A single word can improve your control of your to-do lists when something depends on other people. CC-licensed photo by Ged Carroll 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. To-done. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Elon Musk says X users fight falsehoods. The falsehoods are winning • The Washington Post

Will Oremus, Trisha Thadani and Jeremy Merrill:

»

X users can volunteer to be a Community Notes contributor and, once accepted, can propose notes that debunk or add context to posts on the platform. Participants in the project vote on which notes should be attached to a post and displayed publicly. That process uses a voting algorithm that elevates only notes that receive consensus from users with a history of voting differently.

The CCDH’s analysis, published Wednesday, tracked how Community Notes responded to 283 posts that contained election claims identified as false or misleading by independent fact-checking organizations. The researchers studied only posts that had at least one note proposed by Community Notes contributors. More than 160,000 users have proposed notes in 2024 — a sharp increase from last year.

On 229 of the posts, proposed Community Notes offered accurate, relevant context, the CCDH found. But votes from Community Notes users succeeded in publicly attaching notes to only 20 of those posts. For the other 209, or 91%, participants didn’t reach a consensus under the Community Notes voting system — and the program didn’t provide any public context to the misleading claim.

That findings suggest Community Notes does a poor job of responding to falsehoods relating to politics, even when contributors correctly identify posts lacking context. Separate data analysis by The Post found that even when a Community Note is publicly added to an election-related post, the process typically takes more than 11 hours — by which time the content may have reached millions of users.

«

There’s no good method of stopping falsehoods. What you want is a method that flags them rapidly and then gets them deranked (or even removed) if they’re found to be wrong. But Community Notes doesn’t do the first or the second part. CCDH reckons that “misleading claims about the US election without Community Notes have over 2.2 billion views”. Even if that’s a little off, it’s a colossal amount of misinformation.

And CCDH also finds that misleading posts get 13x more views than their Notes – a totally predictable figure. As someone (identity frequently disputed) said, a lie can be halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on.
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How Russia, China and Iran are interfering in the US presidential election • The New York Times

Sheera Frenkel, Tiffany Hsu and Steven Lee Myers:

»

When Russia interfered in the 2016 US presidential election, spreading divisive and inflammatory posts online to stoke outrage, its posts were brash and riddled with spelling errors and strange syntax. They were designed to get attention by any means necessary.

“Hillary is a Satan,” one Russian-made Facebook post read.

Now, eight years later, foreign interference in American elections has become far more sophisticated, and far more difficult to track.

Disinformation from abroad — particularly from Russia, China and Iran — has matured into a consistent and pernicious threat, as the countries test, iterate and deploy increasingly nuanced tactics, according to U.S. intelligence and defense officials, tech companies and academic researchers. The ability to sway even a small pocket of Americans could have outsize consequences for the presidential election, which polls generally consider a neck-and-neck race.

Russia, according to American intelligence assessments, aims to bolster the candidacy of former President Donald J. Trump, while Iran favors his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. China appears to have no preferred outcome.

But the broad goal of these efforts has not changed: to sow discord and chaos in hopes of discrediting American democracy in the eyes of the world. The campaigns, though, have evolved, adapting to a changing media landscape and the proliferation of new tools that make it easy to fool credulous audiences.

«

More pervasive, but also more targeted, AI-fed, harder to identify and tech companies are even less interested in stopping it.
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Facebook is auto-generating militia group pages as extremists continue to organize in plain sight • WIRED

Tess Owen:

»

Anti-government militia movements have been continuing to use Facebook to recruit, coordinate training, promote ballot box stake outs, and prepare for a civil war that many militants believe will break out after election day. And in some cases, the movement is attracting people who don’t appear to have any prior background in a militia. Meta is even doing the work for extremist movements by auto-generating some group pages on their behalf.

Data shared exclusively with WIRED by the Tech Transparency Project shows that these groups have only continued to grow on Facebook, despite WIRED previously flagging this lapse in Meta’s moderation.

The brazen proliferation of paramilitary activity on the social media platform days before the election highlights Meta’s lackadaisical approach to enforcing its own bans against groups it has labeled dangerous extremists. Militias require platforms like Facebook to grow: It’s a tool for the paramilitary movement to strengthen and radicalize its network. It also helps them facilitate local organizing, state by state and county by county, and boost their membership.

…There have also been some recent instances where Facebook has even auto-generated pages for militias. In May, Facebook auto-generated a page for AP3’s Arizona chapter. In June, Facebook auto-generated a page for “AP3 NM [New Mexico] Training Range.”

«

Astonishing: this is exactly what was happening in 2016 and earlier, when Facebook would auto-generate pages for Al-Qa’ida and other terrorist groups. (I wrote about it in Social Warming.) OK, militia groups might not quite be proscribed organisations like those, but you’d think Facebook might have learnt its lesson.
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Controversy after Polish radio station replaces human presenters with AI • Notes From Poland

Daniel Tilles:

»

A Polish radio station has stirred controversy after relaunching one of its channels in a new version run almost completely by artificial intelligence, including its presenters.

Staff who previously worked on the channel have criticised the move. But the station’s manager says that cooperation with them would have been terminated regardless of the AI decision because the channel had previously been unsuccessful.

On Monday, Radio Kraków, a state-owned broadcaster that operates in Poland’s second-largest city, announced that the following day it would launch Poland’s “first radio station created almost entirely by artificial intelligence”.

Its programmes would be presented by three AI characters, each of which would have a specific personality, set of interests and even AI-generated images of how they look.

One character is called Jakub “Kuba” Zieliński (pictured above), a “22-year-old studying acoustic engineering, looking for the latest news in the field of sound production and new technological solutions”.

Another is Emilia “Emi” Nowak (pictured below), a “20-year-old journalism student and pop culture expert, passionately following the latest trends in the world of cinema, music and fashion”.

The third, called Alex Szulc, is “socially engaged on topics related to identity, queer culture and the influence of media on society”.

Radio Kraków said that the three characters were intended to be “model representatives of Generation Z”, a demographic cohort born between the mid-1990s and early 2010s.

«

Not a good omen.
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Keeping a suspense file gives you superpowers • Pluralistic

Cory Doctorow:

»

while good to-do lists can take you very far in life, they have a hard limit: other people. Almost every ambitious thing you want to do involves someone else’s contribution. Even the most solitary of projects can be derailed if your tax accountant misses a key email and you end up getting audited or paying a huge penalty.

That’s where the other kind of GTD list comes in: the list of things you’re waiting for from other people. I used to be assiduous in maintaining this list, but then the pandemic struck and no one was meeting any of their commitments, and I just gave up on it, and never went back…until about a month ago. Returning to these lists (they’re sometimes called “suspense files”) made me realize how many of the problems – some hugely consequential – in my life could have been avoided if I’d just gone back to this habit earlier.

My suspense file is literally just some lines partway down a text file that lives on my desktop called todo.txt that has all my to-dos as well. Here’s some sample entries from my suspense file:

WAITING EMAIL Sean about ENSHITTIIFCATION manuscript deadline 10/24/24
WAITING EMAIL Russ about missing royalty statement 10/12/24
WAITING EMAIL Alice about Christmas vacation hotel 10/8/24 10/20/24

«

Doctorow is (as John Naughton observes) the most productive person you ever will come across, and this is a terrific little hack to keep even more on top of things.
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Polling paradox: what actually shapes the numbers? • Good Authority

Josh Clinton:

»

There is no end of scrutiny of the 2024 election polls – who is ahead, who is behind, how much the polls will miss the election outcome, etc., etc. These questions have become even more pressing because the presidential race seems to be a toss-up. Every percentage point for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump matters.

But here’s the big problem that no one talks about very much: Simple and defensible decisions by pollsters can drastically change the reported margin between Harris and Trump. I’ll show that the margin can change by as much as eight points. Reasonable decisions produce a margin that ranges from Harris +0.9% to Harris +9%.

This reality highlights that we ask far too much of polls. Ultimately, it’s hard to know how much poll numbers reflect the decisions of voters – or the decisions of pollsters.

«

He goes through how you get such a wild variation: it shows why a poll of polls makes sense, but even then one wonders how anyone could trust a poll ever again. As they say, there’s only one poll that matters.
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Universal Music in deal with “ethical AI music” company Klay Vision • Hollywood Reporter

Georg Szalai:

»

Universal Music Group, led by chairman and CEO Lucian Grainge, is teaming up with L.A.-based AI music company Klay Vision on what they described as “a pioneering commercial ethical foundational model for AI-generated music that works in collaboration with the music industry and its creators.”

Klay is positioning itself to become “the backbone for a new era of innovation, powering new products and experiences, committed to the premise that AI can bolster and grow musical creativity and human artistry,” the partners said. Monday’s press release even called Klay an “ethical AI music company.”

The two companies said that they share “the conviction that state-of-the-art foundational AI models are best built and scaled responsibly through constructive dialogue and consensus with those responsible for the artistry that shapes global culture.” They added: “Building generative AI music models ethically and fully respectful of copyright, as well as name and likeness rights, will dramatically lessen the threat to human creators and stand the greatest opportunity to be transformational, creating significant new avenues for creativity and future monetization of copyrights.”

Klay is led by executives from the fields of music and technology, including music producer and tech visionary Ary Attie, Thomas Hesse, the former president of global digital business at Sony Music Entertainment, and Björn Winckler, who is set to join the firm soon from Google Deepmind.

“Klay is committed to serving artists and songwriters and those who support them, including music publishers and labels, distributors, and other rights holders across the major and Indie label landscape,” the company said. “Klay is developing a global ecosystem to host AI-driven experiences and content, including accurate attribution, and will not compete with artists’ catalogs in traditional music services.”

«

My reading of this is “they offered us a lot of money to use our songs, so we accepted it.”
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Weight-loss surgery down 25% as anti-obesity drug use soars • Harvard Gazette

Terry Murphy:

»

A new study examining a large sample of privately insured patients with obesity found that use of drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy as anti-obesity medications more than doubled from 2022 to 2023. During that same period, there was a 25.6% decrease in patients undergoing metabolic bariatric surgery to treat obesity.

The study, by researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in collaboration with researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Brown School of Public Health, is published in JAMA Network Open.

“Our study provides one of the first national estimates of the decline in utilization of bariatric metabolic surgery among privately insured patients corresponding to the rising use of blockbuster GLP-1 RA drugs,” said senior author Thomas C. Tsai, a metabolic bariatric surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Using a national sample of medical insurance claims data from more than 17 million privately insured adults, the researchers identified patients with a diagnosis of obesity without diabetes in 2022-2023. The study found a sharp increase in the share of patients who received glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists, or GLP-1 RAs, during the study period, with GLP-1 RA use increasing 132.6% from the last six months of 2022 to the last six months of 2023 (from 1.89 to 4.41 patients per 1,000 patients).

«

So in effect, a transfer of wealth from surgeons to pharmaceutical companies?
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Amazon is shutting down its Kindle Vella serialized story platform in February 2025 • Engadget

Mariella Moon:

»

Amazon, in what it described as a “difficult decision,” is winding down Kindle Vella and shutting it down completely in February 2025. When the company launched the serialized story platform in 2021, it said Vella was a way for readers to discover new fictional stories and a new way for authors to earn from the Kindle Direct Publishing service. But it hasn’t caught on as it had hoped, Amazon explains on its website, and it has decided to throw in the towel three years after Vella’s debut.

Authors can only publish stories on Vella until December 4, which is also the last day readers can purchase tokens. While readers will no longer be able to purchase tokens after that, they can continue using those tokens to unlock episodes until the program closes in February. The good news for those who’ve been following specific authors or stories on Vella is that they won’t lose their access to whatever episodes they’ve already unlocked even after the platform shuts down. They can always read the stories they’ve purchased in their library in the Kindle app for iOS and Android, though they can no longer open them on the web. Any token they don’t use by February will be refunded.

Responses to Vella have been pretty lukewarm since it became available. Some authors liked the fact that they could use it to earn money from unfinished stories, while some readers said they’d prefer getting a whole book instead of paying for instalments.

«

The modern Dickens is probably on Substack anyway.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Your 44th and 60th birthdays mark a point of no return for your body. Unfortunately. CC-licensed photo by Shannon McGee 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. Ageing gracefully. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Reddit is profitable for the first time ever, with nearly 100 million daily users • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

Reddit just turned a profit for the first time. As part of its third-quarter earnings results released on Tuesday, the company reported a profit of $29.9m, along with $348.4m in revenue — a 68% increase year over year.

The company hasn’t been profitable at any point in its nearly 20-year history. Since going public, Reddit lost $575m during its first quarter on the market, but it decreased that loss to $10m last quarter, and is now finally in the green.

Reddit also grew to 97.2 million daily users over the past few months, marking a 47% increase from the same time last year. That number exceeded 100 million users on some days during the quarter, Reddit says.

Reddit’s advertising revenue grew to $315.1m, while “other” revenue reached $33.2m on account of “data licensing agreements signed earlier this year.” Both Google and OpenAI have cut deals with Reddit to train their AI models on its posts.

In a letter to shareholders, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman attributed the recent increase in users to the platform’s AI-powered translation feature. Reddit started letting users translate posts into French last year before expanding it to Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German. Now Huffman says Reddit plans to expand translation to over 30 countries through 2025.

«

So to cut a long story short: without being paid to let AI bots index its content, it would still have lost money. Being the most populous free site on the internet still isn’t enough to pay the bills.
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X algorithm feeds users political content—whether they want it or not • WSJ

Jack Gillum, Alexa Corse and Adrienne Tong:

»

New X users with interests in topics such as crafts, sports and cooking are being blanketed with political content and fed a steady diet of posts that lean toward Donald Trump and that sow doubt about the integrity of the Nov. 5 election, a Wall Street Journal analysis found.

The Journal created accounts on the social-media platform that only signaled an affinity for nonpolitical subjects, but a majority of the posts in their For You feed were partisan or related to the election. Kamala Harris’s campaign topped the list of most-seen accounts, with one post mocking pro-Trump hecklers at her rally in Wisconsin reaching all the Journal’s accounts. Ten of the other top 14 most-seen leaned right, including Trump’s, and overall, pro-Trump content appeared about twice as frequently as pro-Harris material.

“If that cringe, dingbat, zero-votes, airhead Kamala Harris is able to cheat enough to win the presidency—the USA is over,” wrote catturd2 in a post served to nearly all of the Journal’s newly created accounts. 

X has faced tumult since Elon Musk’s 2022 takeover but remains a place where tens of millions of Americans congregate and take in information. What users see has implications for the platform’s business, which has struggled with many big advertisers nervous about controversial content. X has said that politics accounts for only a small percentage of what users see, but the Journal’s analysis found that, at least for new users, political content is hard to escape.

…To gauge X’s role in recommending posts related to politics and the election, the Journal established its accounts with apolitical interests across five states, four of which are battlegrounds. The accounts signed on at regular intervals and scrolled through the platform’s For You timeline, an algorithmic feed. The Journal used a computer program to automatically categorize if and how the posts were political.

Less than a third of unique posts seen by the Journal’s accounts were political in nature. But X’s algorithm reupped political posts so often that they accounted for about half of the total posts on the accounts’ For You feeds.

«

Totally predictable. If the algorithm is pushing content that gets a reaction, it will push Trump content, not Harris content. It’s exactly the same as how fake news sites focused on Trump rather than Hillary Clinton in 2016.
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Elon Musk’s xAI in talks to raise funding valuing it at $40bn • WSJ

Berber Jin and Meghan Bobrowsky:

»

Elon Musk’s xAI is in talks with investors for a funding round that would value it around $40bn, according to people familiar with the matter, escalating the tech industry’s race to build advanced generative AI technology.

The startup was last valued at $24bn just a few months ago, when it raised $6bn in the spring.

xAI hopes to raise several billion dollars in the new funding round, one of the knowledgeable people said. The cash raised would be added to the $40bn valuation.

The funding discussions are in the early stages, meaning that terms could change or the talks could fall apart.

Representatives for xAI didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Silicon Valley’s biggest AI startups are raising cash at breakneck speed to fund the intensive computing power needed to develop and run their technology. Earlier this month, OpenAI raised $6.6bn at a $157bn valuation in what was one of the largest private funding rounds in US history. Perplexity, an AI search startup, is in talks to raise new funding that would more than double its valuation to $8bn, The Wall Street Journal recently reported.

They are competing not just with each other, but with huge public companies—like Google parent Alphabet and Meta Platforms—that are pouring profits from their existing businesses into AI.

“If you’re training a frontier model, you need a massive amount of compute,” Musk said while video-calling Tuesday into a conference in Saudi Arabia. 

«

When I first saw this, I thought it was funding for X, and thought that $40bn was wildly overpriced. But it’s for his latest distraction instead. In effect Musk seems to live the life of a venture capitalist, flitting from thing to thing, interfering here and there and leaving messes for other people to clean up.
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The exponential growth of solar power will change the world • The Economist

»

To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.

Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. Much of the world—including Africa, where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind.

To grasp that this is not some environmentalist fever dream, consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel.

As our essay this week explains, solar power faces no such constraint.

«

That data point about nuclear is amazing. But of course, as the objection that’s always raised goes, you need base load, and nuclear does deliver that.
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Nonlinear dynamics of multi-omics profiles during human ageing • Nature Aging

Xiaotao Shen, Michael Snyder et al (at Stanford University):

»

Aging is a complex process associated with nearly all diseases. Understanding the molecular changes underlying aging and identifying therapeutic targets for aging-related diseases are crucial for increasing healthspan. Although many studies have explored linear changes during aging, the prevalence of aging-related diseases and mortality risk accelerates after specific time points, indicating the importance of studying nonlinear molecular changes.

In this study, we performed comprehensive multi-omics profiling on a longitudinal human cohort of 108 participants, aged between 25 years and 75 years. The participants resided in California, United States, and were tracked for a median period of 1.7 years, with a maximum follow-up duration of 6.8 years.

The analysis revealed consistent nonlinear patterns in molecular markers of aging, with substantial dysregulation occurring at two major periods occurring at approximately 44 years and 60 years of chronological age.

«

Life begins at 40.. and then gets worse at 44 and at 60. Enjoy your moment, 43-year-olds and 59-year-olds!
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First stage of Australia’s biggest battery project switched on, well ahead of schedule • RenewEconomy

Giles Parkinson:

»

The first stage of what will be the biggest battery in Australia has been officially switched on, ahead of schedule and less than 18 months after the start of construction, and will now get to work shifting rooftop solar output from the middle of the day to the evening peak.

The 219 MW, 877 MWh stage 1 of Neoen’s giant Collie battery in Western Australia is the first instalment of what will be – by the end of next year – the country’s biggest battery installation with a total of 560 MW and 2,240 MWh.

The location in Collie is significant, because it is the home of the state’s last remaining coal fired generators, which are all due to close by 2030. The federal Opposition has identified the site as one of seven in Australia it wants to build nuclear reactors, but the grid capacity is already being taken up by the giant batteries that are being built there.

Apart from Neoen’s battery, state owned Synergy is building another 500 MW, 2,000 MWh battery just up the road – part of the state’s rapid switch to battery storage as a way of soaking up rooftop solar and injecting it back into the grid in the evening, and easing the exit of the remaining coal plants.

The Neoen Collie battery has actually been operating since October 1, and is the company’s first four hour battery, and its first in Western Australia’s main grid, known as the South West Interconnected System.

«

Batteries replacing coal? Sounds good.
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What is it like to be a smartphone? • New Cartographies

Nicholas Carr:

»

You would not be able to know what it’s like to be an AI by examining the 1s and 0s of its machine code any more than you’d be able to understand your own being by examining the As, Cs, Gs, and Ts of your genetic code. A conscious computer would likely be unaware of the routines of its software — just as we’re unaware of how our DNA shapes our body and being or even of the myriad signals that zip through our nervous system every moment. An intelligent computer may perform all sorts of practical functions, including taking our inputs and supplying us with outputs, without having any awareness that it is performing those functions. Its being may lie entirely elsewhere.

The Turing test, in all its variations, would also be useless in identifying an AI. It merely tests for a machine’s ability to feign likeness with ourselves. It provides no insight into the AI’s being, which, again, could be entirely separate from its ability to trick us into sensing it is like us. The Turing test tells us about our own skills; it says nothing about the character of the artificial being.

All of this raises another possibility. It may be that we are already surrounded by AIs but have no idea that they exist. Their beingness is invisible to us, just as ours is to them. We are both objects in the same place, but as beings we inhabit different universes. Our smartphones may right now be having, to borrow Nagel’s words, “experiences fully comparable in richness of detail to our own.”

Look at your phone. You see a mere tool, there to do your bidding, and perhaps that’s the way your phone sees you, the dutiful but otherwise unremarkable robot that from time to time plugs it into an electrical socket.

«

Good to see that Carr has set up a new home on the internet. Substack may be just another blogging platform, but it is where a lot of the people are, and so is he.
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Bots and fake accounts praise Azerbaijan, host of COP29 climate talks • The Washington Post

Maxine Joselow:

»

At least 1,800 bots on the social media site X are promoting the controversial choice of Azerbaijan, a major oil and gas producer, to host next month’s UN Climate Change Conference known as COP29, according to a new analysis shared exclusively with The Washington Post.

The analysis by Marc Owen Jones, an expert on disinformation at Northwestern University in Qatar, focused on roughly 2,800 X accounts that collectively sent around 10,800 tweets, retweets and replies about the conference between Oct. 17 and Oct. 24. It found that nearly three-quarters of the accounts were created this year and roughly two-thirds had activity patterns consistent with bots.

Jones did not determine who created the bots – defined as automated accounts that are programmed to do specific tasks, often more quickly than a human could manage.

The findings come as Azerbaijan seeks to use the summit to burnish its global image, despite international criticism of its alleged human rights violations and its planned expansion of production of natural gas, a top contributor to climate change.

“Azerbaijan is under scrutiny because of their position as a gas producer, so it makes sense that some entity would be trying to burnish their credentials by artificially amplifying positive messages about COP29,” Jones said.

A spokeswoman for Teneo, a public relations firm representing the COP29 presidency, did not respond to a request for comment.

Azerbaijani officials have argued that countries rich in oil and gas should not be blamed for harnessing their natural resources, and that they are uniquely positioned to lead the global shift to clean energy. The bots amplified posts making this argument in the lead-up to the conference, which is scheduled to start Nov. 11 in Baku.

«

The real puzzle is who the bots would be intended to influence. The choice of location has been made. Is the idea just that the noise on social media won’t be opponents of Azerbaijan? What difference will that make really, though?
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Microsoft accuses Google of ‘shadow campaign’ to influence cloud regulation in Europe • TechCrunch

Paul Sawers:

»

The European cloud wars are heating up. Microsoft has accused its old foe Google of waging a clandestine war against the Azure cloud company, to curry favor with policymakers and antitrust authorities in Europe.

In a blog post on Monday, Microsoft deputy general counsel Rima Alaily pre-empted the imminent launch of a new lobby group called the Open Cloud Coalition, which includes Google and several smaller cloud providers. Alaily called the outfit an “astroturf group organized by Google,” alleging that Google had “gone through great lengths to obfuscate its involvement, funding, and control” by positioning smaller European cloud providers as the face of the coalition.

“When the group launches, Google, we understand, will likely present itself as a backseat member rather than its leader,” Alaily writes. “It remains to be seen what Google offered smaller companies to join, either in terms of cash or discounts.”

The Coalition is being led by Nicky Stewart, public sector director of UK cloud hosting company Civo. A document for the initiative, published by Microsoft on Monday, shows that global “advisory firm” DGA Group was behind the recruitment drive. DGA confirmed to TechCrunch that the coalition will formally launch Tuesday (October 29). In answer to a query from TechCrunch, a DGA spokesperson added that it wouldn’t be divulging the funding makeup of the organization at the moment.

«

War of the astroturfers! There’s a lot of money washing around these lobby groups, though sometimes the backing might come from hedge funds which have an interest in seeing one or the other company’s share price move in some direction or other.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A study shows that no matter what the language, conversation transmits information at a predictable rate. CC-licensed photo by Simon Law 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. Verbatim. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Man who used AI to create child abuse images jailed for 18 years in UK • Financial Times

Stephanie Stacey:

»

A man who used artificial intelligence technology to create child sexual abuse imagery was sentenced to 18 years in prison on Monday, in a landmark prosecution over deepfakes in the UK.

Hugh Nelson, 27, from Bolton, pleaded guilty to a total of 16 child sexual abuse offences, including transforming everyday photographs of real children into sexual abuse material using AI tools from US software provider Daz 3D. He also admitted encouraging others to commit sexual offences on children.

At Bolton Crown Court, Judge Martin Walsh imposed an extended sentence on Nelson, saying he posed a “significant risk” of causing harm to the public. That means Nelson will not be eligible for parole until he has completed two-thirds of his sentence.

Advances in AI mean fake images have become more realistic and easier to create, prompting experts to warn about a rise in computer-generated indecent images of children.

Jeanette Smith, a prosecutor from the Crown Prosecution Service’s Organised Child Sexual Abuse Unit, said Nelson’s case set a new precedent for how computer-generated images and indecent and explicit deepfakes could be prosecuted.

“This case is one of the first of its kind but we do expect to see more as the technology evolves,” said Smith.

Greater Manchester Police found both real images of children and computer-generated images of child sexual abuse on Nelson’s devices, which were seized last June. 

The computer-generated images did not look exactly like real photographs but could be classified as “indecent photographs”, rather than “prohibited images”, which generally carry a lesser sentence. This was possible, Smith said, because investigators were able to demonstrate they were derived from images of real children sent to Nelson.

«

A landmark case. It’s been the case for decades that non-real, computer-created images could qualify as CSAM (child sexual abuse material), but this is a worrying first: using this software in this way.
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Fitness app Strava gives away location of Biden, Trump and other leaders, French newspaper says • AP via SFGate

Sylvie Corbet:

»

An investigation by French newspaper Le Monde found that the highly confidential movements of U.S. President Joe Biden, presidential rivals Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, and other world leaders can be easily tracked online through a fitness app that their bodyguards use.

But the US Secret Service told the newspaper that it doesn’t believe the protection it provides was in any way compromised.

Le Monde found that some US Secret Service agents use the Strava fitness app, including in recent weeks after two assassination attempts on Trump, in a video investigation released in French and in English. Strava is a fitness tracking app primarily used by runners and cyclists to record their activities and share their workouts with a community.

Le Monde also found Strava users among the security staff for French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin. In one example, Le Monde traced the Strava movements of Macron’s bodyguards to determine that the French leader spent a weekend in the Normandy seaside resort of Honfleur in 2021. The trip was meant to be private and wasn’t listed on the president’s official agenda.
Le Monde said the whereabouts of Melania Trump and Jill Biden could also be pinpointed by tracking their bodyguards’ Strava profiles.

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Information leakage really is a thing. The Secret Service may be correct in saying that it doesn’t compromise their protection, but letting people know where the location of Secret Service agents isn’t great either. (When I first saw the headline I thought “they wouldn’t use Strava”. Half-right, I guess.)
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On cryptocurrency, 63% of US adults not confident it’s safe, reliable • Pew Research Center

»

While only a minority of Americans have invested in cryptocurrency, a majority of those who have done so still have it.

Among those who have ever invested in, traded or used cryptocurrency:
•
61% say they currently have cryptocurrency, which is down from 69% in 2023
• 39% say they currently do not have any cryptocurrency, up from 31% in 2023.

By income: roughly half (51%) of adults in lower-income households who’ve used cryptocurrency say they no longer have any, outpacing those in middle-income (32%) or upper-income (36%) households who say the same.

These shares are similar to those measured in 2023. The only significant change is among upper-income cryptocurrency users: 36% have given up the currency, an increase from 21% in 2023.

The financial impact of cryptocurrency is still a concern for many users. When asked about their own investments, the largest shares say they’ve done worse (38%) or about as expected (37%). In comparison, 20% say their investments have done better than expected and 4% are unsure.

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The picture I get is of waning interest and people cutting their losses, while perhaps leaving a little behind just in case it ever comes back. (Or they’ve forgotten how to retrieve it.)
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Russia amplified hurricane disinformation to drive Americans apart, researchers find • AP News

David Klepper:

»

Russia has helped amplify and spread false and misleading internet claims about recent hurricanes in the United States and the federal government’s response, part of a wider effort by the Kremlin to manipulate America’s political discourse before the presidential election, new research shows.

The content, spread by Russian state media and networks of social media accounts and websites, criticizes the federal response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton, exploiting legitimate concerns about the recovery effort in an attempt to paint American leaders as incompetent and corrupt, according to research from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. The London-based organization tracks disinformation and online extremism.

In some cases, the claims about the storms include fake images created using artificial intelligence, such as a photo depicting scenes of devastating flooding at Disney World that never happened, researchers say.

The approach is consistent with the Kremlin’s long-standing practice of identifying legitimate debates and contentious issues in the U.S. and then exploiting them. Previous disinformation campaigns have harnessed debates about immigration, racism, crime and the economy in an effort to portray the US as corrupt, violent and unjust.

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Odd, because one side of the US presidential election also tries to portray the country in the same way. I guess it’s easier to push on an open door.
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A million people play this video wargame. So does the Pentagon. – WSJ

Daniel Michaels and Juanje Gómez:

»

Wargames—long the realm of top brass and classified plans—let strategists test varying scenarios, using different tactics and equipment. Now they are filtering down the ranks and out among analysts. Digitization, boosted by artificial intelligence, helps yield practical lessons in greater safety and at lower cost than staging military maneuvers would. Wargames can also explore hypotheticals that no exercise could address, such as nuclear warfare.

Proponents of wargames include Tim Barrick, a retired Marine colonel who is now wargaming director at Marine Corps University. He drills students using board games and computers. In one online exercise, he pushed eight Marine majors repeatedly through the same Pacific military engagement, using a program called Command: Professional Edition.

This software is unusual because it didn’t originate with a defence contractor or institute, as most wargames do. It is a simulation program built and marketed by gamers with almost no military background—and rooted in Tom Clancy novels. Users of all stripes have made it a surprise hit.

…Command’s British publisher, Slitherine Software, stumbled into popularity. The family business got started around 2000 selling retail CD-ROM games like Legion, involving ancient Roman military campaigns.

When Defense Department officials in 2016 first contacted Slitherine, which is based in an old house in a leafy London suburb, its father-and-son managers were so stunned they thought the call might be a prank. “Are you taking the piss?” J.D. McNeil, the father, recalled asking near the end of the conversation.

What drew Pentagon attention was the software’s vast, precise database of planes, ships, missiles and other military equipment from around the world, which allows exceptionally accurate modeling.

Former Air Force Air Mobility Command analyst Pete Szabo started using Command around 2017 to model military planes’ fuel consumption in battle scenarios. “It’s been a very powerful tool for us,” said the retired Air Force lieutenant colonel. Convincing his superiors to employ commercial, off-the-shelf gaming software, though, took some work, he recalled. “At first it was like, ‘Nooooo.’ ”

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‘Washington Post’ flooded by cancellations after Bezos’ non-endorsement decision NPR

David Folkeflik:

»

The Washington Post has been rocked by a tidal wave of cancellations from digital subscribers and a series of resignations from columnists, as the paper grapples with the fallout of owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to block an endorsement of Vice-President Kamala Harris for president.

More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions by midday Monday, according to two people at the paper with knowledge of internal matters. Not all cancellations take effect immediately. Still, the figure represents about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well. The number of cancellations continued to grow Monday afternoon.

A corporate spokesperson declined to comment, citing The Washington Post Co.’s status as a privately held company.

“It’s a colossal number,” former Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli told NPR. “The problem is, people don’t know why the decision was made. We basically know the decision was made but we don’t know what led to it.”

Chief executive and publisher Will Lewis explained the decision not to endorse in this year’s presidential race or in future elections as a return to the Post’s roots: It has for years styled itself an “independent paper.”

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The number is so big and the cancellations have been so sudden that the Post has begun emailing those who do it with cheap offers to encourage them back. The pretence that the Post has not made endorsements is false – it’s been doing it for more than 40 years.
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Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: comparable information rates across the human communicative niche • Science Advances

Christophe Coupé et al:

»

Language is universally used by all human groups, but it hardly displays undisputable universal characteristics, with a few possible exceptions related to pragmatic and communicative constraints. This ubiquity comes with very high levels of variation across the 7000 or so languages. For example, linguistic differences between Japanese and English lead to a ratio of 1:11 in their number of distinct syllables.

These differences in repertoire size result in large variation in the amount of information they encode per syllable according to Shannon’s theory of communication. Despite those differences, Japanese and English endow their respective speakers with linguistic systems that fulfil equally well one of the most important roles of spoken communication, namely, information transmission.

We show here that the interplay between language-specific structural properties (as reflected by the amount of information per syllable) and speaker-level language processing and production [as reflected by speech rate (SR)] leads languages to gravitate around an information rate (IR) of about 39 bits/s.

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Stunning finding: despite the colossal difference in the apparent speed at which people speak, the amount of information transmitted per second is constant. There’s no “better” language. One has to wonder: if there were, would everyone gravitate to it? And does this finding transfer to the written word too?
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Lost at the station? Follow the blind inventor’s navigation app • The Times

Nicholas Hellen:

»

It is, admittedly, one of life’s more trivial annoyances, but one that exasperates many. Why are smartphone navigation apps not accurate enough to show us which way to turn when getting off a bus, or leaving the train or Tube?

Despite their vast wealth and technical resources, Apple and Google leave users to pace back and forth until the blue locator dot on the phone gives a clue by moving decisively one way or the other.

It has taken a blind entrepreneur, Tom Pey, 71, to take the challenge seriously.

His service, an app called Waymap, tells users which way to turn, gives step-by-step directions, and is accurate to the nearest metre, even when there is no phone signal. It works underground and in crowds, when conventional services are notoriously unreliable, and even indoors.

The service is so accurate that it could, for example, guide people directly to their seat in a football stadium, find the cheese counter in a supermarket or help users avoid getting lost and missing an appointment in a hospital.

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Nice idea, because we always need these.
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Indian coal giants pushed for lax pollution rules while ramping up production • Climate Change News

Akshay Deshmane:

»

The Indian government weakened rules to curb pollution caused by its expanding coal industry after lobbying by top producers, even as it agreed internationally to phase down the use of coal, an investigation by Climate Home has found. 

India’s coal giants pushed back hard against environmental regulation meant to tighten up the disposal of fly ash – a byproduct of coal-fired power plants known to harm both humans and the environment if not managed properly.  

Letters sent by coal companies to the Indian government – and accessed by Climate Home News through freedom of information requests to government agencies – reveal lobbying efforts to weaken federal rules between 2019 and 2023.

The state-run firms involved were Coal India Limited (CIL), the world’s third-biggest coal mining company, and National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) Limited, one of the top 10 coal-fired power companies globally.   

Top management at the coal giants claimed their organisations would not be able to comply fully with the government regulations, aimed at controlling fly ash disposal after decades of public health impacts for local communities. Even after the rules were approved, the companies continued efforts to weaken them, in some cases successfully. 

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Fly ash puts more radioactivity into the environment than nuclear power stations. Hooray for lobbying, eh.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Savings of £3.6bn could be made by turning off 1.5 million streetlights which are no longer needed. CC-licensed photo by Stephen Bowler on Flickr.

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

‘It’s important to talk about online abuse’: Marianna Spring on trolls, conspiracy theorists – and positivity • The Guardian

Eva Wiseman:

»

In the first five months of 2023, the BBC received 14,488 messages abusive enough to be escalated by their system designed to detect hate; 11,771 of those, around 80%, were about Spring. Due to her reporting on conspiracy theories she’s regularly targeted with death threats and harassment, both on and offline. For a while, a man camped in a tent outside the BBC’s New Broadcasting House shouting “disinformation agent” in her face as she left work. Which means, while I can say Spring welcomes me with a hug and invites me into her front room for a conversation that will span murder and Kate Middleton and teenage boys, I can’t describe the city she lives in, or who she lives with, or if she lives with anybody else at all, or give any personal details that might put her in danger.

“It’s quite a big deal for me this,” she says nervously, as we settle on her sofa. “I keep so private, because I know that the world I investigate has attracted this group of trolls who will stop at nothing to figure out literally everything about me and then use it in some way.” She once mentioned that her dad was a doctor, which led to strangers suggesting this connection is why she is invested in killing people with the Covid vaccine. Once she shared a picture online of her family’s 19-year-old cat and she was accused noisily of animal cruelty. “They also called her Chairman Miaow,” Spring adds, “which was actually quite funny.”

…What might surprise readers, she says, is that most of the conspiracy theorists she’s met aren’t bad people. She sits with them at home, like we’re doing now. They have tea together. Biscuits. “Often they arrive at these places from really legitimate points. They really care, they’re very worried about other human beings who are being hurt, or powerful people doing bad stuff. But they are themselves being exploited by other people on social media. They’re being pushed that kind of content and others benefit from their attention.”

«

Amazingly, given what she goes through, she says she is “fundamentally hopeful about people”.
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The ‘Black Insurrectionist’ was actually white. The deception did not stop there • AP News

Brian Slodysko:

»

“Black Insurrectionist,” the anonymous social media persona behind some of the most widely circulated conspiracy theories about the 2024 election, can be traced to a man from upstate New York.

He’s also white.

With a profile photo of a Black soldier and the tagline “I FOLLOW BACK TRUE PATRIOTS,” the account on the platform X amassed more than 300,000 followers while posting dubious claims about Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Some were amplified by former President Donald Trump, his running mate Ohio Sen. JD Vance, and their Republican allies in Congress. The most salacious claims have come in the closing weeks of the campaign.

Last month, the account posted what Black Insurrectionist claimed was an affidavit from an ABC News employee, alleging Harris was given questions in advance of the network’s debate with Trump — which ABC News vigorously disputed. Trump approved, though, declaring, “I love the person.” More recently, Black Insurrectionist posted a baseless claim alleging inappropriate behavior between Walz and a student decades ago, a falsehood that U.S. intelligence officials said sprang from a Russian disinformation campaign.

The reach that the Black Insurrectionist account attained with assistance from Trump and his allies demonstrates the ease with which unverified information from dubious sources can metastasize online to shape public opinion.

«

People are so easily fooled by things like this: you attach a name to an account, you start pushing a certain sort of message, and they think it’s legitimate. Credit to Slodysko for getting to the bottom of this.

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‘We don’t know where the tipping point is’: climate expert on potential collapse of Atlantic circulation • The Guardian

Jonathan Watts:

»

The dangers of a collapse of the main Atlantic Ocean circulation, known as Amoc, have been “greatly underestimated” and would have devastating and irreversible impacts, according to an open letter released at the weekend by 44 experts from 15 countries. One of the signatories, Stefan Rahmstorf, an oceanographer and climatologist who heads the Earth system analysis department at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, explains here why he has recently upgraded his risk assessment of an Amoc breakdown as a result of global heating – and what that means for Britain, Europe and the wider world.

What is Amoc?
Amoc, or the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, is a system of ocean currents that brings heat into the northern Atlantic. Warm surface water from the tropics flows north and releases its heat in the subpolar Atlantic, south of Greenland and west of Britain and Ireland. Then it cools and sinks to a depth of between 2,000m to 3,000 metres before returning south as a cold current. Amoc is one of our planet’s largest heat transport systems, moving the equivalent of 50 times the human energy use, and it has a particularly strong impact on the climate in Europe, affects the ocean’s CO2 uptake and oxygen supply, as well as rainfall patterns in the tropics.

How is Amoc different to the Gulf Stream?
They are connected because the northwards flow of Amoc goes via the Gulf Stream, which is a warm and swift Atlantic Ocean current that originates in the Gulf of Mexico, then flows through the Florida straits, up the coast of the US and then across towards Europe. Amoc contributes just 20% to the Gulf Stream water flow but most of the heat transport, since Amoc’s deep return flow is very cold. It works like a central heating system.

What is happening to Amoc?
There are indications that Amoc has been slowing down for the last 60 or 70 years due to global heating. The most ominous sign is the cold blob over the northern Atlantic. The region is the only place in the world that has cooled in the past 20 years or so, while everywhere else on the planet has warmed – a sign of reduced heat transport into that region, exactly what climate computer models have predicted in response to Amoc slowing as a result of greenhouse gas emissions.

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Why? Because there’s more freshwater, which is less dense, and doesn’t sink. This looks more like when than if. And when that happens, it’s going to have dramatic effects on all sorts of things.
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As bird flu spreads, additional human infection is reported in Missouri • The New York Times

Apoorva Mandavilli and Emily Anthes:

»

A Missouri resident who shared a home with a patient hospitalized with bird flu in August was also infected with the virus, federal officials reported on Thursday.

But symptomatic health care workers who cared for the hospitalized patient were not infected, testing showed. The news eased worries among researchers that the virus, H5N1, had gained the ability to spread more efficiently among people.

Still, the number of human cases is rising in the United States. California said this week that it had confirmed 15 human cases of bird flu. Washington State has reported two poultry workers who are infected and five others presumed to be positive.

There are 31 confirmed cases in the country, but experts have said the figure is likely to be an undercount. “Additional cases may be found as investigations continue,” Dr. Nirav Shah, the principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a news briefing on Thursday.

“The identification of these additional cases of H5 in people with exposures to infected animals does not change CDC risk assessment for the general public, which continues to be low,” he said.

The poultry workers in Washington State were infected with a version of the virus that is distinct from the one circulating in dairy cattle, he added.

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Ehhh that last little remark doesn’t fill me with joy in this watching brief. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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The inside story of the Transport for London cyberattack • London Centric

Jim Waterson:

»

Publicly, the handling of the immediate aftermath of the attack was a mess. TfL initially put out a statement saying it was confident that no customer data had been compromised, before having to backtrack and admit that the bank details of around 5,000 Oyster card users who had applied for refunds had been accessed, although there is no indication anything was done with this data.

While most Londoners were still able to tap in and use transport services as usual, behind the scenes it was chaos. The booking system for Dial-a-Ride buses, used by the disabled, was also shut down, leaving vulnerable people in the lurch. Data on live tube times — fed into apps such as TfL Go and Citymapper — was taken offline.

Staff at TfL’s HQ were unable to log on to the IT network and the WiFi networks taken down. Office-based staff were sent to work from home for the whole of September, although most have now returned to the office. Every single TfL staff member was required to travel into the office to have their password and login details reset. Even now, many basic office tasks remain a struggle. Rebuilding and restoring these systems is a tedious, time-consuming task.

The biggest financial impact has been on the city’s neediest: the young, the old, and those with issues tapping in and out of stations.

People turning 60 have been unable to apply for Oyster cards giving them free travel. Individuals from all age groups have been unable to apply for legitimate refunds after being charged the maximum fare because they were unable to tap out at the end of a journey. Hundreds of thousands of sixth formers and new university students have been unable to apply for their 16+ Zip Oyster card, with the official TfL guidance being that they should make a note of each full-fare journey then reclaim the difference later in an as-yet-unclear manner.

When talking to London Centric, one TfL staffer involved in the recovery process cast doubt on the idea that every 17-year-old student in London is able to carefully note down their journeys and putting them in a spreadsheet for reclaiming at a later date.

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London Centric aims to be what the London Evening Standard has abandoned being – a publication with stories about and for Londoners.
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Britain to axe up to 1.5m lampposts • The Times

Nicholas Hellen:

»

Around 1.5 million of Britain’s 7.2 million lampposts could be removed to save money and reduce carbon emissions and replaced with lighting that will make it safer for pedestrians.

Under existing rules, there is no requirement to light pavements for pedestrians. They are only lit because light spills over from lampposts, which were principally installed to make it safer for motorists.

But today’s cars have such effective headlights that lampposts, which are generally 10m tall on A-roads and 6m tall on residential roads, are not necessary in many parts of Britain. Lampposts will remain in place in many locations where they are necessary, such as in cities where CCTV cameras rely on good lighting.

The first ones scheduled to be removed are in Hayton, a small Yorkshire village on the A1079 road between York and Hull. Starting in December, 30 street lights on each side of the main road are to be switched off and later removed. Around 300 more will be switched off and removed on a 19-mile (30km) stretch of the road.

Rather than plunge the village into complete darkness, the pavements that run alongside the road will be fitted with dedicated footway lights for the first time. On one side they will be on bollards with lights attached. On the other side, they will be on 3m-high columns, also with lights attached.

It is all part of a new strategy by the Department for Transport (DfT) aimed at fundamentally rethinking the purpose of spending £3.5bn each year on the 7.2 million street lights. Around £1bn goes on the energy bill, and the remainder is spent on maintaining them and replacing them at the end of their 40-year life cycle.

Karl Rourke, the street lighting service manager at East Riding of Yorkshire council, who is overseeing the project for Live Labs 2, a £30 million decarbonisation research and innovation programme funded by the DfT, said: “This is about common-sense lighting, not lighting removal at all costs.”

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This sustainable tiny home is made out of an old wind turbine • Fast Company

Grace Snelling:

»

The prototype, which features around 387 square feet (36 sq m) of interior space, is the product of a collaboration between the European renewable power company Vattenfall and the architecture collective Superuse Studios.

The turbine-turned-tiny house is also an experiment in material reuse that could become more critical as wind turbines across the globe reach the end of their life cycles.

Vattenfall has a few near-future sustainability goals. In 2023, 87% of Vattenfall’s electricity production came from renewable sources. The company aims to close that gap and become fossil-free by 2040, and it’s also thinking about how to make its existing material usage more circular. 

One major consideration for the company is its wind turbines, which typically have a lifespan of around 20 years. Once a turbine reaches the end of its utility, Vattenfall has to determine what will be done with its component materials.

That’s a tall order, considering that turbines typically stand at over 300 feet and include a nacelle (the control box that houses the generator, brakes, and other components) as well as three large blades. But the need to address that challenge is climbing. While there are no official decommissioning stats available, Vattenfall estimates that 5,000 wind turbines worldwide will need to be decommissioned annually over the next couple of years, as turbines across the globe begin to age out of their two-decade use window.

On a macro-level, that’s because the first boom of large-scale wind farming infrastructure is reaching the end of its life cycle. While the first electricity-generating wind turbine traces back to the late 19th century, large-scale wind farms have become much more commonplace over the past 30 years or so. In fact, global windpower grew from about 6,100 megawatts to 197,039 megawatts between 1996 and 2010. And that means that now is the time to “find better alternatives of making use of the resources that were developed, and making sure that we get the most out of them,” says Thomas Hjort, Vattenfall’s director of innovation.

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The photos suggest something that could just about suffice for a short holiday, but you might go a little mad living there for a long time: there’s only one window, which is the door.
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Who gets the TikTok in the divorce? The messy fight over valuable social media accounts • WSJ

Katherine Hamilton:

»

When Kat and Mike Stickler filed for divorce, their lawyers had a math problem.

Among the couple’s biggest assets was MikeAndKat, a channel on TikTok and YouTube in which they shared their lives with about four million followers. No one knew how to evenly split MikeAndKat between Mike and Kat. 

“The judge was like, ‘what?’” Kat said last month during a podcast interview with Northwestern Mutual. “It’s a whole new terrain.”

Social media pays the bills for millions of Americans. But making a living online is more financially complicated than working a 9-to-5. Influencers need an audience to win advertising deals, and changing what they post risks turning followers away. Couples who showcase their love life online face an existential threat to the family business when they split.  

For the lawyers charged with pinning a dollar value to the accounts to divide them fairly, it’s way harder than assessing a house or car. Fortunes can swing depending on which ex has the keys to the account. That was Kat’s argument in fighting for control of the TikTok channel. 

“If the TikTok account was left to me, it would keep growing, but if it wasn’t, it would stop,” said Kat, 29, in the podcast interview. 

She was right. Kat got the TikTok, changed that handle to KatStickler and now has almost 10.5 million followers. She has another three million across Instagram, YouTube and Facebook. The channels, where Kat posts skits impersonating her mother and snippets of her everyday life, have earned her enough to buy a condo and become a small business investor. Mike ended up with the YouTube account, which is now defunct. He now works in sales and declined to comment.

There are 27 million paid content creators in the US, and 44% of them say social media is their full-time job, consultant The Keller Advisory Group found. 

The big bucks don’t come from views or followers. Brands pay influencers to recommend a product or service to their audience. US advertisers paid content creators $26bn in 2023, according to Statista.

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Former OpenAI researcher says company broke copyright law • The New York Times

Cade MEtz:

»

“With a research project, you can, generally speaking, train on any data,” [former OpenAI staffer Suchir] Balaji said. “That was the mind-set at the time.”

Then OpenAI released ChatGPT. Initially driven by a precursor to GPT-4 and later by GPT-4 itself, the chatbot grabbed the attention of hundreds of millions of people and quickly became a moneymaker.

OpenAI, Microsoft and other companies have said that using internet data to train their A.I. systems meets the requirements of the “fair use” doctrine. The doctrine has four factors. The companies argue that those factors — including that they substantially transformed the copyrighted works and were not competing in the same market with a direct substitute for those works — play in their favor.

Mr. Balaji does not believe these criteria have been met. When a system like GPT-4 learns from data, he said, it makes a complete copy of that data. From there, a company like OpenAI can then teach the system to generate an exact copy of the data. Or it can teach the system to generate text that is in no way a copy. The reality, he said, is that companies teach the systems to do something in between.

“The outputs aren’t exact copies of the inputs, but they are also not fundamentally novel,” he said. This week, he posted an essay on his personal website that included what he describes as a mathematical analysis that aims to show that this claim is true.

Mark Lemley, a Stanford University law professor, argued the opposite. Most of what chatbots put out, he said, is sufficiently different from its training data.

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I’m not an expert on copyright law – especially US law – but Balaji’s essay doesn’t entirely persuade me. But I recognise that I’m biased; I already think the use is OK.
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X’s new block function will make people mad. That’s exactly what X wants • The Globe and Mail

Phoebe Maltz Bovy:

»

Social-media users block one another all the time, for many reasons unrelated to deterring obsessives. Maybe you’ve blocked someone because they made one annoying post, or were rude to your friend, or are associated with someone you dislike. Maybe you block everyone with certain politics. Or maybe you hit “block” by accident. It is an entirely normal part of online life to be blocked by people you not only have never harassed, but have never interacted with or even heard of.

But under the new order, you might come across a funny or wise post, reply in good faith or even with praise, and then learn that this person has blocked you. That would be maddening. Who wants that?

Which leads me to my theory. It’s not exes who benefit from this change; it’s X. The new block function will raise blood pressure – and thus drive engagement.

To be confronted with someone’s posts and the fact that they blocked you would feel like being taunted, even if it was by no means intended that way. As it currently stands, someone blocking you is a prompt to think about that person less, if indeed you knew who they were to begin with. It is a tranquility- and sanity-preserving system.

Muting, a function that already exists, allows for plausible deniability. Maybe someone didn’t get around to your doubtless brilliant retort because they were busy, not because they’ve hidden your posts because they think you’re a harmless bore. All the new form of blocking amounts to is a form of muting where the muted individual knows what’s up.

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This is a good point. Blocking as a silencing mechanism, in both directions, is underrated.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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.

Watermarking for AI content is the great promise of Google’s latest open source technology. CC-licensed photo by Early Novels Database 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. Not an AI. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google offers its AI watermarking tech as free open source toolkit • Ars Technica

Kyle Orland:

»

Back in May, Google augmented its Gemini AI model with SynthID, a toolkit that embeds AI-generated content with watermarks it says are “imperceptible to humans” but can be easily and reliably detected via an algorithm. Today, Google took that SynthID system open source, offering the same basic watermarking toolkit for free to developers and businesses.

The move gives the entire AI industry an easy, seemingly robust way to silently mark content as artificially generated, which could be useful for detecting deepfakes and other damaging AI content before it goes out in the wild. But there are still some important limitations that may prevent AI watermarking from becoming a de facto standard across the AI industry any time soon.

Google uses a version of SynthID to watermark audio, video, and images generated by its multimodal AI systems, with differing techniques that are explained briefly in this video. But in a new paper published in Nature, Google researchers go into detail on how the SynthID process embeds an unseen watermark in the text-based output of its Gemini model.

The core of the text watermarking process is a sampling algorithm inserted into an LLM’s usual token-generation loop (the loop picks the next word in a sequence based on the model’s complex set of weighted links to the words that came before it). Using a random seed generated from a key provided by Google, that sampling algorithm increases the correlational likelihood that certain tokens will be chosen in the generative process. A scoring function can then measure that average correlation across any text to determine the likelihood that the text was generated by the watermarked LLM (a threshold value can be used to give a binary yes/no answer).

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UNEP: New climate pledges need ‘quantum leap’ in ambition to deliver Paris goals • Carbon Brief

Zeke Hausfather:

»

There is a “massive gap between rhetoric and reality” that must be closed by new climate pledges being drafted under the Paris Agreement, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) says.

In the 15th edition of its annual “emissions gap” report, the UNEP calls for “no more hot air” as countries approach the February 2025 deadline to submit their next nationally determined contributions (NDCs) setting mitigation targets for 2035.

These NDCs “must deliver a quantum leap in ambition in tandem with accelerated mitigation action in this decade”, the report says. 

The report charts the “gap” between where emissions are headed under current policies and commitments over the coming decade, compared to what is needed to meet the Paris goal of limiting global warming to “well below” 2ºC and pursuing efforts to stay under 1.5ºC.

It highlights that greenhouse gas emissions reached record levels in 2023, up 1.3% from 2022, and rising notably faster than the average over the past decade. 

The report warns that both progress and ambition have “plateaued” in recent years, with relatively little of substance occurring since the pledges made at COP26 in 2021. And many countries are not even on track to meet their existing NDCs, with current policy projections from G20 nations exceeding NDC commitments by a collective 1bn tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions (in carbon dioxide equivalent, CO2e) in 2030.

Current policies put the world on track for 2.9ºC of warming by 2100, the report finds – though this could be reduced to 2.4-2.6ºC, if all existing NDCs are met.

«

We’ve been here so many times, and missed the target so many times. Unlike the ozone hole, climate change seems intractable because it’s in the hands of too many people who have a short-term interest in not taking notice of long-term effects.
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Q+A: Can ‘carbon border adjustment mechanisms’ help tackle climate change? • Carbon Brief

Carbon Brief Staff:

»

The EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) has been touted as a key policy for cutting emissions from heavy industries, such as steel and cement production.

By taxing carbon-intensive imports, the EU says it will help its domestic companies take ambitious climate action while still remaining competitive with firms in nations where environmental laws are less strict.

There is evidence that the CBAM is also driving other governments to launch tougher carbon-pricing policies of their own, to avoid paying border taxes to the EU.

It has also helped to shift climate and trade up the international climate agenda, potentially contributing to a broader increase in ambition.

However, at a time of growing protectionism and economic rivalry between major powers, the new levy has proved controversial.

Many developing countries have branded CBAMs as “unfair” policies that will leave them worse off financially, saying they will make it harder for them to decarbonise their economies.

Analysis also suggests that the EU’s CBAM, in isolation, will have a limited impact on global emissions. 

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In isolation, perhaps. But as part of something concerted?
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The Hindawi Files. Part 3: Wiley • James Claims

James Heathers:

»

Unlike many academic issues, where publishers will ignore manifest tomfoolery for months or years at a time — allowing whole journals to go tits-up, allowing peer review to get compromised, allowing mass fakery to infest their products, etc. — the 10-K form is a different ball of wax. The SEC is significantly more serious and powerful than an angry assistant professor sending impotent emails. Thus, financial disclosures are treated more seriously.

As a consequence, while companies can still play little games with various pieces of information on the 10-K form, the whole exercise is infused with a different level of heat and complexity. They also require auditing! Someone not too spiritually dissimilar to me has to analyze and approve them.

So: it was very interesting to me to read the Wiley 10-K forms for the entire period of this sorry saga, because at no point do they mention paper mills deliberately trying to defraud them and ruin their business model. Before, during, and after.

There is a section specifically for this: Part 1, Section 1A.

Wiley lists a lot of regular milquetoast shit…

…But at no point do they mention paper mills — an entire class of business as setting out to catastrophically destroy trust in their brand. There are a whole slew of consequences which are all very real and material:

• loss of academic reputation, hence lower submissions
• delisting of journals, hence lower reputation
• cost of clean-up if fully breached
• etc.

It’s hard to determine if other publishers typically do, because a lot of them aren’t American companies. However, recently Springer Nature went through their long-awaited IPO (that is, they are a private company and decided to become a public company). Disclosure requirements during the IPO process are similar to the 10-K requirements — you have to list threats.

«

Heathers has written two previous pieces about the Hindawi fraud, where the venerable science publisher John Wiley in January 2021 bought Hindawi, an open access publisher, for $298m, getting 200 journals. Which turned out to be utterly rotten. Science publishing has a problem, because Hindawi surely wasn’t alone.
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How one engineer beat the ban on home computers in socialist Yugoslavia • The Guardian

Lewis Packwood:

»

Very few Yugoslavians had access to computers in the early 1980s: they were mostly the preserve of large institutions or companies. Importing home computers like the Commodore 64 was not only expensive, but also legally impossible, thanks to a law that restricted regular citizens from importing individual goods that were worth more than 50 Deutsche Marks (the Commodore 64 cost over 1,000 Deutsche Marks at launch). Even if someone in Yugoslavia could afford the latest home computers, they would have to resort to smuggling.

In 1983, engineer Vojislav “Voja” Antonić was becoming more and more frustrated with the senseless Yugoslavian import laws. “We had a public debate with politicians,” he says. “We tried to convince them that they should allow [more expensive items], because it’s progress.” The efforts of Antonić and others were fruitless, however, and the 50 Deutsche Mark limit remained. But perhaps there was a way around it.

Antonić was pondering this while on holiday with his wife in Risan in Montenegro in 1983. “I was thinking how would it be possible to make the simplest and cheapest possible computer,” says Antonić. “As a way to amuse myself in my free time. That’s it. Everyone thinks it is an interesting story, but really I was just bored!” He wondered whether it would be possible to make a computer without a graphics chip – or a “video controller” as they were commonly known at the time.

Typically, computers and consoles have a CPU – which forms the “brain” of the machine and performs all of the calculations – in addition to a video controller/graphics chip that generates the images you see on the screen. In the Atari 2600 console, for example, the CPU is the MOS Technology 6507 chip, while the video controller is the TIA (Television Interface Adaptor) chip.

Instead of having a separate graphics chip, Antonić thought he could use part of the CPU to generate a video signal, and then replicate some of the other video functions using software. It would mean sacrificing processing power, but in principle it was possible, and it would make the computer much cheaper.

“I was impatient to test it,” says Antonić. As soon as he returned from his holiday, he put together a prototype – and lo and behold, it really worked. Thinking outside the box had paid off.

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Fabulous story, and a great read.
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Data (Use and Access) Bill factsheet: making lives easier • GOV.UK

»

Will the government provide mandatory digital identity cards?

• No, there are no plans to introduce national digital ID cards
• Using a digital identity will be voluntary. People will be in control of their data and who it is shared with
• People will still be able to prove their identity using physical documents if they choose
• If people choose to use digital identity products or services, we’re making sure they know which ones meet the government’s high standards.

Who will use digital identities?

Digital identities will not be mandatory. We are making it clear which digital identity products and services are secure and reliable, so you can make more informed decisions about which ones to trust with your personal data.

«

To which Big Brother Watch says:

»

Commenting on the publication of the Government’s new Data (Use and Access) Bill, Susannah Copson, Legal and Policy Officer at Big Brother Watch said:

“The Government’s new Data Bill threatens to set the UK years behind our international partners when it comes to safeguarding against the threats of new and emerging technologies such as AI. Our data protection laws are amongst the few legal protections we have against these threats, yet this Bill waters them down by simultaneously eroding privacy protections and restricting peoples’ control over their own data. Meanwhile, advancing with a digital ID framework with serious implications for privacy that lacks a legal right to opt-out poses a serious threat to individual autonomy and consent.”

«

Which leaves me rather unsure that BBW has got the right end of the stick. Both documents have the same publication date.
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Bluesky announces Series A to grow network of 13m+ users • Bluesky

“The Bluesky Team”:

»

Bluesky now exceeds 13 million users, the AT Protocol developer ecosystem continues to grow, and we’ve shipped highly requested features like direct messages and video. We’re excited to announce that we’ve raised a $15m Series A financing led by Blockchain Capital with participation from Alumni Ventures, True Ventures, SevenX, Amir Shevat of Darkmode, co-creator of Kubernetes Joe Beda, and others.

Our lead, Blockchain Capital, shares our philosophy that technology should serve the user, not the reverse — the technology being used should never come at the expense of the user experience.

…In addition, we will begin developing a subscription model for features like higher quality video uploads or profile customizations like colors and avatar frames. Bluesky will always be free to use — we believe that information and conversation should be easily accessible, not locked down. We won’t uprank accounts simply because they’re subscribing to a paid tier.

Additionally, we’re proud of our vibrant community of creators, including artists, writers, developers, and more, and we want to establish a voluntary monetization path for them as well. Part of our plan includes building payment services for people to support their favorite creators and projects. We’ll share more information as this develops.

«

“Series A” is usually ground floor funding. There are also third-party apps being built around it. If Bluesky can get enough momentum – a big if – then maybe it will become a serious alternative while what was Twitter turns into smoking ashes. (If they’re really serious, I’d suggest verified users as the obvious way to attract the group who will turn it into a “news happens here” app. Depends how much they think that matters.)
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Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity are promoting scientific racism in search results • WIRED

David Gilbert:

»

AI-infused search engines from Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity have been surfacing deeply racist and widely debunked research promoting race science and the idea that white people are genetically superior to nonwhite people.

Patrik Hermansson, a researcher with UK-based anti-racism group Hope Not Hate, was in the middle of a months-long investigation into the resurgent race science movement when he needed to find out more information about a debunked dataset that claims IQ scores can be used to prove the superiority of the white race.

He was investigating the Human Diversity Foundation, a race science company funded by Andrew Conru, the US tech billionaire who founded Adult Friend Finder. The group, founded in 2022, was the successor to the Pioneer Fund, a group founded by US Nazi sympathizers in 1937 with the aim of promoting “race betterment” and “race realism.”

Hermansson logged in to Google and began looking up results for the IQs of different nations. When he typed in “Pakistan IQ,” rather than getting a typical list of links, Hermansson was presented with Google’s AI-powered Overviews tool, which, confusingly to him, was on by default. It gave him a definitive answer of 80.

When he typed in “Sierra Leone IQ,” Google’s AI tool was even more specific: 45.07. The result for “Kenya IQ” was equally exact: 75.2.

Hermansson immediately recognized the numbers being fed back to him. They were being taken directly from the very study he was trying to debunk, published by one of the leaders of the movement that he was working to expose.

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Search has been a boon to the web, but its effect on the information ecosystem hasn’t been so great.
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US power grid added battery equivalent of 20 nuclear reactors in past four years • The Guardian

Oliver Milman:

»

Faced with worsening climate-driven disasters and an electricity grid increasingly supplied by intermittent renewables, the US is rapidly installing huge batteries that are already starting to help prevent power blackouts.

From barely anything just a few years ago, the US is now adding utility-scale batteries at a dizzying pace, having installed more than 20 gigawatts of battery capacity to the electric grid, with 5GW of this occurring just in the first seven months of this year, according to the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA).

This means that battery storage equivalent to the output of 20 nuclear reactors has been bolted on to America’s electric grids in barely four years, with the EIA predicting this capacity could double again to 40GW by 2025 if further planned expansions occur.

California and Texas, which both saw all-time highs in battery-discharged grid power this month, are leading the way in this growth, with hulking batteries helping manage the large amount of clean yet intermittent solar and wind energy these states have added in recent years.

The explosion in battery deployment even helped keep the lights on in California this summer, when in previous years the state has seen electricity rationing or blackouts during intense heatwaves that see air conditioning use soar and power lines topple due to wildfires. “We can leverage that stored energy and dispatch it when we need it,” Patti Poppe, chief executive of PG&E, California’s largest utility, said last month.

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Micro- and macro-generation (or -storage) really is the way to go. (The figure above assumes 1GW nuclear reactors, by the way; the Chernobyl No.4 reactor was a 3GW system.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Meet the norovirus, which causes the winter vomiting bug but might be a thing of the past thanks to a new mRNA vaccine. CC-licensed photo by NIAID 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. Holding it in. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Inside the US government-bought tool that can track phones at abortion clinics • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

On a computer screen a map shows the movements of smartphones around the globe. Zooming into an abortion clinic in the south of the United States, the online tool shows more than 700 red dots over the clinic itself, each representing a phone, and by extension, a person. 

The tool, called Locate X and made by a company called Babel Street, then narrows down to the movements of a specific device which had visited the clinic. This phone started at a residence in Alabama in mid-June. It then went by a Lowe’s Home Improvement store, traveled along a highway, went past a gas station, visited a church, crossed over into Florida, and then stopped at the abortion clinic for approximately two hours. They had only been to the clinic once, according to the data. 

The device then headed back, and crossed back over into Alabama. The tool also showed their potential home, based on the high frequency at which the device stopped there. The tool clearly shows this home address on its map interface.

In other words, someone had traveled from Alabama, where abortion is illegal after the June 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, to an abortion clinic in Florida, where abortion is limited but still available early in a pregnancy. Based on the data alone, it is unclear who exactly this person is or what they were doing, whether they were receiving an abortion themselves, assisting someone seeking one, or going to the clinic for another reason. But it would be trivial for US authorities, some of which already have access to this tool, to go one step further and unmask this or other abortion clinic visitors. 

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There’s going to be a terrific business in burner featurephones if Trump wins the election. It’ll be like a female casting of The Wire.
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Hacker plants false memories in ChatGPT to steal user data in perpetuity • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

When security researcher Johann Rehberger recently reported a vulnerability in ChatGPT that allowed attackers to store false information and malicious instructions in a user’s long-term memory settings, OpenAI summarily closed the inquiry, labeling the flaw a safety issue, not, technically speaking, a security concern.

So Rehberger did what all good researchers do: He created a proof-of-concept exploit that used the vulnerability to exfiltrate all user input in perpetuity. OpenAI engineers took notice and issued a partial fix earlier this month.

The vulnerability abused long-term conversation memory, a feature OpenAI began testing in February and made more broadly available in September. Memory with ChatGPT stores information from previous conversations and uses it as context in all future conversations. That way, the LLM can be aware of details such as a user’s age, gender, philosophical beliefs, and pretty much anything else, so those details don’t have to be inputted during each conversation.

Within three months of the rollout, Rehberger found that memories could be created and permanently stored through indirect prompt injection, an AI exploit that causes an LLM to follow instructions from untrusted content such as emails, blog posts, or documents. The researcher demonstrated how he could trick ChatGPT into believing a targeted user was 102 years old, lived in the Matrix, and insisted Earth was flat and the LLM would incorporate that information to steer all future conversations. These false memories could be planted by storing files in Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive, uploading images, or browsing a site like Bing—all of which could be created by a malicious attacker.

Rehberger privately reported the finding to OpenAI in May. That same month, the company closed the report ticket.

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Myanmar’s severe internet blackouts spur use of free VPNs, Starlink • Rest of World

Nu Nu Lusan:

»

In Myanmar’s northern Kachin state, Seng had struggled with internet shutdowns and low bandwidth since the military coup of 2021. Then came the blocks on social media platforms including Facebook. But it was the recent ban on virtual private networks (VPNs) that really hurt her online clothing business.

“When they banned Facebook, I hired someone to use a VPN and post on our Facebook page from an area where the internet was still accessible,” Seng, who asked to go by a single name to protect her identity, told Rest of World. “After they banned VPNs, I have to go to Yangon from time to time to try and upload photos and videos with any VPN that still works. Sometimes, I cannot do it.” 

There have been more than 300 internet shutdowns across the country since February 1, 2021, according to the Myanmar Internet Project, an advocacy group. Residents have also faced partial shutdowns of internet and mobile networks, bandwidth limitations, and social media blocks. Those in Sagaing region, and the states of Kachin and Shan, which have seen fierce fighting with resistance forces, are particularly affected.  

The junta has banned encrypted messaging apps such as Signal and WhatsApp, and restricted social media apps including Facebook, Instagram, and X. Only Telegram and TikTok — which the junta uses for propaganda and to dox activists — are accessible. The junta has also launched its version of YouTube, called MTube, and MySpace (not to be confused with the now largely defunct U.S. platform of the same name.)

…In areas with frequent communications blackouts, satellite-based internet has become the only option. Starlink, which is not yet licensed in Myanmar, is in high demand. Anti-junta forces have set up Starlink systems in dozens of areas in the Sagaing and Magway regions, and in Karenni and Kachin states. There may be more than 3,000 Starlink dishes in use in the country, the Myanmar Internet Project estimates.

“It’s the only viable solution for end users,” the spokesperson said. “Others are not end user-oriented, and are also expensive, and need a lot of technical expertise.”

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Myanmar had zero internet in 2010. Then too much in 2016. Now, not enough.
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Nicole Shanahan’s journey from tech royalty to pro-Trump wellness guru • The Washington Post

Elizabeth Dwoskin, Ashley Parker, Meryl Kornfield and Aaron Schaffer:

»

[Nicole] Shanahan described Trump as “a former enemy” turned “partner in a time of need,” who she thinks can bring her main concerns about technology, health and the environment to the White House.

Shanahan’s transformation has alarmed former associates in Silicon Valley, a number of whom are Democrats, startled by her newfound political prominence. Interviews with 34 people familiar with her rise, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive matters, along with court documents, photographs, text messages and screenshots paint a portrait of a chameleon who rose from a violent, hardscrabble childhood to join one of the most elite circles of the tech industry — doggedly pursuing influence.

Her tumultuous marriage to Brin — the world’s 10th-richest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index — is central to that rise. The marriage offered Shanahan entree to tech’s inner sanctum, but generated previously unreported personal drama that drove a wedge between Brin and Google co-founder Larry Page, as well as their friends and families, according to three people who know both men. When the divorce was finalized last year, Shanahan won what is likely one of the largest divorce settlements in U.S. history — as much as $1bn, according to Forbes — and the means to pursue her political ambitions.

Within a year, she had bankrolled Kennedy’s quixotic presidential campaign. Now, those in the elite Silicon Valley circles she once ran in say they fear she will use her piece of the Google fortune to tip the razor-thin race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, or push unverified medical views to a broad audience.

…Shanahan became aware of reporting for this article when she and [would-be presidential hopeless Robert] Kennedy were still campaigning. In June, she texted an associate who had been contacted by The Post to suggest a deal: Shanahan said she would “pay your friend” — The Post reporter — “half a million dollars to be a whistleblower” to expose people Shanahan claimed were spreading false information about her.

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Apparently the $500k was offered to Elizabeth Dwoskin, who describes it as “one of my stranger experiences in journalism”, which makes me wonder about other strange experiences she’s had that can compare to that.

Anyhow, billionaires considered harmful.
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Manchester Arena bomb survivors win conspiracy harassment case • BBC News

Tom Mullen, Ewan Gawne and Marianna Spring:

»

Two survivors of the Manchester Arena bombing have won a High Court harassment case against a former television producer who claimed the attack was staged.

Martin Hibbert and his daughter Eve sued Richard Hall for harassment and data protection in what was the first such case launched against a conspiracy theorist in the UK.

Mr Hibbert was left with a spinal cord injury and Ms Hibbert suffered severe brain damage as a result of the attack at the venue on 22 May 2017.

Mr Hall had told the court his actions, which included filming Eve outside her home, were in the public interest as a journalist and claimed “millions of people” had “bought a lie” about the attack.

Twenty-two people were killed and hundreds more injured when Salman Abedi detonated a homemade rucksack-bomb in the foyer of the venue as thousands of people left an Ariana Grande concert.

The court was told the Hibberts were among those standing nearest to the bomber at the time of the blast. Across several videos and a book, Mr Hall claimed several of those who died were living abroad or were dead before the attack and told the court he believed that no-one was “genuinely injured” in the bombing.

In a 63-page judgment, Mrs Justice Steyn said the Hibberts had won their harassment claim, but said she would not decide the data protection claim at this stage.

The judge said she found Hall to be “unreflective and insensitive to the level of distress likely to be caused by his persistent attempts to discredit what those who have suffered so tragically in the Attack say about it”.

«

Good to know that conspiracy theorists can get jugged on both sides of the Atlantic.
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Doctors trial world’s first mRNA vaccine against vomiting bug norovirus • The Guardian

Nicola Davis:

»

Doctors have begun trialling the world’s first mRNA vaccine against the vomiting bug norovirus in the hope the jab could bring huge health and economic benefits.

Norovirus causes sickness and diarrhoea and can spread very rapidly between people who are in close contact, with outbreaks often occurring in hospitals, care homes, schools and nurseries.

While most people recover within two to three days, the virus can be serious, particularly for the very young, elderly or people with a weakened immune system.

Dr Patrick Moore, a GP and national chief investigator for the trial in the UK, said that at present there were no approved vaccines for norovirus in the world, while people who become very ill were simply given intravenous fluids.

Moore added that the burden of the bug was huge, with about 685m cases and 200,000 deaths globally each year. In the UK it is thought there are about 4m norovirus cases annually, with 12,000 hospitalisations a year in England alone.

“In the UK, norovirus is estimated to cost about £100m annually to the NHS [and] if you take into account lost earnings, that’s about £300m,” Moore said.

Called Nova 301, the phase 3 clinical trial is to run for two years, and will enrol 25,000 adults – with a focus on those over the age of 60 – from countries including Japan, Canada and Australia.

«

The first mRNA vaccine trials were in 2001, but things have really accelerated since then – particularly with Covid.
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Energy storage is a solved problem • PV magazine International

The International Solar Energy Society wants you to know:

»

As fossil fuel power stations close due to old age and competition from low-cost solar and wind, the gap must be filled by large-scale storage. When the amount of solar and wind energy is less than about 50%, batteries with a storage capacity of a few hours are preferred. Eventually, large energy storage is required, to cover overnight and several days of cloudy weather. This is the role of PHES [pumped hydro energy storage – dams, in common parlance].

Hybrid storage systems that combine batteries and PHES are superior to either technology alone. Batteries are relatively inexpensive for storage power ($/GW) but are expensive for energy storage ($/GWh). PHES is more expensive than batteries for storage power ($/GW) but much cheaper for energy storage ($/GWh). A hybrid system has both cheap energy (GWh) and cheap power (GW).

In a hybrid system, storage can charge storage. A large PHES reservoir can trickle charge batteries 24/7 for a week during a calm and cloudy period. For example, a PHES system with 350 GWh of energy storage and 2 GW of generation power can trickle charge twelve 4-hour batteries (48 GWh) every day for a week. Such a hybrid system effectively has energy storage of 370 GWh and storage power of 12 GW. A battery-only system would run out of energy after the first day, while a PHES-only system would be underpowered.

An additional advantage is that the batteries can harvest negative prices for four hours around noon with a power of 12 GW, and trickle charge a large but low-power PHES system for the next 20 hours – and do this every day for a week before the PHES system is full. In other words, the hybrid system harvests peak power prices at 12 GW and is recharged at negative prices.

The Global Pumped Hydro Energy Storage Atlas lists 820,000 sites with combined energy storage of 86 million GWh. This is equivalent to the effective storage in about 2,000 billion electric vehicles, which is far more storage than the world will ever need.

«

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Ex NYT Editor Bill Keller on how to repair public trust in media • Bloomberg (free link)

Bill Keller:

»

Trust in the media did not evaporate; it fractured. A YouGov survey in May found that for the most part, Americans profess some confidence in the news sources they personally consume, much as voters who regard Congress with contempt nonetheless keep reelecting their incumbent lawmakers. Democrats are more likely to trust what we have come to refer to as “mainstream media” — the major daily newspapers, the TV networks, CNN and NPR, et al. — while Republicans, with Donald Trump serving as their cheerleader, scorn those outlets as “fake news” and rely mostly on the smug right-wingers of Fox and Newsmax. Young readers are more likely than older readers to get their news from social media, and more likely to trust it.

What’s missing in this atomized world is a common pool of information. Another survey, this one by the Pew Research Center in 2019, found Americans so divided that they “not only disagree over plans and policies, but also cannot agree on the basic facts.”

The mistrust feeds — and feeds on — the extreme polarization of our politics.

Lee Rainie, a Pew veteran and director of the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University in North Carolina, says many Americans fear a collapse of what he calls the “civic information ecosystem” — the shared understanding and values that enable a functioning democracy. Writing in the journal Daedalus, Rainie said: “Alarmingly, 73% of Americans now believe that political partisans do not operate in a shared reality, and a similar proportion of adults believe the party partisans do not occupy a shared moral universe.”

«

It’s certainly brave of Keller to think that there’s a way back, but I do tend to feel that once the Disinformer-in-Chief passes out of the public eye, things have a chance to reset. But only a chance.
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Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode. We didn’t • The Verge

Nilay Patel:

»

I couldn’t have the CEO of Intuit on [The Verge’s podcast, Decoder] without asking about tax reform in the United States. Individual income taxes are more complicated in the US than in almost any other developed economy, and Intuit has been lobbying hard since the late 1990s to keep it that way to protect TurboTax, spending nearly $3.8m in lobbying in 2023 alone. There’s been extensive reporting about it. This lobbying has had mixed results: truly free online direct filing with the IRS began as a pilot program this year and is expanding to be available for more than half the US population in 2025.

It’s also not just lobbying: in 2022, a coalition of attorneys general from all 50 states got Intuit to agree to a $141m settlement that required Intuit to refund low-income Americans who were eligible for free filing but were redirected to paid products. In 2023, the FTC found that TurboTax’s “free” marketing was willfully deceptive, and after the agency won an appeal early this year, Intuit was ordered to stop doing it.

I asked about that, and Sasan disagreed with me, and we went back and forth for a few minutes on it. It’s Decoder; we have exchanges like this all the time, and I didn’t think anything of it.

But then I got a note from Rick Heineman, the chief communications officer at Intuit, who called the line of questioning and my tone “inappropriate,” “egregious,” and “disappointing” and demanded that we delete that entire section of the recording. I mean, literally — he wrote a long email that ended with “at the very least the end portion of your interview should be deleted.”

We don’t do that here at The Verge.

«

Absolute idiocy on the part of Intuit, which obviously laid itself open to being roasted. Job done!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Life for gigging musicians hasn’t got particularly easier of late. They’re real members of the “precariat”, a new book suggests. (But the Arctic Monkeys aren’t.) CC-licensed photo by Bleeding Mole 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 8 links for you. Power chord. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Meta suspends accounts tracking Trump, Bezos jets, echoing Musk’s X • The Washington Post

Drew Harwell:

»

The tech giant Meta this week suspended Instagram and Threads accounts tracking the flights of private jets owned by Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, former president Donald Trump and other public figures, echoing a move by Elon Musk’s X to crack down on such accounts that drew criticism over social networks’ suppression of public data.

The accounts drew from publicly broadcast flight data to post the takeoff and landing airports of planes used by Zuckerberg, Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) alongside estimates of the carbon dioxide emissions from each trip.

The posts do not specify who was on the plane, the purposes of the flight or where the passengers traveled next. (Bezos, Amazon’s founder, owns The Washington Post.)

Meta’s suspensions appear to mimic X’s move in late 2022 to delete X accounts tracking Musk and other private-jet owners. The platform implemented the policy even after Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” had pledged to keep the accounts online.

Andy Stone, a spokesman for Meta, which also owns Facebook, said that the accounts were disabled for “violating our privacy policy,” that they posed a “risk of physical harm of individuals,” and that the decision followed the recommendation of Meta’s independent Oversight Board.

But the board’s decision, from 2022, offered nonbinding advice only on the sharing of “private residential information,” such as home addresses, and makes no mention of flight or travel data.

It remains unclear under what guidelines an account could post information about a public figure’s travel. Journalists and researchers have frequently used flight data to cover influential newsmakers, investigate government misconduct and report on current events.

«

Very strange move. Temporary, only around the election, perhaps, out of an abundance of care? If they’re violating the privacy policy now, they’ve been doing that for a very long time without anyone taking action.
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Tech critics want a Google exec punished for deleted chats • The Verge

Lauren Feiner:

»

Three advocacy groups are trying to amp up the pressure on Google for allegedly destroying company records. The American Economic Liberties Project, Check My Ads, and the Tech Oversight Project are urging the State Bar of California to investigate Kent Walker, Google’s President of Global Affairs and a member of the Bar. They claim Walker “coached” the company “to engage in widespread and illegal destruction of records relevant to multiple ongoing federal trials.”

In a letter shared exclusively with The Verge, the groups point to a 2008 memo Walker sent to employees while he served as general counsel. The so-called Walker Memo was highlighted in the Department of Justice’s recent antitrust trial, one of multiple cases where Google has been accused of obscuring potentially incriminating documents. The memo referenced “several significant legal and regulatory matters” Google faced at the time as the rationale for a new policy limiting employee chat message retention. The DOJ claimed it marked a turning point for company secrecy — as Google changed the default setting on chats from “history on” to “history off.”

In a legal filing in the ad tech case, Google dismissed the memo as an old document irrelevant to its evidence retention policies for that case. “[T]he memo was not only written 11 years before DOJ opened its investigation or any duty to preserve existed, but also instructs employees to take steps to preserve relevant Chat messages if they are subject to a litigation hold. That is the opposite of an intent to destroy evidence.” 

But Google employees “understood the goal was to remove information that might be discoverable at trial,” the advocacy groups write in their letter to the Bar. Walker also allegedly advised the company implement a “communicate with care” policy, which instructed employees to do things like gratuitously invoke attorney-client privilege on sensitive emails.

«

It’s quite the allegation, but there are plentiful examples from the latest two Google antitrust cases in the US where chats have been erased and the privilege was unnecessarily invoked.
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How to make Google’s [ad] network business a force for good • AdExchanger

Richard Kramer of Arete Research:

»

Throughout history, technology has made industries more efficient. But not ad tech. Why, for example, can we trade stocks for fractions of a% while digital ads cost 50% of spend? Ad tech’s murky supply chain is causing publishers around the world to struggle at best and fail at worst.

Meanwhile, every new revelation from the category of truth tellers we call “forensic ad tech,” including Adalytics, Human and Sincera, sparks indignation and generates fiery headlines only to fade away shortly after.

Yet a US government-mandated breakup of the “ad tech stack” would likely have unintended consequences. Most publishers principally rely on revenue from Google-placed ads. Lawyers may imagine ways to pick apart tech features, but most publishers lack the technical expertise to implement them. There’s a reason so many publishers integrate Google’s products as a default.

I’d argue the best way to unpick this Gordian Knot is to change the incentives and for Google to spin out its entire network unit as a public benefit “B Corp” with capped margins.

Why would Google and its shareholders, which have fiercely resisted any curtailment, consider this plan? There are five very good reasons.

«

He suggests: PR; not getting caught up with antitrust (unlike Microsoft), useful to the wider web, not a great business for Google and could end up sending extra money to publishers.
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Streaming subscription fees have been rising while content quality is dropping • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

Subscription fees for video streaming services have been on a steady incline. But despite subscribers paying more, surveys suggest that viewers are becoming less satisfied with what’s available to watch.

At the start of 2024, the industry began declaring the end of Peak TV, a term coined by FX Networks chairman John Landgraf, refers to an era of rampant content spending that gave us shows like The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones. For streaming services, the Peak TV era meant trying to lure subscribers with original content that was often buoyed by critical acclaim and/or top-tier actors, writers, and/or directors. However, as streaming services struggle to reach or maintain profitability, 2024 saw a drop in the number of new scripted shows for the first time in at least 10 years, FX Research found.

Meanwhile, overall satisfaction with the quality of content available on streaming services seems to have declined for the past couple of years. Most surveys suggest a generally small decline in perceived quality, but that’s still perturbing considering how frequently streaming services increase subscription fees. There was a time when a streaming subscription represented an exclusive ticket to viewing some of the best new TV shows and movies. But we’ve reached a point where the most streamed TV show last year was Suits—an original from the USA Network cable channel that ended in 2019.

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The study is by TiVo. What are we at after Peak TV, then? Doldrums TV?
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Meta tests facial recognition for spotting ‘celeb-bait’ ads scams and easier account recovery • TechCrunch

Natasha Lomas:

»

Meta is expanding tests of facial recognition as an anti-scam measure to combat celebrity scam ads and more broadly, the Facebook owner announced Monday.

Monika Bickert, Meta’s VP of content policy, wrote in a blog post that some of the tests aim to bolster its existing anti-scam measures, such as the automated scans (using machine learning classifiers) run as part of its ad review system, to make it harder for fraudsters to fly under its radar and dupe Facebook and Instagram users to click on bogus ads.

“Scammers often try to use images of public figures, such as content creators or celebrities, to bait people into engaging with ads that lead to scam websites where they are asked to share personal information or send money. This scheme, commonly called ‘celeb-bait,’ violates our policies and is bad for people that use our products,” she wrote.

“Of course, celebrities are featured in many legitimate ads. But because celeb-bait ads are often designed to look real, they’re not always easy to detect.”

The tests appear to be using facial recognition as a backstop for checking ads flags as suspect by existing Meta systems when they contain the image of a public figure at risk of so-called “celeb-bait.”

«

There are plenty of examples of this stuff on X, if they need to do some training.
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Why is Apple so bad at marketing its TV shows? • Fast Company

Joe Berkowitz:

»

Ever since its launch in 2019, Apple TV+ has been carving out an identity as the new home for prestige shows from some of Hollywood’s biggest names—the kind of shows that sound natural coming out of Jimmy Kimmel’s mouth in monologue jokes at the Emmys. While the company never provides spending details, Apple is estimated to have spent at least $20bn recruiting the likes of Reese Witherspoon, M. Night Shayamalan, and Harrison Ford to help cultivate its award-worthy sheen. For all the effort Apple has expended, and for all the cultural excitement around Ted Lasso during its three-season run, the streaming service has won nearly 500 Emmys . . . while attracting just 0.2% of total TV viewing in the U.S. 

No wonder the company reportedly began reining in its spending spree recently. (Apple did not reply to a request for comment.)

“It seems like Apple TV wants to be seen as a platform that’s numbers-agnostic,” says Ashley Ray, comedian, TV writer, and host of the erstwhile podcast TV I Say. “They wanna be known for being about the creativity and the love of making TV shows, even if nobody’s watching them.”

The experience of enjoying a new Apple TV+ series can often be a lonely one. Adventurous subscribers might see an in-network ad about something like last summer’s Sunny, the timely, genre-bending Rashida Jones series about murderous AI, and give it a shot—only to find that nobody else is talking about it in their social media feeds or around the company Keurig machine. Sure, the same could be said for hundreds of other streaming series in the post-monoculture era, but most streaming companies aren’t consistently landing as much marquee talent for such a limited library. (Apple currently has 259 TV shows and films compared to Netflix’s nearly 16,000.)

How is it possible for a streaming service to have as much high-pedigree programming as Apple TV+ does and so relatively few viewers, despite an estimated 25 million paid subscribers? How can shows starring Natalie Portman, Idris Elba, and Colin Farrell launch and even get renewed without ever quite grazing the zeitgeist? How does a show set in the same Monsterverse as Godzilla vs. Kong, and starring Kurt Russell and his roguishly charming son, not become a monster-size hit? 

For many perplexed observers, the blame falls squarely on Apple’s marketing efforts, or seeming lack thereof.

«

And, as the article points out, how is a company that people think of as being great at marketing so bad at.. marketing?
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The decline of the working musician • The New Yorker

Hua Hsu reviews Franz Nicolay’s new book called “Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music”:

»

Nicolay makes these gangs sound like a lot of fun, while also demystifying them. Some band people prefer hierarchy and assertive decision-makers; others aspire to a more chaotic kind of democracy. Some envy the star; others feel sorry for him. Jon Rauhouse, a musician who tours with the singer Neko Case, is glad not to be the one that interviewers want to speak with—he’s free to “go to the zoo and pet kangaroos.” Band people are often asked to interpret cryptic directives in the studio. The multi-instrumentalist Joey Burns recalls one singer who, in lieu of instructions, would tell him stories about the music—he might be told to imagine a song they were working on as “a cloud in the shape of an elephant, and it’s trying to squeeze through a keyhole to get into this room.”

Many musicians prefer the “emotional life” of the band to be familial, rather than seeing their bandmates as “a handful of co-workers.” And despite the collective dream that brings artists together, the critic and theorist Simon Frith argues, “the rock profession is based on a highly individualistic, competitive approach to music, an approach rooted in ambition and free enterprise,” which feeds perfectly into a quintessentially American zero-to-hero dream. This, Nicolay suggests, is what makes the prospect of, say, “a hypothetical union,” which might negotiate fees with a club on behalf of musicians, unimaginable.

«

Be right back, just getting the music in the form of an elephant-shaped cloud into the room via the keyhole. But musicians now are also part of the “precariat” – people on the edge of making a living.
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The vibes are off: did Elon Musk push academics off Twitter? • Cambridge Core

James Bisbee and Kevin Munger:

»

This article addresses a narrower empirical question: What did Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform mean for this academic ecosystem? Using a snowball sample of more than 15,700 academic accounts from the fields of economics, political science, sociology, and psychology, we show that academics in these fields reduced their “engagement” with the platform, measured by either the number of active accounts (i.e., those registering any behavior on a given day) or the number of tweets written (including original tweets, replies, retweets, and quote tweets).

We further tested whether this decrease in engagement differed by account type; we found that verified users were significantly more likely to reduce their production of content (i.e., writing new tweets and quoting others’ tweets) but not their engagement with the platform writ large (i.e., retweeting and replying to others’ content).

«

There’s plenty of data to back them up, but it also strengths a vague feeling you may have had that there’s less academic discourse on Twitter nowadays.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The producers of Blade Runner 2049 are suing Elon Musk over his robotaxi launch imagery. Too similar? CC-licensed photo by Rikard Auregård 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. POB, RTB. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

‘Operating in the Stone Age’: NHS staff’s daily struggle with outdated tech • Financial Times

Laura Hughes:

»

In the paediatric centre at one of London’s largest hospitals, doctors are confounded each day by a ward computer that is not connected to a printer.

The computer is used for managing the daily list of patients. Doctors can only access and update the list, using one shared account.

So twice a day, two doctors on the ward said one of them had to log in to this computer, update the patient list, send the list to themselves via NHS email, and then log in to another nearby computer to print it off for the team.

“I am at a top London hospital and yet at times I feel as though we are operating in the Stone Age,” said one paediatrician on the ward.

Tackling the frustrating delays caused by outdated technology is one of health secretary Wes Streeting and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s core missions, having vowed to shift the service “from an analogue to a digital NHS”.

The monumental task of moving the world’s largest publicly funded health service into the digital age is not lost on doctors working on the frontline of the NHS.

While many sectors of the economy have been “radically reshaped” by technology in recent years, a landmark report into the state of the health service in England last month concluded that the NHS stood “in the foothills of digital transformation”. 

«

There are multiple challenges to improve the NHS: outdated technology, insufficient management, insufficient data sharing. The public has been invited to offer suggestions. They are mad.
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Inside the mind of an AI girlfriend (or boyfriend) • WIRED

Will Knight:

»

Last month, OpenAI unveiled an ambitious new language model capable of working through challenging problems with a simulated kind of step-by-step reasoning. OpenAI says the approach could be crucial for building more capable AI systems in the future.

In the meantime, perhaps a more modest version of this technology could help make AI girlfriends and boyfriends a bit more spontaneous and alluring.

That’s what Dippy, a startup that offers “uncensored” AI companions is betting. The company recently launched a feature that lets users see the reasoning behind their AI characters’ responses.

Dippy runs its own large language model, which is an open source offering fine-tuned using role-play data, which the company says makes it better at improvising when a user steers a conversation in a particular direction.

Akshat Jagga, Dippy’s CEO, says that adding an additional layer of simulated “thinking”—using what’s known as “chain-of-thought prompting”—can elicit more interesting and surprising responses, too. “A lot of people are using it,” Jagga says. “Usually, when you chat with an LLM, it sort of just gives you a knee-jerk reaction.”

Jagga adds that the new feature can reveal when one of its AI characters is being deceptive, for instance, which some users apparently enjoy as part of their role-play. “It’s interesting when you can actually read the character’s inner thoughts,” Jagga says. “We have this character that is sweet in the foreground, but manipulative in the background.”

I tried chatting with some of Dippy’s default characters, with the PG settings on because otherwise they are way too horny. The feature does add another dimension to the narrative, but the dialog still seems, to me, rather predictable, resembling something lifted from a bad romance novel or an overwrought piece of fan fiction.

«

*supremely bored voice* You don’t say. I wonder what sort of content it might have been trained on.

More concerning: what sort of people are going to use these things? What’s their relationship with humanity?
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Inside the bungled bird flu response, where profits collide with public health • Vanity Fair

Katherine Eban:

»

on March 25, the USDA lab confirmed that dairy cows in Texas and Kansas had indeed been sickened by a form of bird influenza known as H5N1. Though versions of the so-called bird flu virus have circled the globe for almost two decades, spreading to species ranging from pelicans and polar bears to sea lions and skunks, the announcement stunned the scientific and agricultural communities. “Every honest virologist will tell you: We did not see this coming,” says Kimberly Dodd, dean of Michigan State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine.

“We plan for every agricultural health emergency, but all of our red teaming missed this” scenario: an agricultural outbreak that potentially imperils public health and leaves cows sick but mostly still standing, says David Stiefel, a former national security policy analyst for the USDA.

With continued spread amongst cows, or to another “mixing-vessel” species like pigs, the virus “could mix and match, then you get a whole new genetic constellation,” says Jürgen Richt, regents and university distinguished professor at Kansas State University. Experts are hesitant to speculate about what could happen if the virus were to begin more widely infecting humans, for fear of spreading panic, but the toll could, in the worst case, dwarf that of COVID-19. If the virus “infects a person infected with a human flu strain, and something comes out that is reassorted and adapted to humans? I don’t even want to imagine,” Richt says. “Not good.”

The Institute for Disease Modeling, a research institute within the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has estimated that a global flu pandemic could kill close to 33 million people within six months.

At that existential moment back in March, when the virus was first detected in cows, veterinarians involved in the response had every expectation that a well-honed network of experts, led by USDA scientists, would immediately rev to life.

But it didn’t. “Nobody came,” says one veterinarian in a Western state. “When the diagnosis came in, the government stood still. They didn’t know what to do, so they did nothing.”

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Very weary watching brief.
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ByteDance intern fired for planting malicious code in AI models • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

After rumours swirled that TikTok owner ByteDance had lost tens of millions after an intern sabotaged its AI models, ByteDance issued a statement this weekend hoping to silence all the social media chatter in China.

In a social media post translated and reviewed by Ars, ByteDance clarified “facts” about “interns destroying large model training” and confirmed that one intern was fired in August.

According to ByteDance, the intern had held a position in the company’s commercial technology team but was fired for committing “serious disciplinary violations.” Most notably, the intern allegedly “maliciously interfered with the model training tasks” for a ByteDance research project, ByteDance said.

None of the intern’s sabotage impacted ByteDance’s commercial projects or online businesses, ByteDance said, and none of ByteDance’s large models were affected.

Online rumors suggested that more than 8,000 graphical processing units were involved in the sabotage and that ByteDance lost “tens of millions of dollars” due to the intern’s interference, but these claims were “seriously exaggerated,” ByteDance said.

The tech company also accused the intern of adding misleading information to his social media profile, seemingly posturing that his work was connected to ByteDance’s AI Lab rather than its commercial technology team. In the statement, ByteDance confirmed that the intern’s university was notified of what happened, as were industry associations, presumably to prevent the intern from misleading others.

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Tim Cook on Apple Intelligence, Vision Pro and more bets the company believes will pay off • WSJ

Ben Cohen:

»

Maybe the most surprising aspect of Vision Pro is how it makes you feel. You might not believe that strapping yourself into a piece of technology could be emotionally overwhelming. But when you experience an ultra-high-resolution spatial photo of your daughter at age 3, or watch an immersive video of a grandparent who’s since died, it’s no longer a headset. It’s a time machine. You put on this device from the future and find yourself reliving the past. You come back to the present and have tears in your eyes. 

“That really is why we did this product,” says Richard Howarth, vice president of industrial design. “It’s got the ability to do things that the other products can’t do.” 

There is no killer use case for the Vision Pro yet, so I asked Cook how he’s using it. At work, of course, when he wants several windows open for multitasking. But especially at home. “I’ve always viewed having to sit in a certain place in your living room as really constrained,” he says. He prefers to lie flat on the couch, project Ted Lasso and The Morning Show on the ceiling and stare into the Vision Pro. “It’s a lot more pleasant way to watch something than to sit like a statue in front of a TV,” he insists.

Jon M. Chu agrees. The director of Wicked grew up in Silicon Valley and bought a Vision Pro the first day it went on sale. From the second he put it on, he knew it would have a dramatic effect on his creative process. “Everyone here laughs at me because I’m so obsessed with it,” he says. Jobs once famously described computers as a bicycle for the mind. “I feel like Vision Pro is a rocket ship for the mind,” Chu says. “You don’t know where you’re headed, but you get to go someplace and figure it out with everybody.” 

But that rocket ship is an expensive ride. When the Vision Pro came out this year, mixed reality crashed into the reality that most consumers aren’t ready to shell out $3,500 for a cool toy. 

“Over time, everything gets better, and it too will have its course of getting better and better,” Cook says. “I think it’s just arguably a success today from an ecosystem-being-built-out point of view.” 

«

It’s not even close to having an ecosystem! It’s a flop in that regard. But perhaps the funniest part of the interview is this:

»

[I ask Cook: what is..] His wallpaper? A photo with his nephew in Grand Teton National Park. His most underrated app? Notes, where he types or dictates thoughts before he forgets them.

The best name of a group chat? He looked at me like I’d asked him to recommend the best Android phone.

“The best—name?” he said. “I don’t name them. Do you name yours? Interesting. I may take that on.”

The next time we meet, Cook proudly reports that he’s named the group chat with his college roommates: Roommates.

«

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Apple’s AirPods Pro hearing health features are as good as they sound • The Verge

Chris Welch:

»

You’ll need a quiet space when taking Apple’s hearing test. Before getting started, your iPhone will do a quick analysis of ear tip fit and environmental noise to ensure you’re good to go. All of these hearing health features are calibrated for Apple’s stock silicone tips, so if you’re using aftermarket third-party tips (including foam), there’s no guarantee you’ll get the optimal experience. Once the test begins, you just tap the screen whenever you hear any of the three-beep tone sequences.

There are a few key things to know about Apple’s hearing test. For one, it’s designed so that you can’t predict or game it. The test can play any frequency at any time, so no two are the same. Apple tests your left ear first, and here’s something I wish I’d known going in: it’s completely normal to hear nothing at all for several seconds at a time. It was in those moments, when five, six, or even 10 seconds would pass without an obvious tone sequence, where I’d start feeling pretty anxious. 

My best advice is to avoid wondering if you should be hearing something at a given moment and instead just focus on the tones as they come. Some can be incredibly faint. There are visual cues that let you know the test is still moving along even during silence — the most obvious one being a large circle that animates onscreen throughout the process. (You’ll also notice a progress dial for each ear that fills as you take it.)

«

The Hearing Test is coming with iOS 18.1, which releases next week. Such fun to come as we discover how we’ve all lost hearing acuity – with graphs.
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Sky Follower Bridge – Chrome Web Store

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Instantly find and follow the same users from your Twitter follows on Bluesky.

«

Spotted via Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day email. A Chrome extension, of course.
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Can journalism survive? The media elite on its future • NY Post

Charlotte Klein in a biiiig piece about the media’s past, present and possible future:

»

To many, the most instructive failure of 2024 was The Messenger, an all-things-to-all-people news site run by ex Condé Nast and People executives with a “chief growth officer” formerly of Gawker Media. It planned on building out a 550-person newsroom and flooding the internet with viral scoops but instead burned through most of its $50 million in funding within a year and shut down. “I’m always suspicious when someone has a huge splashy launch saying they’re going to get up to 300 million page views in six months and reach a massive national audience,” says Betsy Reed, editor of The Guardian US. “I just feel like you can’t do that out of the gate. You need to have a much clearer grasp of who you’re reaching and why you’re going to be relevant.” What actually has succeeded this year are operations — many of them run through Substack — that have low overhead and a focused appeal. Some longtime media executives find this new world befuddling. “I’m surprised that people are okay with the subscription model, where they don’t have that many listeners or viewers but are making money, so they’re just good with it,” says one of them. “The Substack writers, people with Patreon podcasts. My generation was wired completely differently. We wanted to be read or listened to by as many people as possible. And now this new generation is like, I’m totally cool with having 9,000 die-hard fans.”

The Congress-focused media company Punchbowl News, which was founded by Politico veterans Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer in 2021, is well read inside the Beltway. “It’s so small and it’s so particular, and yet it seems like it has impact,” says Carolyn Ryan of the Times. “I don’t even know how many reporters they have — it feels like just a handful — but they really seem to have a sense of mission and what value they bring.” That value is priced at $350 a year — a lot for a general reader, but, as with Politico Pro, such subscriptions are often treated as a business expense by anyone with a need to be in the know.

«

Plenty more to read. But certainly right now the focus feels like it’s around niche subscriptions.
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EVs are just going to win • Noahpinion

Noah Smith:

»

EVs are still winning. But they haven’t won yet; only 4% of the global passenger car fleet, 23% of the bus fleet, and less than 1% of delivery trucks are electrified.

But at this point I think the writing is on the wall. The phenomenon of a superior technology displacing an older, inferior technology is not uncommon, and it generally looks like the EV transition is looking now. When a new technology passes a 5% adoption rate, it almost never turns out to be inferior to what came before; with EVs, that threshold has now been reached in dozens of countries.

In fact, we don’t have to rely on trend-based forecasting to understand why EVs are just going to win. There are a number of fundamental factors that make EVs simply better than combustion vehicles. The longer time goes on, the more these inherent advantages will make themselves felt in the market.

The first of these is price. Currently, EVs often require government subsidies in order to be price-competitive with combustion cars. But batteries are getting cheaper and cheaper as we get better and better at building them. The cheaper batteries get, the smaller the subsidies required to get people to switch to EVs. Goldman Sachs reports that this crucial tipping point will be reached in about two years

…Once batteries cross that tipping point, the EV revolution will take on its own momentum. It will simply be cheaper to buy an EV than a combustion car. People will gravitate toward the cheaper option, especially if it comes with other advantages. And in this case it does.

EVs’ second advantage is convenience. Most EV owners will almost never have to fill their cars up at a station. This is because they will charge their cars at night, in their own home garages or driveway.

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Not so sure about the latter. Lots of people live in flats in cities in the US same as Europe.
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‘Blade Runner 2049’ producers sue Elon Musk over ‘Robotaxi’ imagery • The New York Times

Brooks Barnes:

»

The Hollywood company behind “Blade Runner 2049” sued Elon Musk for copyright infringement on Monday, accusing him of illegally using imagery from that film to promote Tesla’s new “robotaxi.”

Alcon Entertainment, a movie and television company backed by the FedEx founder Frederick W. Smith, filed the lawsuit in US District Court in Los Angeles. The complaint also names Tesla and Warner Bros. Discovery as defendants, saying that Alcon had denied a request by Mr. Musk and the companies to use imagery from “Blade Runner 2049” as part of an Oct. 10 marketing event on the Warner lot.

“He did it anyway,” the suit says.

Mr. Musk’s live-streamed presentation — a grand unveiling of a car that Tesla says will be able to drive itself — did not use exact “Blade Runner 2049” images, according to the complaint. Rather, the event showcased “AI-created images mirroring scenes from ‘Blade Runner 2049,’ including one featuring a Ryan Gosling look-alike,” Alcon said.

The lawsuit called the use of artificial intelligence tools to create near-identical images “a bad-faith and intentionally malicious gambit” to make the event “more attractive to a global audience and to misappropriate the ‘Blade Runner 2049’ brand to help sell Teslas.”

«

So he illegally used imagery from the film except it wasn’t imagery from the film? The comparison made in the story is with OpenAI using a soundalike to Scarlett Johansson after she refused permission to use her voice. I suppose the case will depend on precisely how closely the imagery matches: for a voice, there aren’t many dimensions that can vary, but with video?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If you want to live longer, have you considered taking up the high jump? CC-licensed photo by filip bossuyt 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. Not a flop. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Large French Alpine ski resort to close in face of shrinking snow season • The Guardian

Kim Willsher:

»

A large French Alpine ski resort has announced it is to close, citing a lack of funds to become a year-round destination, as low- and medium-altitude mountain areas around Europe struggle with a truncated season due to global heating and declining snowfalls.

Local councillors voted not to reopen Alpe du Grand Serre in the Isère this winter, saying they could no longer pay for the mountain lifts or pay to complete a programme to diversify as an all-year tourist destination.

The move will wipe out 200 jobs and hit businesses in the nearby village of La Morte, whose economy and population of 150 people depend on winter sports.

A local sports shop owner, Lauranne Vincent, told France 3 television: “We are devastated and shocked. It’s a brutal decision coming two months before we were due to open. We were hoping the opposite would happen. We said all lights were green to go.”

Frédérique Laurence, the owner of a grocery shop in La Morte, added: “We’ve been left completely in the lurch. We still have loans to pay as we’ve only been here four years. Who will pay them? Our lives have been ruined. That’s what is going to happen to us.”

A lack of snow in the past two years has meant slopes opening later and being forced to close during the season, keeping skiers away. The loss-making Alpe du Grand Serre has also suffered from ageing infrastructure and a lack of investment over the past 40 years.

The local authority has spent nearly €3m since 2021 on a project that would keep the resort open all year round, attracting visitors with hiking and bike paths, but said it did not have the money to continue with it for the final two years before completion.

…Alpe du Grand Serre, a collection of six villages at an altitude of 1,368 metres, a 45-minute drive from Grenoble, is the largest ski station in the northern Alps to be forced to close. It opened as a winter sports resort 85 years ago, is the second-oldest in the region and has 55km (35 miles) of slopes, three chairlifts and 10 drag lifts.

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Kurt Vonnegut’s lost board game finally published • Polygon

Charlie Hall:

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Fans of literature most likely know Kurt Vonnegut for the novel Slaughterhouse-Five. The staunchly anti-war book first resonated with readers during the Vietnam War era, later becoming a staple in high school curricula the world over. When Vonnegut died in 2007 at the age of 84, he was widely recognized as one of the greatest American novelists of all time. But would you believe that he was also an accomplished game designer?

In 1956, following the lukewarm reception of his first novel, Player Piano, Vonnegut was one of the 16 million other World War II veterans struggling to put food on the table. His moneymaking solution at the time was a board game called GHQ, which leveraged his understanding of modern combined arms warfare and distilled it into a simple game played on an eight-by-eight grid. Vonnegut pitched the game relentlessly to publishers all year long according to game designer and NYU faculty member Geoff Engelstein, who recently found those letters sitting in the archives at Indiana University. But the real treasure was an original set of typewritten rules, complete with Vonnegut’s own notes in the margins.

With the permission of the Vonnegut estate, Engelstein tells Polygon that he cleaned the original rules up just a little bit, buffed out the dents in GHQ’s endgame, and spun up some decent art and graphic design. Now you can purchase the final product, titled Kurt Vonnegut’s GHQ: The Lost Board Game, at your local Barnes & Noble — nearly 70 years after it was created.

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Not sure it’s going to topple Monopoly, but certainly one for the fans.
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Don Norman: ‘Apple has fallen prey to the most disastrous part of design, which thinks it’s about making something beautiful and elegant’ • EL PAÍS English

Tom C. Avendaño:

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“Apple computer used to be famous for the fact that you wouldn’t even need a manual. You could just pick up the telephone or plug in the computer and in seconds, you could use it and learn. It was self-explanatory,” says [Don] Norman, with the kind of fluid speech that can only come from decades of university teaching. “But unfortunately, the designers who care only about aesthetics and beauty have taken over. And I also blame the journalists who have said that the iPhone screen should be as big as possible, with no boundary [and that the center button that pre-2017 models featured should disappear]. Because when the telephone rings, I can no longer answer the phone.”

In case there was any doubt as to whether the matter was settled, Norman continues: “What happened was that Apple fell prey to the disastrous part of design, which is that design is about making something beautiful and elegant. And I say, nonsense, that’s not what my kind of design is about. My kind of design is — sure, I want it to be attractive and I want it to be nice, but more important than anything else is that I know I can use it freely and that it’s easy to learn and that it doesn’t keep changing. Apple believes that words are ugly, they try not to use them, and you have to memorize all these gestures, up and down, left and right, one finger, two fingers, three fingers, one tap, two taps, a long tap, starting from the top of screen, the middle of the screen. Who can remember that?”

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Norman is, what shall we say, uncompromising. But he also has a habit of being right.
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Cheap AI “video scraping” can now extract data from any screen recording • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

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Recently, AI researcher Simon Willison wanted to add up his charges from using a cloud service, but the payment values and dates he needed were scattered among a dozen separate emails. Inputting them manually would have been tedious, so he turned to a technique he calls “video scraping,” which involves feeding a screen recording video into an AI model, similar to ChatGPT, for data extraction purposes.

What he discovered seems simple on its surface, but the quality of the result has deeper implications for the future of AI assistants, which may soon be able to see and interact with what we’re doing on our computer screens.

“The other day I found myself needing to add up some numeric values that were scattered across twelve different emails,” Willison wrote in a detailed post on his blog. He recorded a 35-second video scrolling through the relevant emails, then fed that video into Google’s AI Studio tool, which allows people to experiment with several versions of Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 1.5 Flash AI models.

Willison then asked Gemini to pull the price data from the video and arrange it into a special data format called JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) that included dates and dollar amounts. The AI model successfully extracted the data, which Willison then formatted as CSV (comma-separated values) table for spreadsheet use. After double-checking for errors as part of his experiment, the accuracy of the results—and what the video analysis cost to run—surprised him.

“The cost [of running the video model] is so low that I had to re-run my calculations three times to make sure I hadn’t made a mistake,” he wrote. Willison says the entire video analysis process ostensibly cost less than one-tenth of a cent, using just 11,018 tokens on the Gemini 1.5 Flash 002 model. In the end, he actually paid nothing because Google AI Studio is currently free for some types of use.

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Algorithms policed welfare systems for years. Now they’re under fire for bias • WIRED

Morgan Meaker:

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The algorithm, used since the 2010s, violates both European privacy rules and French anti-discrimination laws, argue the 15 groups involved in the case, including digital rights group La Quadrature du Net, Amnesty International, and Collectif Changer de Cap, a French group that campaigns against inequality.

“This is the first time that a public algorithm has been the subject of a legal challenge in France,” says Valérie Pras of Collectif Changer de Cap, adding she wants these types of algorithms to be banned. “Other social organizations in France use scoring algorithms to target the poor. If we succeed in getting [this] algorithm banned, the same will apply to the others.”

The French welfare agency, the CNAF, analyzes the personal data of more than 30 million people—those claiming government support as well as the people they live with and their family members, according to the litigation, filed to France’s top administrative court on October 15.

Using their personal information, the algorithm gives each person a score between 0 and 1, based on how likely it estimates they are to be receiving payments they are not entitled to—either as fraud or by mistake.

France is one of many countries using algorithms to search for error or fraud in its welfare system. Last year, WIRED’s three-part investigation with Lighthouse Reports into fraud-detection algorithms in European welfare systems focused on their use in the Netherlands, Denmark and Serbia.

People with higher risk scores can then be subject to what welfare recipients across the bloc have described as stressful and intrusive investigations, which can also involve their welfare payments being suspended.

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Employees describe an environment of paranoia and fear inside Automattic over WordPress chaos • 404 Media

Samantha Cole:

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This is the latest in what has been a tense few months at Automattic.

“Regarding escalations, to me, the most upsetting thing has been the way he’s treating current and former employees and WP community members,” one former employee who recently left the company after several years told me. “He clearly has no clue what people care about or how the community has contributed to the success of WordPress. It very clearly shows how out of touch he is with everyday reality. One, sharing pictures of him being on safari while all this shit is going down, as if people would think that was cool. Only rich tech bros would think that.” (Mullenweg posted photos from a trip on his personal blog and social media posts last week.) 

In July, before the latest WP Engine blowup, an Automattic employee wrote in Slack that they received a direct message from Mullenweg sending them an identification code for Blind, an anonymous workplace discussion platform, which was required to complete registration on the site.

Blind requires employees to use their official workplace emails to sign up, as a way to authenticate that users actually work for the companies they are discussing. Mullenweg said on Slack that emails sent from Blind’s platform to employees’ email addresses were being forwarded to him.

If employees wanted to log in or sign up for Blind, they’d need to ask Mullenweg for the two-factor identification code. The implication was that Automattic—and Mullenweg—could see who was trying to sign up for Blind, which is often a place where people anonymously vent or share criticism about their workplace.

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This is really creepy: diverting work emails, even if it’s in theory legal, implies a paranoia on Mullenweg’s part that is quite disturbing.
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AlphaFold reveals how sperm and egg hook up in intimate detail • Nature

Heidi Ledford:

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An artificial-intelligence tool honoured by one of this year’s Nobel prizes has revealed intimate details of the molecular meet-cute between sperm and eggs .

The AlphaFold program, which predicts protein structures , identified a trio of proteins that team up to work as matchmakers between the gametes. Without them, sexual reproduction might hit a dead end in a wide range of animals, from fish to mammals.

The finding, published on 17 October in Cell, contradicts a previous notion that just two proteins — one on the egg and one on the sperm — are sufficient to ensure fertilization, says Enrica Bianchi, a reproductive biologist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, who was not involved in the study. “It’s not the old concept of having a key and a lock to open the door any more,” she says. “It’s more complicated.”

Despite its crucial role in reproduction, the process by which the fusion of egg and sperm occurs in vertebrates is a molecular mystery that has proved difficult to crack. The union of the two cells involves proteins that reside in greasy membranes, making them hard to study using standard biochemical methods. The interactions between these proteins are often weak and fleeting, and it is difficult to harvest enough viable eggs and sperm from some of researchers’ favoured laboratory animals, including mice, for extensive experiments.

…AlphaFold predicted that three sperm proteins come together to form a complex. Two of these proteins were already known to be important for fertility. Working in the laboratory, Pauli and her colleagues confirmed that the third is also crucial for fertility in both zebrafish and mice, and that the three proteins interact with one another in zebrafish and human sperm.

The team also found that, in zebrafish, the trio creates a binding site for an egg protein called Bouncer, providing a mechanism by which the two cells can recognize one another. “It’s a way to say, ‘Sperm, you found an egg’ and ‘Egg, you found a sperm’,” says Andreas Blaha, a biochemist at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology and a co-author of the paper.

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How Digg helped invent the social internet • The Verge

David Pierce talks to Kevin Rose, the creator and one-time owner of Digg, the former front page of the internet (before it got many, many more front pages):

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David Pierce: As I think about the universal homepage thing, part of me thinks we need that more than ever now. Instead of having to go to 50 websites and 10 different forums and read 20 newsletters, how can I just get a quick sense of what people care about and what they’re saying… and then move on to my life? 

Kevin Rose: I think you’re absolutely right. If you can find out who owns Digg, I would love to buy it back from them and turn it back into that old-school homepage. So, I don’t know if you have any connections…

DP: I’ll look into it. But let’s just quickly reboot Digg right here, for 2024. What would you do?

KR: I would heavily lean into AI on this front — AI for vetting and AI for a bunch of different things. If someone posts a comment, you could instantly run it against AI and say, “Is this comment additive to the article of substance, or is it attacking someone?” There could be some really interesting positive use cases for AI here to help with keeping things civil. I would lean pretty heavily on AI for both summaries for content moderation.

I would not want to embrace an ad model. I’d much rather have it be almost more Wikipedia-style, where it’s community-supported in some way. It wouldn’t be about building the next billion-dollar, publicly traded company, but more like a utility for good. I would want to really lean in heavily on this idea of providing a safe place for people. It’s unfortunate to me that I’ve had to step away from several different social networks out there because they just can be so toxic at times. And so I would want to spend a great deal of time thinking through those issues. 

It would be important to go out and probably sit down with 50 or 100 of the largest moderators on Reddit and ask them what features and functionality they’re missing that they would like to see and have it really be community-driven features and functionality on the site versus top-down telling you what you should have. I don’t know. I think that’d be a good place to start.

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As it happens, Digg has been reborn, at digg.one. Unclear who’s behind it.
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Fuel duty expected to rise by up to 7p a litre after the budget • The Guardian

Gwyn Topham and Helena Horton:

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Fuel duty is levied at 52.95p a litre and pulls in about £25bn a year to the exchequer. Campaigns against the duty by motoring groups and publications including the Sun have coincided with previous governments abolishing planned hikes since 2010.

According to a Whitehall source quoted by the Mail, officials have told Reeves “it’s now or never on fuel duty … They are advising her that motorists can afford it and that if she doesn’t act to end the freeze now she will find it much harder to do so later in the parliament”.

Forecasts by the government’s spending watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility, assume a reversal of the 5p cut and with much discussion of the £22bn “black hole” and now a £40bn “spending gap”, campaigners believe Reeves should go further.

The Campaign for Better Transport said reversing the cut and reinstating an inflationary increase would raise an additional £4.2bn in duty. Director Silviya Barrett said: “At the moment, it’s often cheaper to drive or even fly within the UK than to take the train and that shouldn’t be the case. We’re calling on the chancellor to use the budget to level the playing field for public transport.”

Domestic transport is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the UK, accounting for 29.1% in 2023. Almost all domestic transport emissions are from carbon dioxide, the main source of which is petrol and diesel road vehicles.

According to a Carbon Brief analysis, duty freezes may have increased UK total greenhouse gas emissions by 7% since 2010, as drivers may otherwise have switched forms of transport or chosen more fuel-efficient cars.

…new research from the Social Market Foundationshows that the richest fifth of households have benefited twice as much as the poorest from lower fuel duty as they drive and own more vehicles, including less fuel efficient SUVs.

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Differences in life expectancy between Olympic high jumpers, discus throwers, marathon and 100 metre runners • BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation

Jeffrey and David Lee-Heidenreich and Jonathan Myers:

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For each Olympics between 1928 and 1948 we identified the top (up to 20) Olympic male and female finishers in the high jump (HJ), discus throw, marathon, and 100-m run. We determined date of death using internet searches and calculated age-specific expected survival using published US life tables. We adjusted life expectancy for country of origin based on Global Burden of Disease data.

Results
We identified a death date for 336 of 429 (78%) Olympic athletes including 229 males (55 marathon, 56 100-m 58 high jump, 60 discus), and 107 females (54 100-m, 25 high jump, 28 discus). Discus throwers were heaviest and marathon runners the lightest and oldest athletes (p < 0.01). Observed-expected survival was highest for high jumpers (7.1 years for women, 3.7 years for men) and marathon runners (4.7 years for men) and lowest for sprinters (−1.6 years for women and −0.9 years for men). In multivariate analysis controlling for age and gender, type of sport remained significantly associated with mortality with greatest survival for high jumpers and marathon runners compared to discus throwers and sprinters (p = 0.005). Controlling for weight reduced the survival benefit of high jumpers over discus throwers, but had little effect on the survival benefit of marathon runners vs. sprinters.

Conclusion
Significant differences in long term survival exist for different types of track and field Olympic athletes that were explained in part by weight.

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But only in part. Anyway, a neat thing to tell people at parties: marathon runners and high jumpers live longer. (And it’s not just that it feels longer.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The reason why video conference calls are so exhausting comes down to the sound – and not being there. CC-licensed photo by Nick Doty 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 at the Social Warming Substack due at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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

Not remotely cool: the science of “Zoom fatigue” • Big Think

Richard Cytowic:

When face-to-face we process a slew of signals without having to consciously think about them: facial expression, gesture, posture, vocal tone and rhythm, and the distance between speakers. We read body language and make emotional judgments about whether others are credible or not. This is easy to do in person, whereas video chats force us to work to glean the same cues. This consumes a lot of energy. Recall that compared to electronic devices, the human brain operates at ridiculously slow speeds of about 120 bits (approximately 15 bytes) per second. Listening to one person takes about 60 bits per second of brainpower, or half our available bandwidth. Trying to follow two people speaking at once is fairly impossible for the same reason multitaskers fare poorly: attempting to handle two or more simultaneous tasks quickly maxes out our fixed operating bandwidth.

As attention flags, we fatigue. Yet it is the audio gaps, not the video, that makes Zoom sessions draining. All languages have clear rules for conversation that assure no overlap but no long silences. Online meetings disrupt that convention because the separate sound and video streams are chopped into tiny digital packets and sent via different pathways to the recipient’s end where they are electronically reassembled. When some packets arrive late the software must decide whether to wait to reassemble them — causing a delay — or stitch together whatever packets are available, giving rise to stuttering audio.

Video conferencing platforms have opted to deliver audio that arrives quickly but is low in quality. Platforms aim for a lag time of less than 150 milliseconds. Yet that is long enough to violate the no-overlap/no-gap convention to which speakers are accustomed. A round-trip signal can take up to 300 milliseconds before one gets a reply, a pause that makes speakers seem less convincing and trustworthy. Repeatedly having to sort out talking over one another and who goes first is also tiresome and draining to everyone on the call.

Cytowic has a new book – Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age: Coping with Digital Distraction and Sensory Overload – which has just come out in the US. Now you can refer to it for why you don’t want to do a Zoom meeting.

New crypto-state emerges in the Himalayas: Bhutan has twice as many bitcoins as El Salvador • EL PAÍS English

Álvaro Sánchez:

A tiny nation squeezed between China and India deep within the Himalayas, Bhutan has become an unlikely cryptocurrency hub. The kingdom might be more accustomed to making the travel pages for its bucolic landscapes and Buddhist monasteries, but it has now leapt to the forefront of the cryptosphere after the firm Arkham Intelligence revealed that the state-owned conglomerate Druk Holdings owns 13,011 bitcoins, slightly more than double the amount declared by El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele (5,877). At current prices, this stash is valued at about $780m, which for a population of about 780,000 inhabitants represents $1,000 in bitcoins per citizen.

Arkham explains that this small fortune comes from bitcoin mining operations carried out by Bhutan’s investment arm, the aforementioned Druk Holdings, a name that means “thunder dragon.” This dragon appears on the country’s flag, holding jewels as a symbol of wealth. “We were able to corroborate the chronology of the mining activity with evolving satellite images of the facilities’ construction,” Arkham notes. The largest of these infrastructures is located on the grounds of the failed Education City, with which the authorities sought to tackle emigration and reduce unemployment, but which has ended up housing bitcoin factories that are in operation 24/7 instead of classrooms and books.

“Unlike most governments, Bhutan’s bitcoins come not from law enforcement seizure of assets, but from bitcoin mining operations, which have increased dramatically since early 2023,” states Arkham. Bhutan now ranks fourth among those countries with the most bitcoins, trailing only the US, China and the UK.

Didn’t realise the UK was such a big hub for bitcoins. Is that including all the ones in the Welsh landfill? Also, nobody seems to have written about what effect, if any, the adoption of bitcoin has had on El Salvador’s economy. Or have I just missed it?

The AI boom has an expiration date • The Atlantic

Matteo Wong:

All of this [AI] infrastructure will be extraordinarily expensive, requiring perhaps trillions of dollars of investment in the next few years. Over the summer, The Information reported that Anthropic expects to lose nearly $3bn this year.

And last month, the same outlet reported that OpenAI projects that its losses could nearly triple to $14bn in 2026 and that it will lose money until 2029, when, it claims, revenue will reach $100bn (and by which time the miraculous AGI may have arrived).

Microsoft and Google are spending more than $10bn every few months on data centers and AI infrastructure. Exactly how the technology warrants such spending—which is on the scale of, and may soon dwarf, that of the Apollo missions and the interstate-highway system—is entirely unclear, and investors are taking notice.

When Microsoft reported its most recent earnings, its cloud computing business, which includes many of its AI offerings, had grown by 29%—but the company’s stock had still tanked because it hadn’t met expectations. Google actually topped its overall ad-revenue expectations in its latest earnings, but its shares also fell afterward because the growth wasn’t enough to match the company’s absurd spending on AI.

Even Nvidia, which has used its advanced AI hardware to become the second-largest company in the world, experienced a stock dip in August despite reporting 122% revenue growth: Such eye-catching numbers may just not have been high enough for investors who have been promised nothing short of AGI [artificial general intelligence].

Absent a solid, self-sustaining business model, all that the generative-AI industry has to run on is faith.

Cleaning up “Scientific Reports”: can it be done? • Science

Derek Lowe:

I have had some problems with the journal Scientific Reports over the years, and I’m not alone. At the same time, I’ve read some interesting and useful papers published there as well. But worthless/faked manuscripts showing up in a journal tend to contaminate everything else that shows up there, which is a problem that you’d hope that scientific publishers are concerned about. To put things in the style of my late father, his one of his analogies was that if he had a gallon of urine and put a shot glass of wine into it, he still had a gallon of urine. On the other hand, if he had a gallon of wine and put a shot glass of urine into that, he now had a second gallon of urine. That’s the problem.

This open letter, signed by many well-known literature fraud experts, is (to me) more than enough evidence that Scientific Reports has some serious problems with the papers it’s letting through, and that the publishers (Springer Nature) are not doing enough to address them. It shows numerous examples of papers with odd and questionable references in them and with phrases that are redolent of (unstated) chatbot use, those apparently in attempts to bypass automated plagiarism-detection software. The authors of the letter note that even when the editors have taken action, that can be just to republish the same paper with slightly altered phrases…

…As the letter goes on to note, deploying more AI and automated systems is not going to be enough to fix this problem. Actual humans are going to have to hit some buttons here, and some of those buttons need to be labeled “delete”. The journal needs to show what editors handle each paper (which is currently invisible), because it’s likely that a small number of them are responsible for an outsize fraction of the problem.

Springer Nature doesn’t come out of this looking good. What if it likes the money it gets from subscriptions more than it worries about the reputational damage?

Meta fires staff for abusing $25 meal credits • Financial Times

Hannah Murphy and Stephen Morris:

Meta has fired about two dozen staff in Los Angeles for using their $25 meal credits to buy household items including acne pads, wine glasses and laundry detergent.

The terminations took place last week, just days before the $1.5tn social media company separately began restructuring certain teams across WhatsApp, Instagram and Reality Labs, its augmented and virtual reality arm, on Tuesday.

The revamp has included cutting some staff and relocating others, several people familiar with the decisions said, in a sign that chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s recent efficiency drive is still under way.

Like most big tech companies, Meta offers free food to employees based out of its sprawling Silicon Valley headquarters as a perk. Staff based in smaller offices without a canteen are offered Uber Eats or Grubhub credits, for example, for food to be delivered to the office.

Staff are given daily allowances of $20 for breakfast, $25 for lunch and $25 for dinner, with meal credits issued in $25 increments.

Those who were fired were deemed to have abused the food credit system over a long period of time, said one person familiar with the matter. Some had been pooling their money together, they said, while others were getting meals sent home even though the credits were intended for the office.

Those who violated the company rules only on occasion were reprimanded but not terminated, the person added.

At least one of these people was on a $400k salary. It seems incredibly petty on both sides: you might hope people wouldn’t need such credits (then again, it’s not necessarily cheap to live in LA), but how has the company really lost out?

2004 was the first year of the future • The Verge

In early 2004, the world was shaking it like a Polaroid picture, flocking to theaters to see what was going to happen with all those hobbits, and wondering if that Tom Brady guy was something special. Meanwhile, a few folks around the world were inventing the web as we know it now: A world-shaking social network was brewing in a Harvard dorm room. A Google employee was dreaming up the future of email in their spare time. The coolest cellphone of all time was just about to drop. The internet was still a niche activity, but that was about to change — and fast.

In so many ways, the digital world in which we now all live was created 20 years ago. Google went public and began to ascend to rule the web. Facebook, Gmail, Firefox, Flickr, and Digg all launched — the year Web 2.0 became the web. “Blog” and “the long tail” were on no one’s radar before 2004, and since then, they’ve been everywhere. The United States went through a contentious election, a bunch of sequels dominated the box office, and Apple launched a new product that looked very cool but was ultimately eclipsed by a better product a year later. Okay, some things never change.

Every year is a big year in tech, of course, but 2004 was an especially big one. And The Verge didn’t exist yet! So, this week, we’ll have stories on the best and most important gadgets and platforms that launched that year and pieces about the cultural events that still affect the way we live now. Basically, we’re going to blog like it’s 2004.

Neat idea, given that it can feel difficult to find news in a tech world where the new things aren’t that thrilling: give people a bit of nostalgia by rewinding to 20 years ago.

Unfortunately, they chose the wrong year for the best iPod, which was the 2005 iPod nano. Tolerable miss, though.

Android 15’s security and privacy features are the update’s highlight • Ars Technica

Kevin Purdy:

Android 15 started rolling out to Pixel devices Tuesday and will arrive, through various third-party efforts, on other Android devices at some point. There is always a bunch of little changes to discover in an Android release, whether by reading, poking around, or letting your phone show you 25 new things after it restarts.

In Android 15, some of the most notable involve making your device less appealing to snoops and thieves and more secure against the kids to whom you hand your phone to keep them quiet at dinner. There are also smart fixes for screen sharing, OTP codes, and cellular hacking prevention, but details about them are spread across Google’s own docs and blogs and various news site’s reports.

Here’s what is notable and new in how Android 15 handles privacy and security.

Happy Android 15 for all who celebrate, but I just wanted to observe: Android has been on a long journey towards more privacy and security, while Apple’s iOS has been forced to open up more and more (mostly by the EU, but the effects go wider), with increased customisation that used to be the province of Android. This mirrors the way in which their notifications and so on have been converging for absolutely years.

Weight-loss drugs cut drug and alcohol abuse, according to new study • WSJ

Dominic Chopping:

Drugs such as Novo Nordisk’s blockbuster Ozempic can cut drug and alcohol abuse by up to 50% according to a new study, adding to mounting evidence that the drugs yield health benefits beyond diabetes and weight loss.

In a study published Thursday in scientific journal Addiction, around 500,000 people with a history of opioid use disorder were analyzed, of which just more than 8,000 were taking either GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic or the similar GIP class of drugs that Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro belongs to.

GLP-1 drugs work by mimicking a gut hormone to control blood sugar and suppress appetite while GIP medications take a dual-target approach by mimicking both the GLP-1 hormone and a second gut hormone that is believed to enhance the drug’s effectiveness.

The study found that those taking the drugs had a 40% lower rate of opioid overdose compared with those who didn’t.

Similarly, an analysis of more than 5,600 people with a history of alcohol use disorder and who took the drugs showed they had a 50% lower rate of intoxication compared with those who didn’t take them.

“Our study… reveals the possibilities of a novel therapeutic pathway in substance use treatment,” the study’s lead researcher Fares Qeadan and co-authors of the research report Ashlie McCunn and Benjamin Tingey said.

The researchers, from Loyola University Chicago, said the study opens avenues for more comprehensive and effective treatment strategies for opioid and alcohol use disorders.

It’s an interesting finding, but it’s hard not to have a sneaking suspicion that the people who can stick to an Ozempic regime are just less likely to overdose or get intoxicated, and that the drug isn’t necessarily the primary cause. (The paper does admit, near the end, the “the data limits the ability to assume causality”.)

Spanish mother and daughter train bacteria to restore church frescoes • Reuters

Horaci Garcia and Eva Manez:

As Spanish microbiologist Pilar Bosch was casting around for a subject to investigate for her PhD in 2008, she stumbled across a paper suggesting that bacteria, her field, could be used in art restoration, her mother’s own area of expertise.

At that same moment, her mother – Pilar Roig – was struggling to restore 18th-century paintings by Antonio Palomino in one of the oldest churches in Spain’s third city, Valencia.

She was finding it particularly difficult to remove glue that had been used to pull the frescoes from the walls of Santos Juanes church during restoration work in the 1960s.

“My mother had a very difficult problem to solve and I found a paper about bacteria used to clean frescoes in Italy,” Bosch, 42, said.

She did her PhD on that project. And more than a decade later, daughter and mother have joined forces on a €4m ($4.46m) project, funded by local foundations, to use some of the techniques to restore the artworks in Valencia.

The microbiologist trains bacteria by feeding them samples of the glue which was made from animal collagen. The bacteria then naturally produce enzymes to degrade the glue.

The family team then mixes the bacteria with a natural algae-based gel and spread it on the paintings – which were taken from the walls in the 1960s, then nailed back on, still covered in glue.

After three hours, the gel is removed, revealing glue-free paintings.

“In the past, we used to work in a horrible manual way, with warm water and sponges that took hours and damaged the painting,” said Roig, now 75, whose father and grandfather along with other relatives also worked in art conservation.

Petition to get them to do this for wallpaper glue.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: No individual links for this edition because Pinboard’s API was down, so this was done by hand 😭