighted the growing geopolitical risk around Taiwan, especially as China is eyeing to invade the de facto country. Aside from this, Washington is also investing more on the American semiconductor industry than the last 28 years combined, so the White House is likely keen on pushing American companies to use locally produced chips.

Intel is gunning to become one of the top players in the foundry business, aiming to go head-to-head with TSMC and Samsung. However, recent developments revealed that Intel Foundry Services (IFS) is struggling to gain traction, causing the company to lose $1.6bn and practically making its stock price fall by 30% overnight. Because of this, Intel is reportedly considering spinning off its manufacturing division and other non-crucial business units, similar to how AMD spun off GlobalFoundries in 2008.

However, it’s also in the interest of the Biden administration that Intel succeeds, especially as it is one of the biggest recipients of funds under the CHIPS Act. Although sources say that the federal government is delaying the disbursement of CHIPS Act money to Team Blue until it can get its act together, it seems that the government still wants to see them succeed. Furthermore, while Raimondo did not mention Intel during the meetings, its status as one of the foremost chipmakers in the U.S. has likely been discussed privately.

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This is a touch ironic – Intel is using TSMC to do some of its foundry work itself. Maybe at some point Intel will be struggling badly enough that TSMC will buy it.
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Homing pigeon missiles honored with Ig Nobel Prize • The Register

Richard Currie:

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With less than a month to go before the Nobel Prizes are handed out for the most worthy scientific discoveries of the preceding year, it would be remiss of The Register not to observe the honors conferred by the gong’s bratty little brother, the Ig Nobel Prize.

The satirical ceremony has been run annually since 1991 by the scientific humor mag Annals of Improbable Research, which serves the laudable goal of highlighting “research that makes people laugh… then think.” In other words, the quirky, trivial, inane, and insane.

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I won’t include all of them, but these were rather good:

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Probability Prize: František Bartoš et al, for showing, both in theory and by 350,757 experiments, that when you flip a coin, it tends to land on the same side as it started. “Fair Coins Tend to Land on the Same Side They Started: Evidence from 350,757 Flips,” arXiv 2310.04153, 2023.

Biology Prize: Fordyce Ely and William E Petersen, for exploding a paper bag next to a cat that’s standing on the back of a cow, to explore how and when cows spew their milk. “Factors Involved in the Ejection of Milk,” Journal of Dairy Science, vol. 3, 1941.

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Though I thought that the IgNobels used to be awarded for science that “could not, and/or should not, be repeated”.
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The Plaude NotePin is a great AI voice recorder, and it’s totally doomed • The Verge

David Pierce:

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Kudos to Plaud for one thing: in a year otherwise marred by high-profile failures and oh so much AI vaporware, it made an AI gadget that does exactly what it claims to do and does it pretty well. The gadget is called the NotePin, and it’s a $169, pill-shaped voice recorder that can transcribe, summarize, and pull important information out of your audio. This is something current AI systems can actually do well! There’s good and mature tech at every step along the pipeline here, from tiny microphones to speech-to-text transcription to natural-language processing and AI summarization. The NotePin does it well.

But the reason the NotePin works is also the reason I wouldn’t recommend buying one. AI voice recording is great and handy and being commoditized at an absolutely blistering pace. With iOS 18 or macOS Sequoia, you get transcriptions and summarization built into the Voice Memos app. Google’s Pixel Recorder app is terrific and is built into both the Pixel phones and the Pixel Watch. You can also get similar features from lots of apps. Do you need a dedicated voice recorder?

This is, of course, the eternal question about AI assistants as a whole. Are they a feature of your existing devices or a gadget category unto themselves? Plaud’s argument for dedicated hardware is about the same as all the other AI startups: that ease of use is everything.

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Agree – hardware is hard, but this is hardware which is being supplanted at top speed.
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The price of privacy: how paywalled cookie banners are redefining digital revenue streams • Conroyp

Paul Conroy:

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For many ad-supported online publications, users refusing to consent to cookies used for personalised advertising can lead to a significant drop in ad revenue. Depending on the site niche and userbase, personalised ads can deliver in the region of 50% more revenue than the non-personalised kind. The legislation which led to the creation of these CMPs [Consent Management Platforms, aka cookie notices] state that it’s not legal to outright block someone who says “no” to their data being shared, so what can publishers do to try to fill this revenue gap when they see users declining consent?

A number of large European publications have begun changing their CMPs in an effort to plug this gap. Rather than the traditional “Accept” and “Reject” buttons, the options on these sites are now closer to “Accept” and “Reject tracking by paying a small fee”. The “Reject” option is modified to ask users to make up the difference in lost revenue by paying a small amount to gain access.

It’s an interesting approach from publishers struggling in a cut-throat market, but is it legal? In April 2024, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) issued a revised ruling on Meta’s “Pay or Okay” model, which has significant implications for large online platforms and potentially for media publishers in the future.

…In response, publishers in countries like Spain and Germany have introduced a novel concept, linking a paywall to the “reject” option. On websites such as elpais.es and bild.de users are presented with a stark choice: accept cookies or pay a small fee to access content. This fee works like a paywall, giving access to a version of the site without tracking cookies, or in many cases, any display ads at all. This model, while controversial, has opened up a potentially-valuable new revenue stream for publishers.

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The Sun and The Mirror and some others are trying this: either accept the cookies, or pay £4.99 per month (per month!) to reject. Amazing: that would be equivalent to a paywall on its own.
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Spotify says it accounted for just $60k of $10m streaming fraud case • Music Ally

Stuart Dredge:

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Last week, we reported on the case of a US producer arrested and charged with multiple felonies relating to streaming fraud. Michael Smith is accused of fraudulently obtaining more than $10m in royalty payments from streaming services.

This morning, there’s a very interesting development. Spotify has gone on the record to say what its share of those royalty payouts was.

“Spotify invests heavily in automated and manual reviews to prevent, detect, and mitigate the impact of artificial streaming on our platform,” its spokesperson told Music Ally.

“In this case, it appears that our preventative measures worked and limited the royalties Smith was able to generate from Spotify to approximately $60,000 of the $10,000,000 noted in the indictment.”

“As Spotify typically accounts for around 50% of streamshare, this shows how effective we are at limiting the impact of artificial streaming on our platform,” continued the spokesperson.

Well then. The streaming service that claims to account for 50% of streamshare only paid out 0.6% of the royalties in this alleged case of streaming fraud.

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Which leaves a comparatively small group of suspects who could have paid out on that sort of scale: Apple Music, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Deezer. Perhaps more will come out in the case.
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Own a virtual piece of Tannadice Park! • Dundee United Football Club

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United supporters are being offered the opportunity to own a digital piece of the hallowed Tannadice turf following the launch of an innovative new partnership with Sportli!

Through Sportli’s unique platform, fans can now purchase and own virtual sections of the pitch at The CalForth Construction Arena at Tannadice Park. Each virtual area represents a real-life segment of the stadium, offering fans a new way to connect with the club and their favourite players.

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Feel like they missed a trick here – they could have let them name a star *and* own a crater on the moon as well.
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Academic Journal Publishers Antitrust Litigation • Lieff Cabraser

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On September 12, 2024, Lieff Cabraser and co-counsel at Justice Catalyst Law filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against six commercial publishers of academic journals, including Elsevier B.V., John Wiley & Sons, Wolters Kluwer NV, and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), on behalf of a putative class of scientists and scholars who allege that these six world’s-largest for-profit publishers of peer-reviewed scholarly journals conspired to unlawfully appropriate billions of dollars that would otherwise have funded scientific research.

As detailed in the complaint, the defendants’ alleged scheme has three main components. First, an agreement to fix the price of peer review services at zero that includes an agreement to coerce scholars into providing their labour for nothing by expressly linking their unpaid labour with their ability to get their manuscripts published in the defendants’ preeminent journals.

Second, the publisher defendants agreed not to compete with each other for manuscripts by requiring scholars to submit their manuscripts to only one journal at a time, which substantially reduces competition by removing incentives to review manuscripts promptly and publish meritorious research quickly.

Third, the publisher defendants agreed to prohibit scholars from freely sharing the scientific advancements described in submitted manuscripts while those manuscripts are under peer review, a process that often takes over a year. As the complaint notes, “From the moment scholars submit manuscripts for publication, the Publisher Defendants behave as though the scientific advancements set forth in the manuscripts are their property, to be shared only if the Publisher Defendant grants permission. Moreover, when the Publisher Defendants select manuscripts for publication, the Publisher Defendants will often require scholars to sign away all intellectual property rights, in exchange for nothing. The manuscripts then become the actual property of the Publisher Defendants, and the Publisher Defendants charge the maximum the market will bear for access to that scientific knowledge.”

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Academic publishers are under attack in all sorts of ways. This might come to nothing – it still needs to rise to the status of a class action, though that’s a low bar – but even the fact it’s possible is surprising.
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Is anyone out there? • Prospect Magazine

James Ball:

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If you’ve ever walked a city street so late at night that it’s very early in the morning, you may have been greeted by a strange and unbidden thought. In the eerie stillness, it can feel for a moment as though you’re the last person alive. The usual throngs are gone, and the absence of what should be there is impossible to ignore—until some other person, off to start their working day, breaks the spell. The world is still there.

It is hard, in any real-world city, to maintain the illusion of being the only person for any length of time. But the internet is different. There is always an element of unreality to an online interaction with another human: how do we know for sure that they are who they say they are? Can we be certain they’re even actually a person?

This is the idea at the core of what became known as Dead Internet Theory, a joke-cum-conspiracy that says if you’re reading these words online, you’re the last person on the internet. Everyone else is a bot. The other commentators on Reddit? Bots. The people in the videos or the podcasts you listen to? Bots. What’s filling the junky websites that we all can’t help but click? You guessed it. They’re all bots, and you’re the guinea pig in the perverse experiment of some unknown power.

Dead Internet Theory is, if anything, a thought experiment. We’ve learned that we can’t necessarily trust what we read or who we meet online—so what happens if we take that notion to the extreme? If you were the last actual human on the internet, how long would it take for you to notice?

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Neat question.
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The exact hour you hit peak vacation happiness—and how to make that feeling last • WSJ

Jen Rose Smith:

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studies suggest that holiday blahs set in more commonly than many would like to admit, especially for travelers who linger in one place for a long time. To understand why fun sometimes trails off so quickly, we turned to scientists who examine vacationing. Their work can both help explain why fun peters out, and offer tips on how to hack your brain’s source code to optimize vacation enjoyment.

Let’s dig into the findings. A 2019 survey of tourists at an all-inclusive resort in the Dominican Republic determined that vacationers’ average happiness rose steadily from the moment they left home, then peaked around hour 43 of a trip.

Key to this good-vibes spike is “dishabituation,” a perspective refresh one gets from a change of pace, says neuroscientist Tali Sharot, who helped interpret the survey results.

“The word people used more than any other to describe the parts of the holiday they liked best was ‘first,’” said Sharot. “First view of the ocean, first cocktail, first sand castle.” A daiquiri or two later, and the thrill starts to subside.

“You kind of habituate to joy, to the great things around you,” said Sharot, whose recent book, “Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There,” co-authored with Cass R. Sunstein, offers strategies to disrupt the lulling effects of routine. Sharot argues that finding ways to dishabituate—again and again—is the secret to making the most of every precious vacation day.

Long trips give your brain ample time to adjust to new surroundings—precisely the shift that leads to a drop-off in pleasure. Instead plan shorter, more frequent getaways, which can jolt your perspective with repeated doses of novelty. “You’re less likely to habituate,” said Sharot, noting that a three-day escape leverages the 43-hour sweet spot. (The benefits of brief trips are particularly salient for Americans, who get less time off than any other nationality surveyed in Expedia’s 2024 Vacation Deprivation Report.)

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The challenge of getting younger editors for Wikipedia is being taken seriously – but what’s the answer? CC-licensed photo by Roger on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 10 links for you. Edited. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Chats with AI bots found to damp conspiracy theory beliefs • Financial Times

Michael Peel:

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Conspiracy theorists who debated with an artificial intelligence chatbot became more willing to admit doubts about their beliefs, according to research that offers insights into dealing with misinformation.

The greater open-mindedness extended even to the most stubborn devotees and persisted long after the dialogue with the machine ended, scientists found.

The research runs counter to the idea that it is all but impossible to change the mind of individuals who have dived down rabbit holes of popular but unevidenced ideas.

The findings are striking because they suggest a potential positive role for AI models in countering misinformation, despite their own vulnerabilities to “hallucinations” that sometimes cause them to spread falsehoods.

The work “paints a brighter picture of the human mind than many might have expected” and shows that “reasoning and evidence are not dead”, said David Rand, one of the researchers on the work published in Science on Thursday.

“Even many conspiracy theorists will respond to accurate facts and evidence — you just have to directly address their specific beliefs and concerns,” said Rand, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management.

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The paper’s full text is available at the link. Getting a chatbot to talk to people is certainly a bonus – those things will have a lot more patience than a human.
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Triple hearsay: original sources of the claim that Haitians eat pets in Ohio admit no first-hand knowledge • Newsguard

Sam Howard and Jack Brewster:

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In just days, a bizarre and baseless claim accusing Haitian migrants of eating pet cats in Springfield, Ohio, went from an obscure Facebook post in a private group to a talking point by Republican Donald Trump during Tuesday night’s presidential debate.

The journey of the viral claim from vague, third hand gossip among Ohio neighbors to the presidential debate stage — where it was broadcast to 67 million people — is as stunning as the claim itself, according to those who started it all. 

NewsGuard identified and tracked down the two people central to the claim: Erika Lee, the Springfield resident who wrote the original Facebook post, and Kimberly Newton, the neighbor who had provided her with a third-hand account of the rumor, making Lee’s social media post a fourth-hand account: the alleged acquaintance/cat owner; Newton’s friend; Newton; and Lee, who posted it on Facebook. 

In exclusive interviews, NewsGuard spoke both with Lee, a 35-year-old hardware store worker who has lived in Springfield for four years, and Newton, her neighbor and a 12-year resident of Springfield. The interviews reveal just how flimsy and unsubstantiated the rumor was from the beginning — based entirely on third hand hearsay. Yet it quickly gained traction and, remarkably, found its way to Trump’s lips on a national stage. 

“I’m not sure I’m the most credible source because I don’t actually know the person who lost the cat,” Newton said about the rumor she had passed on to her neighbor, Lee, the Facebook poster. Newton explained to NewsGuard that the cat owner was “an acquaintance of a friend” and that she heard about the supposed incident from that friend, who, in turn, learned about it from “a source that she had.” Newton added: “I don’t have any proof.” 

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Facebook: a much, much more efficient way to spread “friend of a friend” rumours.
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OpenAI releases new o1 reasoning model • The Verge

Kylie Robison:

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OpenAI is releasing a new model called o1, the first in a planned series of “reasoning” models that have been trained to answer more complex questions, faster than a human can. It’s being released alongside o1-mini, a smaller, cheaper version. And yes, if you’re steeped in AI rumors: this is, in fact, the extremely hyped Strawberry model.

For OpenAI, o1 represents a step toward its broader goal of human-like artificial intelligence. More practically, it does a better job at writing code and solving multistep problems than previous models. But it’s also more expensive and slower to use than GPT-4o. OpenAI is calling this release of o1 a “preview” to emphasize how nascent it is.

ChatGPT Plus and Team users get access to both o1-preview and o1-mini starting today, while Enterprise and Edu users will get access early next week. OpenAI says it plans to bring o1-mini access to all the free users of ChatGPT but hasn’t set a release date yet. Developer access to o1 is really expensive: In the API, o1-preview is $15 per 1 million input tokens, or chunks of text parsed by the model, and $60 per 1 million output tokens. For comparison, GPT-4o costs $5 per 1 million input tokens and $15 per 1 million output tokens.

The training behind o1 is fundamentally different from its predecessors, OpenAI’s research lead, Jerry Tworek, tells me, though the company is being vague about the exact details. He says o1 “has been trained using a completely new optimization algorithm and a new training dataset specifically tailored for it.”

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Wikipedia is facing an existential crisis. Can gen Z save it? • The Guardian

Stephen Harrison:

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In Katowice, Poland, at last month’s annual Wikimania conference – an event that feels a bit like an international summit of librarians crossed with Comic-Con – many of the speakers highlighted how Wikipedia faces an existential threat of fading into obscurity or disrepair. But there was also talk of a solution that may help secure Wikipedia’s future, or at least prevent its premature demise: recruiting more younger editors from generation Z and raising their awareness of how widely Wikipedia content is used across the internet.

Wikipedia operates on a model of unpaid and independent volunteers who create, update and maintain the content. Casual editors may make minor stylistic edits to a page, while others devote substantial time to creating full-fledged articles. A significant number of Wikipedia contributors are already gen Z; according to a 2022 survey, about 20% of Wikipedia editors are between the ages of 18 and 24. Although this is roughly reflective of the global population, there is a clear desire to increase this percentage.

As a tech writer, and in my research of Wikipedia for my novel The Editors, I have often heard the same handful of issues that dissuade the younger generation from joining the cause. First and foremost, the smartphone is gen Z’s preferred internet access device, but it’s not an easy tool for editing Wikipedia. Even the savviest digital natives find it frustrating to edit the encyclopedia with a small screen.

There are exceptions. Hannah Clover, a 22-year-old Canadian, was the youngest ever winner of “Wikimedian of the Year” at last month’s Wikimania. She also happens to be a rare breed: a highly prolific Wikipedian who has made more than 75% of her edits using mobile devices. A lot of those were edits she made on the go, while commuting on the bus or during shift breaks at her former job at McDonald’s. For Clover, adding to the global encyclopedia helped provide a sense of purpose. “Serving ice-cream to people isn’t really that much of a world-changing endeavour,” she told me.

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Suspicious phrases in peer reviews point to referees gaming the system • AAAS

Jeffrey Brainard:

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When University of Seville researcher Maria Ángeles Oviedo‑García began to look at the peer reviews some journals publish alongside their papers, she was surprised to see the same vague, generic phrases kept turning up.

“In abstract, the author should add more scientific findings.” “Discuss the novelty and clear application of the work in the abstract as well as in introduction section.”

She ultimately identified 263 suspicious reviews prepared for 37 journals in multiple disciplines between 2021 and this year. One reviewer used duplicated phrases in 56 reviews, she reported last month in Scientometrics.

It’s an unusually detailed analysis of a little-noticed scheme that may be allowing some researchers to reap undeserved benefits for boilerplate or downright manipulative reviews. The practice may also be compromising the integrity of the scientific literature. “Some other researchers will probably base their future research on those fake-reviewed papers, and it’s scary,” especially for ones about health and medicine, says Oviedo-García, who primarily studies marketing and tourism.

Oviedo-García and other research integrity experts suspect the reviewers worked off a template to quickly crank out reports. They could then take credit for the work on their CVs to gain a boost in professional evaluations. Some may have additional self-interest: Several reviewers asked the author to include citations to their own papers, and some authors complied.

The reviews Oviedo-García analyzed appeared almost exclusively in journals from MDPI, which publishes reviews alongside many of its papers if the author agrees. (Reviewers are named if they consent.) The privately held company based in Switzerland publishes all its articles open access, charging authors a fee and promising prompt publication.

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Once more we discover a problem with the open access model.
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Celebrity Number Six and the unreal power of crowdsourced investigations • Links I Would GChat You

Caitlin Dewey on the crowdsourced discovery of the identity of a face on a set of old curtains (really):

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This is viral frivolity of the purest and highest order: a whole lot of hijinx and hysteria for a “mystery” whose stakes could not conceivably be lower. But it’s also a testament to the growing power and efficacy of crowdsourced investigations — for good as well as for evil. In the past five months alone, online sleuths have closed out three high-profile, long-running “internet mysteries,” culminating with Celebrity Number Six. Recent crowdsourced investigations have also cracked cold cases, outed January 6 rioters and advanced historic research, said Kurt Luther, a professor of computer science and the director of Virginia Tech’s Crowd Intelligence Lab.

Empowered with new generative AI and facial recognition tools that make their work more effective, and armed with far more free time than experts could ever muster, these sleuths have raised significant questions about privacy, vigilantism and the so-called wisdom of crowds. But when they get it right … it’s kind of magical.

“There have been so many misidentifications,” Luther acknowledged. “But there have been so many successes, as well: missing people found, criminals identified — there are a lot of compelling examples of the power of crowdsourced investigations.” 

Identifying “Six” might seem trivial next to something like, you know, solving a 50-year-old homicide. But the technologies and social dynamics at play in r/CelebrityNumberSix are actually pretty similar to those playing out in other online investigative communities, Luther said. For years, Sixers have deployed a mix of conventional and open-source investigative techniques to try to identify the woman on the curtain: contacting the original fabric supplier, for instance, or running the stylized print through facial recognition engines.

Over the past 18 months, as generative AI tools became both more powerful and more accessible to the wider public, members of the community began attempting to create more photorealistic, 3D images of Celebrity Number Six, rather like a police sketch artist drawing out a portrait. Last week, a 20-year-old Redditor named u/StefanMorse tried a slightly different approach, shading the print with skin-like colors but leaving it two-dimensional. When uploaded to PimEyes, the terrifying facial recognition search engine beloved by many a TikTok doxxer, that colourised version of the Number Six image repeatedly matched the obscure Spanish model Leticia Sardá.

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Simultaneously we can solve ages-old puzzles like this, and yet we can’t locate ten-year-old web pages which have been scrubbed from the internet and the Wayback Machine.
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New Google Wallet features for travelers and commuters • Google Blog

Jenny Cheng, VP and GM of Google Wallet:

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People are increasingly looking for ways to digitize everyday items — with one of the top requests being a digital ID. Last year we began rolling out the ability to save select state-issued digital IDs to Wallet. Starting soon, we’ll begin beta testing a new type of digital ID in Google Wallet, giving more people in more places a way to create and store a digital ID, now with a U.S. passport. This new ID pass works at select TSA checkpoints, saving you time and stress at the airport when you’re traveling domestically.

Creating an ID pass is easy: select the prompt in the Google Wallet app to “create an ID pass with your U.S. passport” and follow the instructions to scan the security chip in the back of your passport. You’ll be asked to take a selfie video to verify your identity, and Google Wallet will notify you when your ID pass is ready (typically within a few minutes). While ID passes are accepted at select TSA checkpoints today, we’re working with partners so you can use digital IDs in even more situations — for example, in the future we believe you should be able to use digital ID for things like account recovery, identity verification and even car rentals. This technology is in its early stages, so it’s important to know that a digital ID in Google Wallet is not a replacement for your physical ID. For now, you need to carry a physical ID with you when traveling.

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This is quite an advance. Unusual too for Google get a step ahead of Apple on something like this. Though.. what if your phone is out of juice at your destination?
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Five reasons I think Apple will be the surprise winner in the AI race • Tom’s Guide

Ryan Morrison:

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Apple may have been late to the generative AI game, lagging behind Google, Microsoft and newcomers like OpenAI and Anthropic, but it is quickly catching up. It could easily surpass the capabilities of the current industry leaders.

While it is true that Apple didn’t jump on the large language model bandwagon soon after ChatGPT launched, unlike Google and Microsoft, the Cupertino company has been heavily involved in machine learning and forms of AI for decades, using it throughout its operating systems.

This heritage and other reasons, including a focus on privacy, deep software and hardware integration, and access to personal data, are why I think Apple is well-placed to lead the AI pack.

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He suggests privacy, integration of hardware and software, personal context (on the phone), simplicity of focus, and AI being built into the camera. Whether that will really create an edge over Google – even on the Pixel? – is an open question, for now.
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How China has ‘throttled’ its private sector • Financial Times

Eleanor Olcott and Wang Xueqiao:

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“China used to be the best VC destination in the world after the US,” says one Beijing-based executive, referring to the business of private investment in high-risk start-up companies.

Founders and investors harbour few hopes of a return to the glory years before the Covid-19 pandemic, when the likes of Alibaba and Tencent took advantage of rapid economic growth and the rise of the mobile internet to become globally significant technology companies.

“The whole industry has just died before our eyes,” the executive continues. “The entrepreneurial spirit is dead. It is very sad to see.”  

The downbeat mood is reflected in the statistics. In 2018, at the height of VC investment, 51,302 start-ups were founded in China, according to data provider IT Juzi. By 2023, that figure had collapsed to 1,202 and is on track to be even lower this year.

Keyu Jin, associate professor at the London School of Economics, says the industry “has been critical to spur China’s entrepreneurial dynamism”.

“The outflow of global investment and the massive drop in the valuation of Chinese companies will impinge on the nation’s innovation drive,” she warns.

The crisis in the sector partly reflects the slowdown in the Chinese economy, which has been buffeted by the protracted Covid-19 lockdowns, the bursting of its property bubble and the stagnation of its equity markets. As bilateral tensions have risen, US-based investors have also largely pulled out.

But it is also the direct result of political decisions taken by President Xi Jinping that have dramatically changed the environment for private business in China — including a crackdown on technology companies regarded as monopolistic or not attuned to Communist party values, and an anti-corruption crusade that continues to ripple through the business community.

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That’s going to cause a dearth of successful companies in a few years’ time; Xi may have cause to regret it. Unless the plan is that only state-sponsored companies get to do tech, and be big.
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Mark Zuckerberg says he’s done apologizing • TechCrunch

Maxwell Zeff:

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Shortly after hopping on stage, [Mark] Zuckerberg joked that he might need to schedule his next appearance in order to apologize for whatever he was about to say. After a beat, he added that he was just kidding and that, in fact, his days of apologizing are over.

Zuckerberg has had something of a rebrand recently. He raises cattle in Hawaii now, has long bouncy curls and a gold chain, and commissions Roman-style statues of his wife. On stage, the Facebook founder wore a boxy T-shirt he designed himself alongside fashion designer Mike Amiri that read “learning through suffering” in Greek letters.

The tongue-in-cheek comment about apologizing was a reference to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who himself addressed a flub he’d made on the Acquired podcast earlier this year, via a pre-recorded video on a screen hanging over the crowd. Huang’s original comment — that he never would have started Nvidia if he knew what he did today — was grossly taken out of context, he said. In the video, he clarified that he absolutely would start Nvidia again, and that his comment was more about the blissful ignorance of startup founders.

While Zuckerberg’s opening comment was just a friendly jab at Huang, it set the tone for Zuckerberg’s new attitude toward life and business. The founder of Facebook has spent a lot of time apologizing for Facebook’s content moderation issues. But when reflecting on the biggest mistakes his career, Zuckerberg said his largest one was a “political miscalculation” that he described as a “20-year mistake.” Specifically, he said, he’d taken too much ownership for problems allegedly out of Facebook’s control.

“Some of the things they were asserting that we were doing or were responsible for, I don’t actually think we were,” said Zuckerberg. “When it’s a political problem… there are people operating in good faith who are identifying a problem and want something to be fixed, and there are people who are just looking for someone to blame.”

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Are emoji becoming too abstruse – and yet also too specific? CC-licensed photo by Forsaken Fotos on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

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.

That Olympic breakdancer everyone laughed at? She just became the world No.1 • WSJ

Joshua Robinson and Andrew Beaton:

»

Rachael Gunn, as it says on her passport, was the break dancer whose performance launched a thousand memes and earned her exactly zero votes from the judges the whole time she was in Paris.

But it also paved the way for something else. A month after the Games, Raygun is now the No. 1 breaker in the world. 

This might seem like an egregious mistake to anybody who actually watched breaking’s Olympic debut—or to the millions who didn’t but caught the clips that set the internet on fire. Raygun, a college lecturer in Sydney who focuses on “the cultural politics of breaking,” lost her three dance-offs, or battles, by a combined score of 54-0.

Except this isn’t some kind of prank. Instead, her rise to the top is explained by the esoteric rules of the little-known World DanceSport Federation, which felt compelled to issue a lengthy statement this week explaining how Raygun really became the top-ranked breaker. 

According to the WDSF’s Breaking Rules and Regulations Manual, the standings are based on athletes’ top four performances over the previous 12 months. And last October, Raygun earned a whole raft of points when she claimed first place at the Oceania Continental Championships. 

Since then, those points have only become more valuable. That’s because there haven’t been any chances for breakers to accumulate them for most of the past year. From the start of 2024 through the Paris Olympics, the WDSF intentionally stopped holding ranking events so that the breakers could “focus solely on the last part of their Olympic qualification without the added pressure.” Neither qualifying nor the Olympics had points on offer either because of the limited athlete quotas.

Once the Olympics ended, many of the results included in the rankings simply expired, the WDSF said. That left plenty of breakers with just one event’s worth of ranking points.

That’s how Raygun’s lone first-place finish propelled her into a points tie with another “B-Girl” named Riko from Japan. Raygun won the No. 1 slot over Riko in the end based on Article 5.1.1 of the bylaws, which settles ties based on the level of the competition where the points were earned.

«

You do need something today to tell people to amaze them. And this is it.
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New feature alert: access archived webpages directly through Google Search • Internet Archive Blogs

Chris Freeland:

»

In a significant step forward for digital preservation, Google Search is now making it easier than ever to access the past. Starting today, users everywhere can view archived versions of webpages directly through Google Search, with a simple link to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

To access this new feature, conduct a search on Google as usual. Next to each search result, you’ll find three dots—clicking on these will bring up the “About this Result” panel. Within this panel, select “More About This Page” to reveal a link to the Wayback Machine page for that website.

Through this direct link, you’ll be able to view previous versions of a webpage via the Wayback Machine, offering a snapshot of how it appeared at different points in time. 

At the Internet Archive, our mission is to provide, “Universal Access to All Knowledge.” The Wayback Machine, one of our best-known services, provides access to billions of archived webpages, ensuring that the digital record remains accessible for future generations.

«

That mission statement is quite similar to Google’s. This is certainly a useful thing. Are other search engines going to get it too?
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9/11 memes have taken over the internet • Rolling Stone

David Mack:

»

Olivia, a 21-year-old college student, was sitting in an English class at her Minnesota school last week when her professor began talking about the challenges in writing about traumatic events. But when he used 9/11 as an example, and described to the class how hectic things seemed that day, she realized just how she felt — or rather, didn’t feel — about the attacks. “Being terminally online is wild [because] someone mentioned 9/11 in my class today and I genuinely forgot that not everyone thinks it’s funny now,” she subsequently wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter), favourited more than 10,000 times.

“I had this moment of realization within myself that this should be having an impact on me and it weirdly isn’t,” Olivia recalled to Rolling Stone, asking that her last name not be used due to the sensitivities around 9/11. (She has since taken down the tweet.) “I think it’s been watered down a lot for our generation. It’s a moment of levity, this very heavy moment. For our generation, it’s very almost casual.”

Olivia is not alone. To be on social media in 2024 is to be swimming in jokes and memes about 9/11. Things that might once have been whispered among friends are now shared by meme accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers. On TikTok, videos contrasting the year 2024 with 2001 (often ending with someone reacting to the planes hitting towers) frequently went viral. While on X, a famous photo of President George W. Bush being informed by his chief of staff that the U.S. was under attack is now frequently used to mock everything from Ozempic to J.D. Vance to the Drake/Kendrick Lamar beef. Want to be overly dramatic about a minor event in your life? Why not use a video or GIF of Caitlyn Jenner standing in a sea of American Flags, solemnly saying, “9/11”? Or you could keep things simple and just say, “This was my 9/11.”

As the world marks 23 years since the attacks, the ways in which people talk — and joke — about the tragedy have evolved dramatically, especially on the internet.

«

It’s not surprising, though, that people for whom the events lie outside living memory won’t be able to grasp how serious it felt at the time. In the days after the attacks, the US public mood wanted to bomb the culprits into their constituent atoms.
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AI voice analysis for diabetes screening shows promise • Medscape

Marilynn Larkin:

»

An artificial intelligence (AI)–driven voice algorithm showed “excellent agreement” with the American Diabetes Association (ADA) risk test in detecting adults with type 2 diabetes (T2D), research presented at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) 2024 Annual Meeting revealed.

The AI model detected T2D with 66% accuracy among women and 71% in men, and there was 93% agreement with the questionnaire-based ADA risk score, demonstrating comparable performance between voice analysis and an accepted screening tool.

…The AI algorithm analyzed various vocal features, such as changes in pitch, intensity, and tone, from a total of 607 recordings to identify differences between individuals with and without diabetes. This was done using two techniques: One that captured up to 6000 detailed vocal characteristics, and a deep learning approach that focused on a refined set of 1024 key features.

The voice-based algorithm achieved good overall predictive capacity (AUC = 75% for men, 71% for women) and correctly predicted 71% men and 66% of women with T2D. The model performed even better in women aged 60 years or older (AUC = 74%) and in those with hypertension for both men and women (AUC = 75%).

“This study represents a first step toward using voice analysis as a first-line, highly scalable T2D screening strategy,” the authors concluded.

“The next studies will have to demonstrate the robustness of our approach in diverse populations and also include people living with prediabetes,” Fagherazzi said. “If proven reliable, we expect such technology to be available in the next 5-10 years. Then, it could be deployed easily at scale in millions of smartphones worldwide and reduce undiagnosed diabetes cases.”

…The reasoning behind this is “due to Hooke’s law, in which changes in the tension, mass, or length of the vocal folds,” mediated by different glucose levels, “may result in an alteration in their vibrational frequency,” [Dr Gianluca Iacobellis of the University of Miami Hospital Diabetes Service] explained.

«

Amazing finding. (Hooke’s Law originally related to springs, but seems to work for vocal folds too.)
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Waymo cites possible ‘intentional contact’ by a bicyclist in SF • San Francisco Chronicle

Jordan Parker:

»

A cyclist may have made intentional contact with a Waymo robotaxi during an alleged crash in San Francisco in July, according to documents provided to the California Department of Motor Vehicles by the robotaxi company.
 
The alleged collision between the cyclist and Waymo vehicle occurred just before 1 p.m. on July 6 at a parking garage exit on Mission Street between 7th and 8th Streets, according to documents. As the Waymo robotaxi was exiting the parking garage, it stopped for the cyclist, who was approaching the vehicle from the left side. 

While the robotaxi was stopped, the cyclist passed in front of it and appeared to dismount, according to the documents. “The cyclist then reached out a hand and made contact with the front passenger side of the stationary Waymo AV (autonomous vehicle), backed the bicycle up slightly, dropped the bicycle, then fell to the ground,” the documents said. 

The cyclist received medical treatment at the scene and was transported to the hospital, according to the documents. The Waymo vehicle was not damaged during the incident.

«

Absolutely hilarious. What the cyclist seems to have overlooked is that there was a human in the driver’s seat of the Waymo car at the time, and no doubt there will have been cameras running on the car too. Sadly the document sent to the DMV doesn’t include them, but they’re going to be fun to look at. (Thanks Gregory for the link.)
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The real problem with emoji • The Atlantic

Ian Bogost:

»

Emoji ought to be as broadly expressive as possible. Guns—and swimming, and much more—would be most fruitfully emojified in the most generic, abstract way possible. Yet emoji seem to be evolving in the opposite direction. Unicode approves more new icons every year, with more specific and narrow intended meanings—a lime or a mythical phoenix, say. New emoji this year even include variants that specify which direction the picture faces—a person running to the right rather than to the left—a choice that only further plunges emoji-life into the murk of particulars.

This year, Apple also announced Genmoji, a forthcoming feature that uses AI to allow individual users to spawn what seems like any concept imaginable. The feature is meant to “match any moment perfectly,” according to Apple. An example shown in a marketing video turned the prompt “smiley relaxing wearing cucumbers” into, well, a yellow emoji head wearing cucumbers, spa-style; “lox bagel” produced a convincing rendition of that preparation. Users will also be able to create Genmoji that resemble real people in your photo albums—presumably adjusting them for specific situations.

That sounds fun but also doomed. Will Genmoji allow you to depict your mother holding a firearm? Apple didn’t respond when I asked what guardrails it might apply to user-created Genmoji. But some people will be bothered, no matter how the feature works. Consider a less charged but still controversial matter: Apple’s demo depicted a lox bagel eaten as a sandwich rather than open-faced, as some purists insist it should be eaten.

Whether textual or visual, languages are powerful because they allow an infinity of complex expression. And languages work because the communities that use them develop a shared understanding of their meaning. For years, emoji have been transforming from a sophisticated, powerful visual language capable of diverse expression into just a format for sending pictures that conform to the emoji visual style. To which I say, 🚮

«

Bogost seems to be complaining about a language gaining more dialects. Isn’t that a sign of a vibrant language, though?
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VR headset used to train Ukranian pilots to fly F-16s • UploadVR

David Heaney:

»

A simulator with a Varjo XR-3 headset is being used to train Ukrainian pilots to fly the F-16 fighter jets the country recently received.

Ukraine started receiving the first F-16s in August, intended to boost the country’s ability to repel attacks by Russian aircraft on its cities and infrastructure. Around 65 F-16s have been pledged to the country by NATO countries including the Netherlands and Denmark.

But Ukraine’s President Zelensky has publicly said that the limiting factor in utilizing these F-16s is the lack of pilots trained to fly them. Until now Ukraine’s air force has been using Soviet jets, which have significant differences.

To help make this F-16 training program faster, more convenient, and lower cost, Czech startup Dogfight Boss says it delivered to the Ukrainian Air Force a simulator that uses a Varjo XR-3 mixed reality headset alongside a replica F-16C cockpit.

Dogfight Boss says it spent almost a year fine-tuning the simulator with the help of European F-16 pilot instructors, and shared the following statement it says came from the Ukrainian Air Force: “Our pilots and cadets were deeply impressed by the advanced and realistic features of the F-16C Viper simulator. These features are essential for pilot training, providing an effective environment to practice with sophisticated flight systems, fine-tune their strategies, and prepare for future missions.”

«

Proof is in the pudding, of course, but even so, must save a lot of flying time, and hence valuable fuel and costly wear on the plane.
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Bluesky catches up to X with native support for video • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

Bluesky, the social networking startup now nearing 10 million users thanks to X’s ban in Brazil, will now allow users to share videos of up to 60 seconds in length on its platform, the company announced on Wednesday.

Designed as a decentralized version of X (formerly Twitter), Bluesky allows users to post text and images, reply and repost, and message users. However, unlike X, Bluesky lets users set up their own servers if they choose, pick their own algorithm, and decide how much or little they want their content moderated by subscribing to independent moderation services.

With native video support, the network will be able to better compete with other X rivals, including Instagram Threads and the decentralized service Mastodon, among others.

The company notes that videos will autoplay by default, but this can be turned off in the settings.

«

Every social network eventually turns into a video repository. I’m sure Elon won’t be worried: as long as Bluesky doesn’t introduce banking, it’s all fine. Both networks may be losing money at similar rates, unless Bluesky is staffed very thinly.
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Ex-Google exec said goal was to ‘crush’ competition, trial evidence shows • Reuters

Jody Godoy:

»

On the third day of the [Google Adtech] trial, prosecutors began to introduce evidence of how Google employees thought about the company’s products at the time when the government alleges it set out to dominate the ad tech market.

“We’ll be able to crush the other networks and that’s our goal,” David Rosenblatt, Google’s former president of display advertising, said of the company’s strategy in late 2008 or early 2009, according to notes shown in court.

Google denies the allegations, saying it faces fierce competition from rival digital advertising companies.
Rosenblatt came to Google in 2008 when it acquired his former ad tech company, DoubleClick, and left the following year. The notes of his talk showed him discussing the advantages of owning technology on both sides and the middle of the market.

“We’re both Goldman and NYSE,” he said, he said, according to the notes, referring to one of the world’s biggest stock exchanges at the time and one of its biggest market makers. “Google has created what’s comparable to the NYSE or London Stock Exchange; in other words, we’ll do to display what Google did to search,” Rosenblatt said.

By owning publisher ad servers, the advertiser ad network would have a “first look” at available spots for ads, he said according to the notes. He also said it was a “nightmare” for publishers to switch platforms. “It takes an act of God to do it,” he said, according to the notes.

Rosenblatt, now CEO of online luxury marketplace 1stDibs, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Brad Bender, another former DoubleClick executive, who worked at Google until 2022, testified at trial that he forwarded the notes to his team, calling them a “worthwhile read” at the time.

«

In retrospect, the DoubleClick acquisition should at least have had some sort of guardrails to ensure competitiveness. Instead, Google acquired an overwhelming share of the market via its search dominance.
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2021: Silencing the competition: inside the fight against America’s hearing aid cartel • The Big Newsletter

Matt Stoller, writing in 2021:

»

For decades, buying a hearing aid in the U.S. has been an experience in humiliation. Hearing loss is pervasive, with two thirds of people over the age of 70 experiencing some form of it. Despite that, only 20% of people who have hearing loss actually use hearing aids, and one of the big reasons is price. The average cost of such devices is $4700 per pair, for what is essentially a highly advanced adjustable microphone. With 40 million Americans suffering from some form of hearing loss, which can lead to dementia, a lot of people go without and just suffer, or don’t replace hearing aids when they break, because of this high price.

The reason for this excess cost is pure profit margin for the manufacturers. We know this because independent audiologists pay between three to four times as much as Costco does for the same device. So why are hearing aids so expensive? One reason is that the Food and Drug Administration requires a prescription to get one, making it hard to bring cheaper and more innovative devices to market. Hearing aids had traditionally required lots of adjustment and fitting from a specialist, and while specialists offer critical help, a hearing aid is basically just a microphone in your ear. That technology is much easier for individuals to set up with smartphones and other innovations in consumer electronics over the last ten years. “It just seems crazy that hearing aids haven’t become much less expensive, much like every other type of digital technology, and much more user friendly,” said Christine Cassel, the former CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine.

Since 1993, advocates have been calling for the FDA to loosen these tight regulations, and the calls got louder over the years. In 2015, the President’s Council on Science and Technology issued a report seeking to make these devices more widely available. The next year, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine issued a similar report.

Finally, in 2017, Congress acted.

«

Stoller draws a direct line between those 2017 actions and the Apple announcement earlier this week that AirPods Pro will have hearing aid functionality. (Via John Naughton.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In the US, increasingly heavy vehicles such as the Ford F-150 are leading to more and more pedestrian deaths in collisions. CC-licensed photo by F. D. Richards on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

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

‘Going back in time’: the schools across Europe banning mobile phones • The Guardian

Ashifa Kassam:

»

Four years after Calvijn College became one of the first schools in the Netherlands to go smartphone-free, it’s no longer an outlier. As students head back into classrooms across mainland Europe, a growing number of them will be forced to leave their mobile phones behind; In France, 200 secondary schools are testing a ban while French-speaking primary schools in Wallonia and Brussels, in Belgium, have moved forward with their own prohibitions. In Hungary, a new decree requires schools to collect students’ phones and smart devices at the start of the day.

Italy and Greece have adopted milder approaches, allowing students to carry their phones with them through the day but barring their use in classrooms.

For those at Calvijn College, the sweeping tide of change is thrilling. From the moment they began requiring students to either leave their phones at home or lock them up for the day, school officials watched as the culture of the school transformed.

“Basically what we had lost, we got back,” said Bakker. “The students playing with each other and talking to each other. And a lot less interruptions in the lessons.”

Other schools across the country began getting in touch, curious about the impact of the ban. In January 2024, the Dutch government entered the debate, urging schools to ban mobile phones, tablets and smartwatches from most secondary school classrooms across the country, The recommendation was recently extended to primary schools.

Late last year, as secondary schools across the Netherlands geared up to follow the recommendations, researchers at Radboud University seized on the chance to take a before and after snapshot of the change.

They polled hundreds of students and parents, as well as dozens of teachers, at two schools with imminent plans to do away with mobile phones on school premises, visiting the schools again three months after the ban was enacted.

About 20% of students reported that they were less distracted once smartphones were off limits, said Loes Pouwels, one of the researchers, while teachers described students as being more attentive and focused on their work in class. “So I think in terms of cognitive functioning, overall it was a positive thing.”

«

Australia thinking of doing the same. Can’t argue that they’re not distracting if you’re trying to work.
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Goodbye Tinder, hello Strava: have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks? • The Guardian

Chris Stokel-Walker:

»

Singletons looking to shack up with their soulmates online have relied on two key routes in the past decade or so: take your chance on dating apps, or befriend as many mutuals as possible on social media, in the hope that you find the one.

But some have found a third way, using services such as Goodreads and Strava to meet partners with whom they hope to spend the rest of their lives. Those couples proved to be trendsetters. So-called hobby apps – built around activites such as running, reading or movie-going – are having a moment, and not just for love.

It’s all part of a broader movement as people grow tired of the “digital town square” offered on Twitter/X and other social media platforms. At a time when many are abandoning Elon Musk’s social network over his attitude to “free speech” (which some see as “amplifying hate”), competing apps such as Bluesky and Threads are having a resurgence in users.

Whereas some users are switching to Twitter replicas, others are seeking refuge in apps that promise to connect them to people with whom they have common interests. Running app Strava has seen user numbers grow 20% in a year, according to digital market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. That success has led it to add a messaging tool for users to keep in touch, alongside documenting their workouts. Knitting social network Ravelry, which is accessed through a number of third-party apps, has more than 9 million users. Goodreads has clocked up more than 150 million members.

Letterboxd, a film completist’s dream app, where you can tick off the latest movies you’ve seen, and review and rate them, alongside other cinephiles and the occasional famous actor or director, has gone from having 1.8 million users worldwide in March 2020 to more than 14 million users this summer.

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It’s strange how this stuff comes around. You’re far more likely to find a soulmate in a shared pastime than on a speed dating night or a dating app. And people are now rediscovering that.
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Ford seeks patent for tech that listens to driver conversations to serve ads • The Record

Suzanne Smalley:

»

Ford Motor Company is seeking a patent for technology that would allow it to tailor in-car advertising by listening to conversations among vehicle occupants, as well as by analyzing a car’s historical location and other data, according to a patent application published late last month.

“In one example, the controller may monitor user dialogue to detect when individuals are in a conversation,” the patent application says. “The conversations can be parsed for keywords or phrases that may indicate where the occupants are traveling to.”

The tech — labeled as “in-vehicle advertisement presentation” — will determine where a car is located, how fast it is traveling, what type of road it is driving on and whether it is in traffic. It also will predict routes, speeds and destinations to customize ads to drivers, the application said.

The system could pull data from “audio signals within the vehicle and/or historical user data, selecting a number of the advertisements to present to the user during the trip,” the patent application said.

By monitoring dialogue between vehicle occupants the ad controller system can determine when to deliver audio versus visual ads, providing ads to drivers as they travel “through a human-machine interface (HMI) of the vehicle,” the application said.

«

Whoa whoa whoa. Adverts? In a car?? Based on your conversation??? This is immediately three strikes against Ford.
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TV news overtaken by digital rivals for first time in UK • FT

Daniel Thomas:

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Television has ceased to be the main source of news in the UK for the first time since the 1960s as Britons turn increasingly to online news and social media apps, according to research by the media regulator.

Ofcom said on Tuesday that viewing of TV news had continued to fall steeply, with online platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and TikTok and digital versions of broadcasters now slightly more widely used as a source of news. 

In its annual study of audience habits, the watchdog said 71% of adults obtained news online, compared with 70% via TV — a finding it described as “marking a generational shift in the balance of news media”.

The reach of TV news has fallen from 75% last year. More than four-fifths of people between the ages of 16 and 24 obtained their news from social media, Ofcom found.

The report underlines the pressure on more traditional linear broadcasters such as the BBC, Sky and Channel 4 to accelerate moves to digital platforms, which include their own streaming sites as well as social media apps such as TikTok. 

Broadcast executives are investing in creating TV and audio content specifically for such digital channels; the BBC, for example, is focused on growing its services such as iPlayer and Sounds. But they also need to cater for the now diminishing number of mainly older people who watch traditional TV. 

…TV remained the leading platform for news among older age groups, serving as the main source for 85% of people over 55, compared with only half of 16- to 24-year-olds.

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Linear TV will have fallen away too. Quite what the future looks like.. is probably some sort of YouTube/TikTok mixup.
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The US finally takes aim at truck bloat – The Verge

Andrew Hawkins:

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This week, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) stunned safety advocates by proposing new vehicle rules that it says will help reduce pedestrian deaths in America. The new rules appear aimed directly at the trend of increasingly massive SUVs and trucks, which have been shown to be more deadly to pedestrians than smaller and midsize vehicles.

Never in its 50-plus years in existence has the regulator issued new rules for automakers requiring them to change their vehicle designs to better prevent pedestrian fatalities. If enacted, the new rules could change how vehicles are designed in the US — permanently.

“It’s good to see NHTSA acknowledge that a myopic focus on pedestrian detection — which is imperfect — is no substitute for actually regulating car bloat,” said David Zipper, a senior fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative and a Verge contributor. 

…SUVs and trucks, two of the most popular segments in the US, have become larger and heavier than ever before. In 2023, 31% of new cars in America weighed over 5,000 pounds (2.27 tons), compared to 22% in 2018, according to a recent investigation by The Economist. And with the shift to electric vehicles, many of those vehicles have become even heavier. The Ford F-150 Lightning has a curb weight of around 6,500 pounds, roughly 60% heavier than its gas equivalent.

Meanwhile, pedestrian deaths have skyrocketed in recent years. Between 2013 and 2022, pedestrian fatalities increased 57%, from 4,779 to 7,522, NHTSA reports. In 2022, 88% of pedestrian deaths occurred in single-vehicle crashes.

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America seems to be really bad at keeping its people alive, and only noticing that they’re dying in growing numbers long after it’s got out of control. Though of course the NHTSA isn’t going wild with this. It estimates that the changes it’s proposing will save.. 67 lives per year.
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Apple told to pay Ireland €13bn in tax by EU • BBC News

Charlotte Edwards and Theo Leggett:

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Apple has been ordered to pay Ireland €13bn (£11bn; $14bn) in unpaid taxes by Europe’s top court, putting an end to an eight-year row.

The European Commission accused Ireland of giving Apple illegal tax advantages in 2016, but Ireland has consistently argued against the need for the tax to be paid.

The Irish government said it would respect the ruling. Apple said it was disappointed with the decision and accused the European Commission of “trying to retroactively change the rules”.

A separate European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruling on Tuesday also brought a long-running case with Google to a close, with the company ordered to pay a €2.4bn (£2bn) fine for market dominance abuse.

The EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager praised both judgements. “Today is a huge win for European citizens and tax justice,” she said.

In the Apple case, the ECJ said: “The Court of Justice gives final judgment in the matter and confirms the European Commission’s 2016 decision: Ireland granted Apple unlawful aid which Ireland is required to recover.”

«

This has been chugging on for ages, and covers the period from 1991 to 2014 – 23 years! – when Ireland treated Apple’s Irish subsidiaries in an overly generous fashion.
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Google loses fight against $2.7bn EU antitrust fine • Reuters

Foo Yun Chee:

»

Alphabet’s Google on Tuesday lost its fight against a €2.42bn ($2.7bn) fine levied by EU antitrust regulators seven years ago, one of a trio of hefty fines meted out to the company for various anti-competitive practices.

The European Commission fined the world’s most popular internet search engine in 2017 for using its own price comparison shopping service to gain an unfair advantage over smaller European rivals.

A lower tribunal had endorsed the EU competition enforcer’s decision in 2021, prompting Google to appeal to the Luxembourg-based Court of Justice of the European Union.

CJEU judges noted that EU law does not sanction the existence of a dominant position, but its abusive exploitation.

“In particular, the conduct of undertakings in a dominant position that has the effect of hindering competition on the merits and is thus likely to cause harm to individual undertakings and consumers is prohibited,” they said.

Google has racked up €8.25bn in EU antitrust fines in the last decade. It has challenged two rulings involving its Android mobile operating system and AdSense advertising service, and is now waiting for the judgments.

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A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking serious money.
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Why AI is so bad at generating images of Kamala Harris • WIRED

Condé Nast:

»

When Elon Musk shared an image showing Kamala Harris dressed as a “communist dictator” on X last week, it was quite obviously a fake, seeing as Harris is neither a communist nor, to the best of our knowledge, a Soviet cosplayer. And, as many observers noted, the woman in the photo, presumably generated by X’s Grok tool, had only a passing resemblance to the vice president.

“AI still is unable to accurately depict Kamala Harris,” one X user wrote. “Looks like they’re posting some random Latina woman.”

“Grok put old Eva Longoria in a snazzy outfit and called it a day,” another quipped, noting the similarity of the “dictator” pictured to the Desperate Housewives star.

“AI just CANNOT replicate Kamala Harris,” a third posted. “It’s uncanny how failed the algorithm is at an AMERICAN (of South Indian and Jamaican heritage).”

Many AI images of Harris are similarly bad. Meanwhile, a tweet featuring an AI-generated video showing Harris and Donald Trump in a romantic relationship—it culminates in her holding their love child, which looks like Trump—has nearly 28 million views on X. Throughout the montage, Harris morphs into what look like different people, while the notably better Trump imagery remains fairly consistent.

…Despite being a prominent figure, Harris hasn’t been as widely photographed as Trump. WIRED’s search of photo supplier Getty Images bears this out; it returned 63,295 images of Harris compared to 561,778 of Trump. Given her relatively recent entry into the presidential race, Harris is “a new celebrity,” as far as AI image makers are concerned, according to Cuenca Abela. “It always takes a few months to catch up,” he says.

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So both less photographed – offering less supply for the AI generators – and more difficult.
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Apple invents its own version of Google Lens called Visual Intelligence • Engadget

Pranav Dixit:

»

Apple has introduced a new feature called Visual Intelligence with the iPhone 16, which appears to be the company’s answer to Google Lens. Unveiled during its September 2024 event, Visual Intelligence aims to help users interact with the world around them in smarter ways.

The new feature is activated by a new touch-sensitive button on the right side of the device called Camera Control. With a click, Visual Intelligence can identify objects, provide information, and offer actions based on what you point it at. For instance, aiming it at a restaurant will pull up menus, hours, or ratings, while snapping a flyer for an event can add it directly to your calendar. Point it at a dog to quickly identify the breed, or click a product to search for where you can buy it online.

Later this year, Camera Control will also serve as a gateway into third-party tools with specific domain expertise, according to Apple’s press release. For instance, users will be able to leverage Google for product searches or tap into ChatGPT for problem-solving, all while maintaining control over when and how these tools are accessed and what information is shared. Apple emphasized that the feature is designed with privacy in mind, meaning the company doesn’t have access to the specifics of what users are identifying or searching.

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Picking this out because it’s based on a particular button on the iPhone, which is becoming festooned with buttons, compared to what people thought was going to happen a couple of years ago when it was rumoured that there wouldn’t be any buttons at all.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

When Jony Ive designs a button, you can bet it’s not like any other button. CC-licensed photo by Steven Lilley on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

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:

»

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:

»

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:

»

[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.

»

“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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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A common dye used in Doritos and other foods can make skin transparent, new research has found. CC-licensed photo by Mike Mozart on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Why is my stomach transparent? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google search monopoly US case remedies to come by December • Reuters

Jody Goday:

»

The US Department of Justice plans to issue an outline by December on what Alphabet’s Google must do to restore competition after a judge earlier found the company illegally monopolized the market for online search, prosecutors said at a court hearing in Washington on Friday.

Prosecutors did not detail what remedy they will propose, but Justice Department attorney David Dahlquist said it should be comprehensive and take into account how Google plans to integrate artificial intelligence into search.

Since the case was brought, Google has rebranded its Bard AI product to Gemini, Dahlquist said.

“What else are they thinking about? What else is beyond that?” he said at the hearing.

Prosecutors could seek to have Google divest certain business units, such as its Android mobile device operating system, or end billions of dollars in annual payments to smartphone makers and others to ensure that its search engine is the default on devices and browsers.

Google’s attorney John Schmidtlein said at the hearing that the company needs a detailed proposal from prosecutors, and will likely seek information from Microsoft (MSFT.O) and OpenAI to prepare any counter-argument on AI search.

Google has said it plans to appeal the judge’s ruling.

US District Judge Amit Mehta said he could hold a hearing in the spring and would like to rule by next August.

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August! That’s August 2025 – nearly a year away. Then again, the US v Microsoft trial began in May 1998, the judgment (findings of fact) came in November 1999, the conclusions of law in April 2000, and in June 2000 the district court recommended a Microsoft breakup. Which of course didn’t happen. But it does show this stuff runs slooooowly.
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Wind and solar farms power Great Britain’s grid to greenest ever summer • The Guardian

Jillian Ambrose:

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Great Britain’s electricity system has recorded its greenest ever summer after growing numbers of wind and solar farms cut the need for gas power plants to fresh lows.

Analysis of energy generation data, commissioned by the Guardian, revealed that Britain’s reliance on gas generation fell in August to less than one-fifth of all electricity, or 4 terawatt hours (TWh), its lowest ever level for a one-month period.

This allowed the carbon intensity of the power grid to plummet to the lowest level recorded for a single month, at 144g of CO2 per kilowatt-hour in August, 40% lower than in the same month last year, according to the analysis.

The data, analysed by the energy thinktank Ember, showed that the record lows were sustained even when averaged over the summer months from June to August, meaning the grid experienced its greenest summer ever.

The Labour government aims to run the UK’s power grid on virtually zero carbon electricity by 2030 thanks to a surge in new wind and solar farms. Its flagship auction this week for renewable energy subsidies awarded contracts for 131 new projects, or enough new clean electricity projects to power 11m UK homes. However, it secured just half the offshore wind capacity needed every year for the rest of the decade if the government is to hit its net zero target.

Frankie Mayo, an analyst at Ember, said: “Having the lowest monthly fossil fuel share on record shows that homegrown wind and solar can reduce reliance on imports. This is a great starting point on the path to clean power by 2030 for the new government.

“But gas in the mix still threatens energy bills. Clean power is delivering cheap, low-cost power – ramping up deployment at scale can’t come soon enough.”

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That 2030 target looks like it will be missed. But it does at least provide something to go for. (Note how we call it a “greenest ever summer”, yet the Green Party is against all the infrastructure needed to support this. Strange how the politics gets unmoored from the word.)
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Common food dye found to make skin and muscle temporarily transparent • The Guardian

Ian Sample:

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Researchers have peered into the brains and bodies of living animals after discovering that a common food dye can make skin, muscle and connective tissues temporarily transparent.

Applying the dye to the belly of a mouse made its liver, intestines and bladder clearly visible through the abdominal skin, while smearing it on the rodent’s scalp allowed scientists to see blood vessels in the animal’s brain.

Treated skin regained its normal colour when the dye was washed off, according to researchers at Stanford University, who believe the procedure opens up a host of applications in humans, from locating injuries and finding veins for drawing blood to monitoring digestive disorders and spotting tumours.

“Instead of relying on invasive biopsies, doctors might be able to diagnose deep-seated tumours by simply examining a person’s tissue without the need for invasive surgical removal,” said Dr Guosong Hong, a senior researcher on the project. “This technique could potentially make blood draws less painful by helping phlebotomists easily locate veins under the skin.”

The trick has echoes of the approach taken by Griffin in HG Wells’s 1897 novel, The Invisible Man, in which the brilliant but doomed scientist discovers that the secret to invisibility lies in matching an object’s refractive index, or ability to bend light, to that of the surrounding air.

When light penetrates biological tissue, much of it is scattered because the structures inside, such as fatty membranes and cell nuclei, have different refractive indices. As light moves from one refractive index to another, it bends, making tissue opaque. The same effect makes a pencil look bent when dropped in a glass of water.

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Since you’re wondering: tartrazine, commonly found in Sunny D and Doritos. Though I don’t know, my fingers have never gone transparent while eating them.
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When bats were wiped out, more human babies died, a study found • CBC News

Emily Chung and Benjamin Shingler:

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White-nose syndrome is a deadly fungal disease that kills an average of 70% of bats it infects, and has been spreading to new areas since it was first reported on the continent in 2006.

The disease wakes bats during their hibernation, often causing them to freeze and starve to death.

Ecologists know that bats play a crucial role in eating up and controlling insect pests. Because of that, Eyal Frank, an environmental economist at the University of Chicago, decided to look at what happened when white-nose syndrome spread into new counties in the eastern US, decimating bat populations.

He found that farmers responded to the resulting insect outbreaks by increasing their pesticide use by 31%. Pesticides are toxic, and often associated with human health impacts such as increases in infant deaths.

Frank found that infant mortality went up 8% after the arrival of white-nose syndrome in a county, according to his study published in the journal Science.

“At first I was surprised,” Frank said, noting those increases are “big effects.” But he noted that in regions affected by white-nose syndrome, bat populations don’t just decline, but plummet, and are often wiped out altogether. “This is really turning off the switch on biological pest control in some of these counties,” he said.

That forces farmers to compensate with “a lot more insecticides,” which he notes are toxic by design. Frank also found evidence that not only were the pesticides expensive, but they weren’t as good as the bats at controlling insects — farmers’ revenue from crop sales fell 29% in areas hit by the bat pandemic.

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The higher infant mortality is in the counties where the pesticide was used, which would imply some sort of atmospheric spread – which the paper does allude to. It doesn’t examine whether that higher mortality is among the babies of agricultural workers who might be directly exposed, though.
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The NSA has a podcast—here’s how to decode it • WIRED

Steven Levy:

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Why an NSA podcast? The spokesperson explains that the NSA has the world’s best cryptologists and cryptanalysts, all of whom work in silence, and the agency wanted to talk about their critical and amazing work. “The podcast,” the spokesperson says, “is a medium that allows for good storytelling and conversation that is distinct from things we already engage in. It provides a different level of connection.” I later received a statement from Sara Siegle, the NSA’s head of strategic communications, echoing that point: “NSA believes in showcasing the incredible, dedicated work of our diverse, expert workforce. No Such Podcast extends our existing efforts into a new and growing medium.” Got it.

I suggest some secondary motivations. Some of the NSA’s social media posts solicit workers, and this podcast seems likewise designed to appeal to STEM graduates who might place patriotism over working for Google or a startup. My source acknowledged that this was the case. “Recruitment is not the number one goal of the podcast, but we are certainly hoping that by showcasing the work we do here, and the real people on the show who work here, listeners might say, ‘Oh, that sounds like a really cool job—and that person seems pretty normal, right?’”

The NSA also apparently sees the podcast as a chance to answer some critics who charge that the agency is a Big Brother-ish snooping operation that threatens our privacy. In the very first episode, guest speaker Natalie Laing, the NSA’s director of operations, speaks at length about how the NSA limits itself to information relevant to national security and similar imperatives. “Compliance is our number one focus,” she says. By hitting this note so hard that my Apple Watch sent me a volume alert, the NSA seems to be using the podcast format to address suspicions that it violates privacy—especially after the shocking revelations from Edward Snowden about how much stuff the NSA does grab.

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Snowden’s name is never mentioned by the NSA in its podcast, of course. It’s called No Such Podcast, an in-joke referring to its past identity cloaking as “No Such Agency”.
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Teens are making thousands by debating Trump vs. Harris on TikTok • Rest of World

Viola Zhou:

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On the afternoon of August 19, Democrat Liam Keyes entered a TikTok battle. Against a blue background, the 19-year-old lashed out at his Republican opponent, fellow TikToker “Jackson,” who donned a “Trump 2024” cap and spoke in front of a Donald Trump portrait. More than 150 viewers joined the room. 

“She listens to us, bro. She is not self-centered!” Keyes, in a black hoodie, hollored from one side of the split screen. “She puts the people before herself.” 

“Just wait until she gets into an actual debate,” Jackson, livestreaming from the other side, fought back. “You’re gonna see how much of an idiot Kamala Harris really is!” 

The showdown took place through a niche TikTok feature called “live match,” which originated in China and has grown in popularity in the U.S. since 2022. As the 2024 presidential election approaches, a group of creators, known as “political battlers,” have adopted the format to stage political debates. 

Keyes started doing live matches in the spring, after noticing how many gifts streamers received for debating politics. As a liberal, he reached out to conservative creators on TikTok, inviting them to live matches. The hustle paid off quickly. Keyes makes $100 to $1,000 from one night’s battling. In a good month, he could make up to $7,000.

Each round lasts five minutes. During a match, spectators pump up the scores of their favorite hosts by sending them virtual gifts with cash value — popping up on the screen as ice cream cones, a whale, or a lion. The side with the higher score wins. The losing creators often take on comedic punishments on camera, such as pouring milk on themselves and eating raw eggs. Keyes shaved his head after one match.

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As the article points out, it’s an increasingly popular model – Putin V Zelensky, (Brazil’s) Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva against Jair Bolsonaro. The money that sloshes around these social networks is weird.
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Poliovirus that infected a Chinese child in 2014 may have leaked from a lab • Science

Kai Kupferschmidt:

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Researchers at the Pasteur Institute in Paris working under strict biosafety conditions recently opened an old box that contained a virological time capsule: four poliovirus samples, each with a handwritten label on the vial, sent to the institute more than 60 years earlier by Albert Sabin, a giant in the field of poliovirus research.

The viruses had to be destroyed, as part of a global campaign to get rid of old poliovirus samples. But first, the Pasteur team would sequence them to preserve their genetic information.

Now, a paper about those sequences, published in Virus Evolution in July, has raised an unexpected and troubling possibility: a poliovirus that infected a four-year old child in China in 2014 may have originated in a research laboratory or a vaccine production facility.

The exact source of that virus is unclear, as is the route by which it infected the child, and the authors are careful not to point fingers. But the paper underscores the fact that accidental releases of poliovirus are remarkably common.

“It is an interesting detective story,” says Mike Famulare, a systems epidemiologist at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation who has studied polio but was not involved in the work. And because the child’s virus was analyzed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), the finding has, inevitably, become politicized: on social media and in conservative outlets, advocates of a lab-leak origin of the COVID-19 pandemic have seized on it to suggest WIV had “another” lab release—even though there is no evidence the virus came from that institute.

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Multiple possible scenarios for how the infection happened; no way to weigh them up.
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Interview day at Thiel Capital • Astral Codex Ten

Scott Alexander:

»

You look up from your massive mahogany desk.

“Tom, right? Thank you for coming…hmm…I see you’re applying for the role of Vice-President Of Sinister Plots. Your resume looks very impressive – I didn’t even know any of the masterminds behind the Kennedy assassination were still alive.”

“That’s what we want you to think,” says Tom.

“Of course. Then just one question for you. What’s something you believe, that very few people agree with you on?”

“I think we’re in a simulation.”

“Hm, yes, that was very shocking and heterodox back in 2012. But here at Thiel Capital we’re looking for something – “

“Let me finish. I think we’re in a simulation, and it’s a porno.”

“What?”

“Bostrom’s original simulation argument said that if future generations simulated the past, there would be far more of these simulations than there were actual pasts. He thought maybe people would simulate the past to learn about the branching pattern of history. That’s the kind of mistake only a philosopher could make. If we look at existing media consumption – whether it’s videos, RPGs, or incipient VR properties – by far the most common category is porn. Even if you limit your search to historical media, there are a hundred bodice-rippers for every sober investigation of Victorian lifestyles.”

“But . . . people aren’t having sex all the time!”

“Maybe not at Thiel Capital. But go outside, and you’ll find that people are, in fact, having sex all the time. Tindr. Hinge. Grindr. Young people are going out and having casual sex every weekend.

«

Very funny and entertaining little riff on “something off-beam, but further off-beam than that”. There are multiple interviewees and answers to the question. You wish for this much imagination.
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YouTubers are almost too easy to dupe • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel on the YouTubers who were (allegedly) paid millions for a sinecure to parrot Russian talking points:

»

That some of MAGA world’s biggest influencers should find themselves connected to a Russian disinformation operation makes perfect sense. Their incessant posts and rants, attacking Democrats and fearmongering about migrants, transgender Americans, and “wokeness” run amok, track with a brand of divisive rhetoric that foreign governments wish to inject into the bloodstream of American media.

“This idea that Americans are deeply divided, that things are getting worse, that you can’t trust the government—the things that seek to destabilize American society—are a natural fit because of the content,” [Jared] Holt [a senior research analyst who studies the far right at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue think tank] told me.

One does not just become a useful idiot for Russian state media only by being greedy. Should the allegations be proved true, the incident will serve as a cautionary tale of what happens when you chase and optimize for engagement at every available opportunity. Pool and Rubin, for example, made their names as disaffected liberals who came to the realization that their peers had evolved away from rational liberalism toward dangerous leftist ideological values.

This notion, that lifelong moderate liberals have no choice these days but to support right-wing causes, is a common trope among far-right activists (see: Elon Musk). To defect to the right is a proven lucrative path and, just as important, a way to find a highly engaged audience who’s ready to leap to your defense online. Johnson, an alum of BuzzFeed, Independent Journal Review, The Daily Caller, and Blaze Media, is also an inveterate poster and engagement optimizer whose apparent quest for audience has led him deeper down the pro-Trump rabbit hole. (As a point of disclosure: Johnson and I overlapped at BuzzFeed News, before he was fired for plagiarism.) His online biography proudly declares that, “with +5 billion views and +7 million followers across his social media platforms, he is a veteran when it comes to viral content!”

This type of engagement-based worldview—the constant optimizing for maximum attention, regardless of substance—is inherently corrupting, a fact that the Kremlin appears to understand.

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Missouri’s first human case of bird flu makes national history • KSDK via MSN

Hunter Bassler:

»

The first human case of bird flu in Missouri was confirmed by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Friday.

The patient was hospitalized on Aug. 22 and tested positive for influenza A, the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS) said. The adult reported no known exposure to animals. They have since recovered and were discharged home. Due to patient privacy, the department did not release any further information.

The Missouri State Public Health Laboratory conducted additional testing to determine the specific type of flu the patient was infected with, DHSS said. The tests identified the subtype as H5, also known as bird flu or avian flu. The specimen was forwarded to the CDC, who confirmed the lab’s findings and are undergoing additional testing.

The case made national history, as it is the first-ever human bird flu case that was detected as part of the general flu surveillance system, rather than a targeted bird flu outbreak-specific surveillance that has previously been conducted on animal outbreaks. The latter system has detected the previously identified 15 human bird flu cases in the U.S. since 2022, 14 of which had been in 2024.

“The risk of sustained transmission or infection among the general public remains low,” DHSS said in an emailed release. “DHSS continues to closely monitor available data from influenza surveillance systems, and there has been no sign of unusual influenza activity in people, including no increase in emergency room visits for influenza and no increase in laboratory detection of human influenza cases in Missouri.”

«

Watching brief! Nothing more!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

When it comes to Olympic medals, India underperforms compared to its GDP. Then again, it’s pretty handy at cricket. CC-licensed photo by Ashwin John on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 9 links for you. Feeling googly. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The secret inside One Million Checkboxes • eieio games

Nolen:

»

One Million Checkboxes was a website with a million checkboxes on it. You probably coulda guessed that.

But the bit – the trick – was that all of those checkboxes were global. Checking or unchecking a box changed it for everyone in the world, instantly.

I thought the site wouldn’t get much traction but I was very, very wrong. Over 500,000 people visited the site in the 3 days after launch; folks checked 650,000,000 boxes in the two weeks that I kept the site online.

It made the New York Times and The Washington Post; it’s on Know Your Meme and Wikipedia. I just spoke about it at XOXO Fest and the site won a Tiny Award. The whole thing was a wild ride.

I’ve written at length about the technical details behind the site – you can read about them here. And if you prefer to listen to the story I’m about to tell rather than read it, you can watch it on YouTube (it’s based on my talk from XOXO). This is my first video; I’m trying to figure out if it’s something I’d like to pursue.

But let’s get into the story. To tell you this story, I need to give you some context.

I like to make games that help people interact on the internet. Some people are assholes when they interact on the internet. So when I make games like this I try to add constraints to make the average interaction a little more pleasant.

I’ve been around long enough to know what people will draw if you put an unrestricted canvas on the public internet, so for OMCB [One Million Checkboxes] I wanted to constrain drawing.

«

You won’t be able to guess where this is going, but you will be astounded and delighted, and then you’ll think about The Three Body Problem and alien communication and other surprises.
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LG Display unveils stretchable displays at Seoul Fashion Week • LG Display

»

LG Display, the world’s leading innovator of display technologies, announced today that it is this week presenting its Stretchable displays, which can be freely stretched, folded, and twisted, at one of the world’s most exciting fashion events.

The groundbreaking displays are part of clothing and bag concepts being unveiled at 2025 S/S Seoul Fashion Week at Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP).

Their appearance at Seoul Fashion Week marks another milestone after LG Display in 2022 unveiled the industry’s first Stretchable prototype that could extend from 12 to 14 inches while maintaining a high resolution of 100ppi, at the level of a regular monitor, and a full color spectrum.

Allowing designs and colors to shift from one moment to the next, the company’s Stretchable displays feature on the front of garments, sleeves, and clutch bags crafted by leading Korean designers Youn-Hee Park and Chung-Chung Lee. Models are demonstrating these concepts during runway shows on September 5 and 7.

“We have been able to design future fashion concepts with new materials that have never existed before,” said Park, the head of GREEDILOUS. “Stretchable displays will bring a new paradigm to the fashion world.”

Lee, the head of LIE, added, “Stretchable displays will have a great impact on the fashion industry by enabling the implementation of designs that previously could only be imagined.”

«

Could be a big moment? Could be nothing? Foldable displays seemed like a big thing, but phones don’t feel like quite the right place (despite everything). Stretchable and twistable seem much more interesting.
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When reality came undone • Nautilus

Philip Ball:

»

n 1926, tensions were running high at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen. The institute was established 10 years earlier by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who had shaped it into a hothouse for young collaborators to thrash out a new theory of atoms. In 1925, one of Bohr’s protégés, the brilliant and ambitious German physicist Werner Heisenberg, had produced such a theory. But now everyone was arguing with each other about what it implied for the nature of physical reality itself.

To the Copenhagen group, it appeared reality had come undone.

Bohr had electrified the scientific world in 1913 with his bold theory of how atoms are constituted. Drawing on an idea proposed in 1900 by the German physicist Max Planck, he said that the electrons that orbit the dense central nucleus are constrained to specific orbits, able to jump between them only by emitting or absorbing light in discrete packets of energy called quanta.

The theory won Bohr a Nobel Prize in 1922, but it was an ungainly, ad hoc mix of traditional physics and Planck’s new “quantum” hypothesis. Bohr craved an explanation that got to the root of why atoms seemed to behave in this peculiar way. It couldn’t be constructed from the traditional classical mechanics that had prevailed since Isaac Newton laid out its basic rules in the 17th century but demanded a new mechanics of quanta.

«

Long but absorbing read about a topic that still puzzles us today.
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When the bitcoin scammers came for me • The Atlantic

Annie Lowrey:

»

Earlier this year, an astonishing moneymaking opportunity appeared on my phone. I had somehow been added to a cacophonous group chat populated by scores of high-net-worth investors. For weeks, I watched as they shared photographs of steak dinners and second homes, while also proffering their buy-sell positions, their gains and losses. Keita, a guy with a northern-Florida number, complained about having to hire laborers to clean up his garden. Anthony of New York posted while reading his kids a bedtime story. Jefferson Ogwa talked about smart trades.

The smartest trades of all came from a guy named Mike Wilson, who, along with his assistant at Morgan Stanley, put order recommendations into the chat. When he did, folks would flood the group with screenshots of their Wilson-directed wins and occasionally post their Wilson-advised losses. Wilson’s assistant would aid people in making their trades, encouraging them to hold steady through the inevitable market fluctuations. “Start-up capital is relatively low for those interested in participating,” she wrote. “Stay tuned.”

I stayed tuned. Having not made any trades—as a reporter, I do not actively invest in anything—I nevertheless chimed in: “Can’t wait for the markets to open Monday.” At that point, I got added to other trading groups and my phone started to ping with texts on iMessage and WhatsApp. “This is Marie, do you have time to talk today?” “Are you interested?” From there, escalation, gentle, slow. Would I like to chat? What were my investment goals? How was my week going? Looking forward to anything?

I was enmeshed in a textbook pig-butchering scam—the hallmark of which, its horrifying name aside, is a certain relaxed charm. No rush. No blunt ask for cash. Just a lot of engaging and unthreatening messages leading, inexorably, to an attempt to get me to start trading bitcoin on a dedicated platform or to send it to an anonymous address.

«

Lowrey twigged it pretty much immediately – it would be like being among aliens who’d learnt English from a book – but what’s different here is that the scammers don’t hurry.
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Real-estate shopping for the apocalypse • The New Yorker

Patricia Marx decided to see if there are any affordable bunkers for if, you know, the reds decide to push the button down (in the words of Donald Fagen’s New Frontier):

»

I considered breaking the bank ($4.9 million) for a compound in Battle Creek, Michigan: more than two hundred and ninety acres encompassing several dwellings, the largest being a fourteen-thousand-square-foot affair that looks like a soap opera’s idea of a mansion, with indoor pool and “high-end” appliances (if there’s a Miele waffle-maker, I need that house!)—and, below, a spacious bunker with its own shooting range and grow room. (Phew! Who can survive without daily fresh fenugreek?) Unfortunately, the owner of that particular McBunker wouldn’t allow me to tour the place, because I couldn’t show proof of funding. This is a standard requirement when shopping for bunkers; so few “comps” exist that banks cannot assess their value, and thus won’t give mortgages.

After weeks of scrolling, I found a handful of dream hideaways on the market whose sellers were willing to let me take a tour. There were two bunkers in Montana, one of which sleeps at least ninety; a prepper bunker in Missouri that features an inconspicuous entrance and a conspicuous arsenal of guns (not included in sale, but makes you think twice before criticizing the kitchen-countertop choice); a defunct missile-silo site in North Dakota; and a twenty-thousand-square-foot cave in Arkansas used by its previous owner to raise earthworms. (Favorite bit of real-estate marketing copy: “The worm room speaks for itself.”)

«

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Music producer allegedly used AI songs to swindle Spotify • Variety

Gene Maddaus:

»

A music producer was arrested Wednesday and charged with multiple felonies for allegedly scamming more than $10m in royalties using hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs.

Michael Smith, 52, of Cornelius, N.C., is alleged to have created thousands of bot accounts on platforms like Spotify, Amazon Music and Apple Music. According to the indictment, he used the accounts to automatically stream AI music he had placed on the platforms, generating as many as 661,440 streams per day.

Smith allegedly orchestrated the scheme to get around the platforms’ fraud detection systems. Prosecutors allege that he initially engaged in fraudulent streaming of music that he owned. But the streaming platforms could detect likely fraud if a particular piece of music was streamed a billion times.

«

Quite possibly related to this 2020 piece by Andres Guadamuz, who found his Spotify account hacked (still haven’t figured out 2FA, people?) and being used to play bizarrely bland music.
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How Navy chiefs conspired to get themselves illegal warship Wi-Fi • Navy Times

Diana Correll:

»

Today’s Navy sailors are likely familiar with the jarring loss of internet connectivity that can come with a ship’s deployment.

For a variety of reasons, including operational security, a crew’s internet access is regularly restricted while underway, to preserve bandwidth for the mission and to keep their ship safe from nefarious online attacks.

But the senior enlisted leaders among the littoral combat ship Manchester’s gold crew knew no such privation last year, when they installed and secretly used their very own Wi-Fi network during a deployment, according to a scathing internal investigation obtained by Navy Times.

As the ship prepared for a West Pacific deployment in April 2023, the enlisted leader onboard conspired with the ship’s chiefs to install the secret, unauthorized network aboard the ship, for use exclusively by them.

So while rank-and-file sailors lived without the level of internet connectivity they enjoyed ashore, the chiefs installed a Starlink satellite internet dish on the top of the ship and used a Wi-Fi network they dubbed “STINKY” to check sports scores, text home and stream movies.

The enjoyment of those wireless creature comforts by enlisted leaders aboard the ship carried serious repercussions for the security of the ship and its crew.

“The danger such systems pose to the crew, the ship and the Navy cannot be understated,” the investigation notes.

Led by the senior enlisted leader of the ship’s gold crew, then-Command Senior Chief Grisel Marrero, the effort roped in the entire chiefs mess by the time it was uncovered a few months later.

«

That’s ex-Command Senior Chief Marrero to you, following the court-martial. Can’t figure out if the bust to E-7 is one or three rank demotions. (Thanks G for the link.)
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Why is India so bad at sport? • FT

Tej Parikh:

»

whether it is the Paralympics or Olympics, India underwhelms on the global sports stage, relative to its demographic heft. It has won just 41 medals at the Olympics since 1900. On the balance of probability alone — accounting for 1 in 6 people in the world — the nation’s recent performance is embarrassing. It amassed just six medals at the Olympics this year.

Of course, athletic prowess depends on far more than people power. For instance, America sent over five times the number of athletes India did to this year’s Olympics, despite having just a quarter of its population. Indeed, Rory Green, chief China economist at TS Lombard, finds that GDP explained about 90% of the variation in medal counts at the Paris games. But, India is also the world’s fifth-largest economy. If it has the people and the money, why is it so bad at sport?

Success at the Olympics tends to scale with GDP partly because it acts as a proxy for sport expenditure. “Capital-intensive sports — including gymnastics, sailing, swimming, rowing and diving — accounted for 28% of available medals this year,” notes Green. America, China and Britain excel in many of these. “Economic development also means more leisure time and the creation of a sporting culture.”

India’s economic emergence has, however, not translated into stronger investment in sport, or more recreation. Expenditure on physical recreation has not been a priority for successive governments. As a result, wannabe athletes have faced significant hurdles in the form of poor funding and a lack of access to facilities, coaching and equipment.

«

There’s a graph with a log scale which seems to suggest that the UK, France, China and US are outliers in the medal count.

But of course, there aren’t Olympic medals for cricket, and that is colossal in India: the IPL (India Premier League) is worth over a billion US dollars in media revenue alone.
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Solar module installations could hit 592 GW in 2024 • PV Magazine International

Patrick Jowett:

»

The global solar industry is on track to install 592 GW of modules this year, up 33% from 2023, according to a new report from BloombergNEF. It said in its its “3Q 2024 Global PV Market Outlook” that “low prices for modules are stimulating demand in new markets this year, but hurting manufacturers, who are competing intensely to maintain market share.”

Quarter-on-quarter analysis shows a 1% increase across the world’s largest 28 markets. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and India lead the largest developments, while Japan and South Africa experience notable decreases.The most established solar markets continue to build steadily.

The report forecasts steady year-on-year increases in solar module installations, reaching 996 GW by 2035. BloombergNEF has also reduced its 2024 estimate for polysilicon production to 1.96 million metric tons – enough to produce 900 GW of modules.

Jenny Chase, BloombergNEF’s lead solar analyst, told pv magazine that the main reason for the polysilicon output reduction from 2.2 million tons of estimated annual output in the second quarter of 2024, is “that manufacturers are scheduling maintenance or using other ways to temporarily reduce production, due to the low prices and oversupply.” The report states that polysilicon prices are currently $4.9/kg, below production costs for nearly all manufacturers. 

«

Polysilicon now as cheap as plywood. But generates more energy if you put it on a roof. And look at that growth rate!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Airline Wi-Fi has been very variable, but satellites are about to make it more reliable and faster. CC-licensed photo by Dunk 🐝 on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Flying high. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Appeals court upholds decision against Internet Archive’s book scanning program • Publishers Weekly

Andrew Albanese:

»

In a swift decision, a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has unanimously affirmed a March 2023 lower court decision finding the Internet Archive’s program to scan and lend print library books is copyright infringement. In an emphatic 64-page decision, released on September 4, the court rejected the Internet Archive’s fair use defense, as well as the novel protocol known as “controlled digital lending” on which the Archive’s scanning and lending is based.

“This appeal presents the following question: Is it ‘fair use’ for a nonprofit organization to scan copyright-protected print books in their entirety, and distribute those digital copies online, in full, for free, subject to a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio between its print copies and the digital copies it makes available at any given time, all without authorization from the copyright-holding publishers or authors? Applying the relevant provisions of the Copyright Act as well as binding Supreme Court and Second Circuit precedent, we conclude the answer is no,” the decision states.

The closely watched copyright infringement lawsuit was first filed on June 1, 2020, in the Southern District of New York by Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Wiley, organized by the Association of American Publishers.

The appeals court ruling comes just over two months after a lengthy June 28 hearing in New York, at which the panel appeared highly engaged, if deeply skeptical of the Internet Archive’s case—a relatively quick turnaround that suggests that the court did not struggle in deciding the case, much like district court Judge John G. Koeltl, who delivered his March 24, 2023 summary judgment ruling in favour of the plaintiff publishers just days after a March 20 hearing.

…In his now affirmed 47-page opinion, Koeltl forcefully rejected the Internet Archive’s fair use defence. “At bottom, IA’s fair use defense rests on the notion that lawfully acquiring a copyrighted print book entitles the recipient to make an unauthorized copy and distribute it in place of the print book, so long as it does not simultaneously lend the print book,” Koeltl wrote in his opinion granting the publisher plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment and denying the Internet Archive’s cross-motion. “But no case or legal principle supports that notion. Every authority points the other direction.”

«

To be honest, I never thought the IA had a good case. It’s so very different from websites – infinitely storeable and reproducible, and intentionally so.
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A select few have tried OpenAI’s Google killer: here’s what they think • The Washington Post

Lisa Bonos and Gerrit De Vynck:

»

A long-awaited search engine being developed by the maker of ChatGPT is far from ready to replace Google, according to interviews with people who got access to the tool, videos shared online and analysis by a search marketing firm.

OpenAI’s SearchGPT uses artificial intelligence to provide slick answers with clearly marked sources, by summarizing information drawn from different webpages. But the search tool struggled with some shopping and local queries, and on some occasions, it presented untrue or “hallucinated” information.

The limitations of the prototype search tool suggest that OpenAI, whose ChatGPT has inspired predictions that some Silicon Valley giants could become sidelined, still has major work to do before it can begin to directly threaten Google’s lucrative search business.

“We’re going to take the best features and merge them into ChatGPT,” OpenAI spokeswoman Kayla Wood said in a phone interview about SearchGPT. When asked if OpenAI’s service would include ads, like Google and other established search engines, Wood said the company’s business model was based on subscriptions. But she added that OpenAI hasn’t announced if SearchGPT will be offered free or as part of a ChatGPT subscription.

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Nothing about this is in the least bit surprising: why would anyone think that a search engine with an LLM backend would do this right? Surely the right way to do it would be a fantastic LLM (to interpret what the question is) and a fantastic search engine. But Google has demonstrated that that doesn’t work either.
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Microsoft rolled out AI PCs that can’t play top games—and there’s no quick fix • WSJ

Yang Jie:

»

The latest Windows personal computers with artificial-intelligence features have “the best specs” on “all the benchmarks,” Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella recently said. There is one problem: the chips inside current models are incompatible with many leading videogames.

Microsoft and its partners this spring rolled out Copilot+ PCs that include functions such as creating AI-generated pictures and video.

Under the hood of the new laptops is a hardware change. Instead of the Intel chips that have powered Microsoft Windows PCs for nearly four decades, the initial Copilot+ PCs to hit the market use Qualcomm chips, which in turn rely on designs from UK-based Arm. 

Most PC games, including popular multiplayer games such as “League of Legends” and “Fortnite,” are made to work with Intel’s x86, a chip architecture that has been the standard for many personal computers for decades.

To make some of these programs function on the Qualcomm-Arm system, they must be run through a layer of software that translates Intel-speak into Arm-speak. Chip experts say the approach isn’t perfect and can result in bugs, glitches or games simply not working.

The problem is widespread. About 1,300 PC games have been independently tested to see if they work on Microsoft’s new Arm-powered PCs and only about half ran smoothly, said James McWhirter, an analyst with research firm Omdia. He cited an independent website recommended by Microsoft to check compatibility. Many other less-popular games haven’t been tested.

«

This was always going to be the problem for Windows on ARM – though the question is whether the buyers of those PCs actually care about playing games. If they’re used by corporates, does it matter? PC sales are about 50-50 corporates and consumers, from memory.
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UK electric car drivers should be charged per mile, say campaigners • The Guardian

Gwyn Topham:

»

Campaigners have called on the chancellor to introduce a controversial pay-per-mile road charging scheme on electric cars, warning of a £5bn “black hole” in tax revenues from motoring.

In a letter to Rachel Reeves, the Campaign for Better Transport (CBT) urged her to reform vehicle taxes, with fuel duty poised to dwindle in the coming decade as petrol and diesel cars are phased out. The charity said it was an “urgent issue” as tax revenues were forecast to fall by £5bn between 2028 and 2033, and the public agreed that all vehicles should pay a fair share.

Silviya Barrett of CBT said: “The new chancellor faces a looming black hole. She can avoid it, in a way which is fair, and which garners broad public support. But she should start now, as this issue will only get more pressing.” CBT said the easiest first step would be to levy a small pay-per-mile charge on zero-emission vehicles, with a transition period exempting existing drivers.

The letter said the group “fully appreciate that such a change would be difficult and be criticised by the opposition”. However, it said its research showed that 65% of the public believe it is fair for electric car drivers to be taxed, but at a lower rate than petrol and diesel drivers.

Fuel duty is now 53p a litre for petrol and diesel vehicles. Zero-emission cars will also pay vehicle tax for the first time in 2025..

«

A 30mpg car gets 30 miles per 4.54 litres, ie 6.6 miles/l, so pays 53p/6.6miles = 8p in fuel duty per mile. You could levy it based on MOT figures. The problem is that rural drivers need to drive further, on less congested roads. How do you allow for that? (Or do you not, since fuel duty already doesn’t make that distinction?)

I do recall reading an article suggesting the way to do this is to introduce the tax two years in the future, but can’t now find it. Link welcome!
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The Uruguayan company teaching people how to turn regular cars into EVs • Rest of World

Daniela Dib:

»

In 2010, Uruguayan president-elect José Mujica made headlines for the bright blue mini-truck he rode to his inauguration ceremony.

The vehicle, which looked like any ordinary pickup truck, was used to convey a message: Uruguay was serious about its quest to become more environmentally friendly. The gas-powered four-wheeler had been transformed into an electric vehicle by Organización Autolibre, a local retrofitting company.

Viral press coverage of the ceremony put the company in the spotlight, sparking interest from EV enthusiasts inside and outside Uruguay who wanted to convert their gas-guzzling vehicles into economical EVs. 

“This news coverage in many media outlets across Latin America gave a lot of visibility to this technology, and to this day we tour the region every year across Peru, Mexico, Argentina,” Gabriel González Barrios, founder and CEO of Organización Autolibre, told Rest of World. “The same distributors of Autolibre systems permanently invite us to train the necessary technicians to generate the local ecosystem for the local development of this industry.”

Over the years, González Barrios and his team at Organización Autolibre have helped convert thousands of traditional vehicles into e-cars across 14 Latin American countries. The company trains individuals and mechanics through online courses, and supervises conversions for corporate fleets. So far, at least 40 companies have used Organización Autolibre’s services, González Barrios said. While some countries have flagged concerns about the safety of retrofitting vehicles, González Barrios said his company is leading efforts to make it a safer and standardized practice across Latin America.

“We want to show it’s an industrialized process,” Andrés García, the owner of a retrofitting shop in Bogotá, Colombia, which works with Autolibre, told Rest of World. “This is not for hobbyists or people who are inexperienced.”

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Stock plunge wipes out Trump Media’s extraordinary market gains • The Guardian

Callum Jones:

»

Donald Trump’s tiny social media empire has seen its extraordinary stock market rally wiped out by a steep sell-off.

Shares in Trump Media & Technology Group, owner of Truth Social, closed below $17 on Wednesday, reversing all their gains since the company’s rapid rise took hold in January.

The former president has been prohibited by a lock-up agreement from starting to sell shares in the firm until late September. While his majority stake in the firm is still worth some $2bn on paper, its value has fallen dramatically from $4.9bn in March.

As a business, TMTG is not growing rapidly. It generated sales of just $4.13m in 2023, according to regulatory filings, and lost $58.2m.

Nor is Truth Social growing rapidly as a platform. While TMTG has not disclosed the size of its user base, the research firm Similarweb estimated that in March it had 7.7m visits – while X, formerly Twitter, had 6.1bn. That same month, however, TMTG was valued at almost $10bn on the stock market.

«

All the people selling ahead of the lock-up expiring really is very, very funny, though that it’s there at all is still a demonstration of the madness of crowds.
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Biden administration announces major actions to tackle Russian efforts to influence 2024 election • CNN Politics

Sean Lyngaas, Evan Perez, Kylie Atwood, Zachary Cohen, Jennifer Hansler:

»

The Biden administration announced a sweeping set of actions to tackle a major Russian government-backed effort to influence the 2024 US presidential election on Wednesday, including unveiling criminal charges against two Russian nationals, sanctions on ten individuals and entities, and the seizure of 32 internet domains.

At Russian President Vladimir Putin’s direction, three Russian companies used fake profiles to promote false narratives on social media, US Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement.

Two employees of RT, the Russian state media network, were indicted in a US court for allegedly being part of a scheme that funneled nearly $10m to set up and direct a Tennessee-based front company to produce online content aimed at sowing divisions among Americans, according to the Justice Department.

Taken together, the actions represent the Biden administration’s most significant public response yet to alleged Russian influence operations targeting American voters. After the US accused Iran of trying to hack both the Trump and Biden-Harris campaigns last month, Wednesday’s expected actions are a reminder that US officials continue to see Russia as a prominent foreign influence threat to November’s election, the sources said.

…In July, the Justice Department accused an RT employee of being involved in a scheme that used a network of about 1,000 social media accounts to pose as US residents to spread disinformation about the Ukraine war and other topics. US officials accuse the Kremlin of financing the scheme; a Kremlin spokesperson denied the allegation.

Asked for comment, an RT spokesperson did not respond to the substance of the allegations, and instead emailed mocking comments including, “2016 called and it wants its clichés back.”

«

Then again, the cliche isn’t a cliche, because there was a Russian disinformation effort – which had some effect – in 2016.
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Intel honesty • Stratechery

Ben Thompson:

»

the problem with Intel’s most recent earnings call was threefold:

• Intel is technically on pace to achieve the five nodes in four years [CEO Pat] Gelsinger [who returned to Intel, where he had previously successfully pushed CISC over RISC, in 2021] promised (in truth two of those nodes were iterations), but they haven’t truly scaled any of them; the first attempt to do so, with Intel 3, destroyed their margins. This isn’t a surprise: the reason why it is hard to skip steps is not just because technology advances, but because you have to actually learn on the line how to implement new technology at scale, with sustainable yield. Go back to Intel’s 10nm failure: the company could technically make a 10nm chip, they just couldn’t do so economically; there are now open questions about Intel 3, much less next year’s promised 18A.

• Intel is dramatically ramping up its Lunar Lake [allegedly ARM-competitive x86] architecture as it is the only design the company has that is competitive with the Qualcomm ARM architecture undergirding Microsoft’s CoPilot+ PC initiative; the problem is that Lunar Lake’s tiles — including its CPU — are made by TSMC, which is both embarrassing and also terrible for margins.

• The third problem is that the goal Gelsinger has been pushing for is the aforementioned 18A, yet Intel has yet to announce a truly committed at-scale partner. Yes, the company is in talks with lots of folks and claims some number of secret agreements, but at this point the foundry strategy needs real proof points; unfortunately Intel itself ramping up on TSMC, even as it loses control of its costs, isn’t exactly a selling point as to why any third-party should put their fortunes in Intel’s hands.

All that noted, my initial response to the meltdown over Intel’s earnings was to defend Gelsinger; what is happening to Intel now is downstream of mistakes that happened years before Gelsinger came back to the company. That remains true, but Gelsinger does have one fatal flaw: he still believes in Intel, and I no longer do.

«

That’s an utterly damning phrase from Thompson, who isn’t given to dumping on companies, especially big ones. But it’s clear that Intel just doesn’t have a strategy that fits how the world is. As Thompson goes on to point out, only the fact that TSMC is based in Taiwan, and China poses a threat, gives Intel any leverage.

Gelsinger’s choice of CISC over RISC paid off.. but not forever.
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We tested Wi-Fi on over 50 flights. It often stinks, but it’s about to get better • WSJ

Joanna Stern:

»

Soon you might get a low-earth orbit (LEO) connection. LEO satellites are less than a thousand miles from earth, so the data travels a shorter distance, addressing that latency problem. And you certainly feel the difference. 

I packed my bags and tested two providers of LEO connectivity. The first was Starlink from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which now offers in-flight Wi-Fi on Hawaiian Airlines and smaller carriers like JSX. I flew JSX round trip from Dallas to Houston. Next, I tested Intelsat’s upcoming LEO service on the company’s test plane, from Chicago to Newark. It was a stunning leap forward in performance.

• Streaming: I brought 10—yes, 10—devices on board. I could simultaneously stream high-def YouTube and Netflix on my menagerie of tablets, laptops and smartphones.
• Video calling: Without stopping those streams, I also managed to Zoom with people on Earth and on the same flight. The delay was minimal and I was able to keep up with the meeting. (Maybe the true flight nightmare isn’t a crying baby but a seatmate spewing corporate jargon for five solid hours.)
• Real-time apps: Download speeds hit 150 Mbps on the flights. More impressive was the lower latency, resulting in snappier web browsing, scrolling long social feeds and rock solid connections for apps like Google Docs and Slack.

Starlink’s performance was excellent but its availability is limited. Intelsat plans to start equipping planes later this year with antennas that can connect to both GEO and LEO satellites. GEO is still better in the skies over major population centers, because of the way those satellites are concentrated, says Bijur.

American and Alaska plan to start upgrading those old cellular planes this year, wrapping up next year. Viasat and Panasonic plan to offer a similar dual-network system to airlines.  

“In 25 years, I have never seen such a high level of interest from airlines in upgrading,” John Wade, Panasonic Avionics vice president of in-flight connectivity, told me. Since I’m often on United planes with slower Panasonic GEO systems, that’s (streaming) music to my ears.

«

I guess this matters if you’re flying over the US, but any flying I’ve done lately has been over multiple countries, and I’d imagine that gets complicated. Also expensive. Isn’t it nice to know you’re not online sometimes?
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What I’ve learned after a year of serious Substacking • Odds and Ends of History

James O’Malley:

»

When I started my writing career, churning out articles for search engines to find, with titles like “Top 10 iPhone cases 2013”, I was not imagining a rapturous critical reception at my prose. Instead, my main goal was to hit the necessary wordcount as quickly as possible, so that I could bank my £40 and move on to the next piece.

Though I take somewhat more pride in my work today, where I typically work on less depressing articles, what remains true is that not all words are not created equal. The time and effort required to write, say, a thousand words can vary enormously. Sometimes you just want to get to something good enough to before your deadline – because even if you spend double the amount of time finessing every word, the fee at the end is ultimately the same.

However, Substack is very different.

Here, my professional success is closely linked to the quality of work that I’m producing. There is a direct correlation between the quality of my writing and the number of new subscribers (both paid and free) that I earn after each post.

This is a good thing, as this aligns my incentives to produce quality content, because the more effort I make, the more I will be rewarded. That’s why I genuinely think that my writing on this newsletter has been some of the best that I’ve ever done.

«

This is an important observation: by making it possible for people to find the audience with whom they can connect most effectively, and enabling them to monetise that connection, Substack is doing an enormous favour to journalists and people with a yen generally for writing. It’s only taken 10 years to be an overnight sensation.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Don’t fret: an extensive overview of thousands of studies shows mobile phones don’t cause cancer. CC-licensed photo by Nana B Agyei on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Calling back. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Mobile phones not linked to brain cancer, biggest study to date finds • The Guardian

Natasha May:

»

Mobile phones are not linked to brain and head cancers, a comprehensive review of the highest quality evidence available commissioned by the World Health Organization has found.

Led by the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (Arpansa), the systematic review examined more than 5,000 studies from which the most scientifically rigorous were identified and weak studies were excluded.

The final analysis included 63 observational studies in humans published between 1994 and 2022, making it “the most comprehensive review to date”, the review lead author, associate prof Ken Karipidis, said.

“We concluded the evidence does not show a link between mobile phones and brain cancer or other head and neck cancers.”

Published on Wednesday, the review focused on cancers of the central nervous system (including brain, meninges, pituitary gland and ear), salivary gland tumours and brain tumours.

The review found no overall association between mobile phone use and cancer, no association with prolonged use (if people use their mobile phones for 10 years or more), and no association with the amount of mobile phone use (the number of calls made or the time spent on the phone).

“I’m quite confident with our conclusion. And what makes us quite confident is … even though mobile phone use has skyrocketed, brain tumour rates have remained stable,” said Karipidis, Arpansa’s health impact assessment assistant director.

«

This has been a claim made at more or less volume for absolutely years. And now we can, surely, say it’s done.
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Bird flu reaches cows in California, the country’s largest milk producer • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

»

The outbreak of H5N1 bird flu in US dairy cows has now spread to three herds in California, the largest milk-producing state in the country with around 1.7 million dairy cows, federal and state health officials have confirmed.

Fourteen states and 197 herds have now been affected by the unprecedented outbreak in dairy cows, which was first confirmed by federal health officials on March 25.

In a statement, the secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, Karen Ross, said the spread of the virus to California was not unexpected. “We have been preparing for this possibility since earlier this year when [Highly pathogenic avian influenza or HPAI] detections were confirmed at dairy farms in other states,” Ross said. “Our extensive experience with HPAI in poultry has given us ample preparation and expertise to address this incident, with workers’ health and public health as our top priorities.”

The herds in California are thought to have been infected through the movement of cattle, despite a federal order mandating testing of cattle prior to movement between states. So far, health officials believe that all of the dairy infections across the affected states stem from a single spillover event from wild birds to dairy cows in Texas. The virus is thought to spread from cow to cow, as well as from contaminated milking equipment, dirty hands, and boots.

«

At what point do we start calling it bovine flu? Just so we know for the watching brief.
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The Third Circuit’s Section 230 decision In Anderson v. TikTok is pure poppycock • Techdirt

Corbin Barthold:

»

Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit concluded, in Anderson v. TikTok, that algorithmic recommendations aren’t protected by Section 230. Because they’re the platforms’ First Amendment-protected expression, the court reasoned, algorithms are the platforms’ “own first-party speech,” and thus fall outside Section 230’s liability shield for the publication of third-party speech.

Of course, a platform’s decision to host a third party’s speech at all is also First Amendment-protected expression. By the Third Circuit’s logic, then, such hosting decisions, too, are a platform’s “own first-party speech” unprotected by Section 230.

We’ve already hit (and not for the last time) the key problem with the Third Circuit’s analysis. “Given … that platforms engage in protected first-party speech under the First Amendment when they curate compilations of others’ content via their expressive algorithms,” the court declared, “it follows that doing so amounts to first-party speech under [Section] 230, too.” No, it does not. Assuming a lack of overlap between First Amendment protection and Section 230 protection is a basic mistake.

«

It’s quite a detailed examination of the topic, but those paragraphs set out the essential problem: if it isn’t protected by S230, then it is by the First Amendment.
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Bluesky continues to soar, adding two million more new users in a matter of days • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

Social networking startup Bluesky continues to benefit from X’s shutdown in Brazil having now added over 2 million new users over the past four days, up from just half a million as of Friday. This rapid growth led some users to encounter the occasional error that would state there were “Not Enough Resources” to handle requests, as Bluesky engineers scrambled to keep the servers stable under the influx of new sign-ups.

As new users downloaded the app, Bluesky jumped to becoming the app to No. 1 in Brazil over the weekend, ahead of Meta’s X competitor, Instagram Threads. According to app intelligence firm Appfigures, Bluesky’s total downloads soared by 10,584% this weekend compared to last, and its downloads in Brazil were up by a whopping 1,018,952%. The growth seems to be having a halo effect, as downloads outside Brazil also rose by 584%, the firm noted. In part, this is due to Bluesky receiving downloads in 22 countries where it had barely seen any traction before.

«

Well done, Mr Musk, really got hold of the job there.
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I learned the language of computer programming in my 50s; here’s what I discovered • The Guardian

Andrew Smith, a writer, decided he should learn coding to understand what is driving the whole world these days:

»

My dismay at JavaScript was about more than discomfort with algorithms, though. Strange as it seemed for what I’d always thought of as a hyperrational realm, the primary problem was aesthetic. Emotional. Just looking at JavaScript, with its ugly flights of brackets and braces and unnecessary-seeming reams of semicolons, made me miserable. There also seemed to be 25 different ways to accomplish every task and these were constantly changing, turning the language into a kind of coding wild west. The more time I spent with it, the more I thought: “I can’t do this; coding’s not for me – I don’t have the right kind of mind (and never liked Star Wars).”

At this low ebb, I had a stroke of luck when a pro-coder friend of a friend suggested I try another language before giving up. He put me in touch with a man called Nicholas Tollervey, who was prominent within the Python language community. Before calling Tollervey, I looked at Python and instantly felt more at home with it. The first thing I noticed was the spare simplicity of its syntax, which used indentation rather than ugly symbols to delineate instructions to the machine. The language was designed by a naturally collaborative Dutchman named Guido van Rossum, who prized communication, community and concern for how his language would behave in the wild – in other words, empathy – above all else. He named his language Python after Monty Python, a whimsical, human touch that seemed promising. When Tollervey suggested I travel to Cleveland, Ohio, to experience the 4,000-strong PyCon conference, I found myself agreeing, with no idea what I was agreeing to.

The first day was less like the stiff gathering of my imagining than the first day back at Hogwarts.

«

It’s an extract from a book – “Devil in the Stack: A Coding Odyssey” by Andrew Smith, published by Grove Press (£16.99). Smart move to make a book from necessity!
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Did your car witness a crime? Police may be coming for your Tesla • San Francisco Chronicle

Rachel Swan:

»

A Canadian tourist was visiting Oakland recently when he had to talk someone out of taking his Tesla from a hotel parking lot.

This was no thief. It was the Oakland Police Department. Turns out, the Tesla may have witnessed a homicide.

In Oakland and beyond, police called to crime scenes are increasingly looking for more than shell casings and fingerprints. They’re scanning for Teslas parked nearby, hoping their unique outward-facing cameras captured key evidence. And, the Chronicle has found, they’re even resorting to obtaining warrants to tow the cars to ensure they don’t lose the video.

The trend offers a window into how mass surveillance — the expansion of cameras as well as license-plate scanners, security doorbells and precise cellphone tracking — is changing crime-fighting. While few cars have camera systems similar to Teslas, that could change rapidly, especially as the technology in vehicles continues to improve.

“We have all these mobile video devices floating around,” said Sgt. Ben Therriault, president of the Richmond Police Officers Association.

Therriault said he and other officers now frequently seek video from bystander Teslas, and usually get the owners’ consent to download it without having to serve a warrant. Still, he said, tows are sometimes necessary, if police can’t locate a Tesla owner and need the video “to pursue all leads.”

“It’s the most drastic thing you could do,” he acknowledged.

In at least three instances in July and August, Oakland police sought to tow a Tesla into evidence to obtain — via a second court order — its stored video. Officers cited the cars’ “Sentry Mode” feature, a system of cameras and sensors that records noise and movement around the vehicle when it is empty and locked, storing it in a USB drive in the glove box.

«

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What’s happening to oil market forecasts? • Baker Institute

Mark Finley:

»

Historically, the institutional calculus was that the US was perceived to be vulnerable to higher oil prices — and as a result, policymakers would complain to the US EIA [Energy Information Administration] if the oil market was tighter than they had originally forecast. While this analysis does not include IEA’s [International Energy Agency] short-term outlooks, the same institutional pressures can certainly be ascribed to an organization that was created after the oil shocks of the 1970s and whose members are comprised largely of mature, oil-importing countries — as was the EIA. Accordingly, at the margins, the EIA and IEA had an institutional incentive to err on the side of being slightly overly aggressive on forecasting oil demand growth.

In contrast, OPEC [Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries] forecasters would receive complaints from their members if the market was weaker than they had forecast, since their members are oil exporters and, therefore, vulnerable to lower prices. Accordingly, on the margins, they would have an incentive to err on the side of undershooting on their oil demand forecast. Through 2022 — excluding the COVID-19 pandemic years of 2020–21, when demand fell by a massive, unexpected 10 Mb/d after the January forecasting cycle — the differences in revisions after 12 months reflected that institutional bias:

• OPEC tended to undershoot on its annual demand forecast and would on average revise its oil demand figure up after one year by 130,000 b/d.
• The EIA tended to overshoot on its demand forecast and would on average revise its oil demand figure down by 90,000 b/d.

Interestingly, the pattern of revisions after one year has remained consistent for the EIA even as the U.S. policy narrative has shifted since the country became a net oil exporter, and amid a greater emphasis on climate change: It has continued to tend, on average, to revise lower an overly aggressive short-term demand growth forecast. But for OPEC, the pattern has shifted: Instead of having a low-growth demand forecast that tends to be revised higher, in recent years OPEC has moved to a high-growth forecast that, on average, has tended to be revised lower, largely due to a large overshoot for 2022 oil demand as discussed above.

«

The puzzle they’re all building their forecasts around is: when will oil demand peak? What will make it peak?
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Get ready for Tesla cops • The Atlantic

Matteo Wong:

»

Last month, South Pasadena’s police department became the first in the country with a fully electric police fleet, replacing all of its gas-powered vehicles with 20 Teslas. Four officers, after test-driving Teslas for the department, have already bought one for personal use, Abdalla, who leads his department’s EV-conversion project, told me. South Pasadena is one among a growing number of law-enforcement agencies that are electrifying their fleets.

About 50 miles south, the Irvine Police Department just became likely the country’s first to purchase a Tesla Cybertruck. Departments in at least 38 states have purchased, tested, or deployed fully electric cars. Electric patrol cars are not yet legion and in many cities are likely less common than EVs among the general population, but their ranks are growing. They now prowl the streets in Eupora, Mississippi; Cary, North Carolina; and Logan, Ohio.

The nation’s switch to battery-powered police cruisers isn’t only, or even primarily, about the environment. In many cases, they are proving to simply be the best-performing and most cost-effective option for law enforcement. Police departments require vehicles that have rapid acceleration and deceleration; space for radios, sirens, and other special equipment; and extreme reliability for 24-hour emergency responses.

When the South Pasadena police first looked into electrification, in the mid-2000s, no EVs on the market could handle the heavy workload that law enforcement demands. The last thing any police officer needs is to worry about their car running out of charge mid-shift. When Tesla unveiled the Model Y in 2019, Abdalla said, it “perked us up.” The model’s range, safety, and power made it the first EV that appeared potentially suitable for the department.

Five years later, the cars have gotten much better. New EVs can regularly drive upwards of 200 or 300 miles per charge, plenty for many officers.

«

The acceleration alone must be useful for chases (though those are obviated more and more by drones). But they’re also cheaper to maintain and run. The only question would be what happens if they’re involved in crashes.
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‘Queen of trash’ among 11 on trial in Sweden’s largest environmental crime case • The Guardian

Miranda Bryant:

»

The [husband and wife Thomas and Bella] Nilssons face charges of serious environmental crime and serious economic crime linked to the company, all of which they deny. The others face a combination of different charges, including serious environmental crime, serious economic crime linked to the company, aiding and abetting serious environmental crime and environmental crime.

From 2018-20, the company’s heyday, the trademark pink construction bags of Think Pink, offering cheap recycling and waste disposal, were a common sight in the capital. Nilsson won awards for her work as chief executive.

The business came crashing down in 2020 when its owners were arrested. The company has been accused of dumping at least 200,000 tonnes of waste around Sweden.

Police investigators, whose report runs to 50,000 pages, found harmful levels of arsenic, dioxins, zinc, lead, copper and petroleum products. Several of the rubbish dumps caught fire, with one fire lasting for months.

Anders Gustafsson, one of the trial’s three prosecutors, has described the case as “the largest environmental crime in Sweden in terms of scope and organisation”.

On Tuesday he said Think Pink had dumped rubbish and used falsified documents to deceive authorities and make big profits. “There are claims for damages of 260m SEK [£19m], mainly from municipalities, when they were forced to clear away the large mountains of rubbish,” he told the broadcaster SVT. “It is exceptional that it is on a large scale and that it has been going on for such a long time in several places in the country.”

«

All that recycling you thought was happening that.. wasn’t.
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Former high-ranking New York State government employee charged with acting as an undisclosed agent of the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party • US Department of Justice

»

[Civil servant Linda] Sun and [lobster fisherman husband Chris] Hu laundered the monetary proceeds of this scheme to purchase, among other items, real estate property in Manhasset, New York currently valued at $4.1m, a condominium in Honolulu, Hawaii currently valued at $2.1m, and various luxury automobiles, including a 2024 Ferrari.  Sun never disclosed any benefits she received from representatives of the PRC government and the CCP to the New York State government, as she was required to do as a New York State government employee. 

Hu also laundered unlawful proceeds through bank accounts opened in the name of a close relative but that were actually for Hu’s exclusive use.  To open these accounts, Hu unlawfully used an image of the relative’s driver’s license.

The charges in the indictment are allegations and the defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

«

And you thought it was just because lobster fishing was really, really lucrative.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

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.

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

Mishaal Rahman:

»

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.

«

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

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.”

«

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:

»

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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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified