New data suggests that obesity rates have fallen in the US – perhaps due to the new generation of GLP-1 agonists. CC-licensed photo by Tony Alter 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

---

How to fight back against a traffic-less web • SparkToro

Rand Fishkin:

»

My position on this is that zero click is taking over everything. Google is trying to answer searches without clicks. Facebook is trying to keep people on Facebook. LinkedIn wants to keep people on LinkedIn.

Here’s another post. This is from Tim Soulo over at Ahrefs. Oh, look: 96.55% of web pages get zero traffic from Google.

And this is this is not super shocking to anyone, but what scares me is that this report that we did at SparkToro which looked at zero click searches in US and the EU was done in May, and June of this year looking at the five previous months. And you’ll recall Google had rolled back AI overviews, which hadn’t rolled out very far. But today, if you search for, for example, “my smoke alarm randomly went off”. Well, here’s this AI overview.

Last night I was searching for something related to my Dungeons and Dragons game. The AI overview takes over the whole page. Today Geraldine was searching for something related to lighting installation: AI takes over the whole page. There, you might argue well but look you could get a click here, or maybe someone will click on Reynolds restoration services.

I’m sorry friends, I think this is taking a tremendous amount more traffic than even what we measured back in June of this year. My friend Adam just put together this fireball x y z site, which is actually probably the best website I have ever read, or you will ever read, about finding the best smoke alarms out there. I can’t recommend it enough. Adam walked me through it and was like, what what do you think? I replied, I think that you have done a superb job, that your personal, deep dive into smoke alarms is second to none on the Internet, and that it will get absolutely no freaking traffic.

And what instead you are gonna have to do here is try and influence what these LLMs and Google is telling people. And to do that, you’re essentially gonna have to be in all the places where Google is pulling information from, which is a lot of these websites that rank in the top ten and all across the rest of the web.

«

The original page has lots of repeated little phrases, which I thought was a tactic to spot copying. In fact it’s just a machine-generated transcript of a little video. But this is the new reality: your (new) site won’t get traffic from Google.
unique link to this extract

---

I taught for most of my career. I quit because of ChatGPT • TIME

Victoria Livingstone:

»

In my most recent job, I taught academic writing to doctoral students at a technical college. My graduate students, many of whom were computer scientists, understood the mechanisms of generative AI better than I do. They recognized LLMs as unreliable research tools that hallucinate and invent citations. They acknowledged the environmental impact and ethical problems of the technology. They knew that models are trained on existing data and therefore cannot produce novel research. However, that knowledge did not stop my students from relying heavily on generative AI. Several students admitted to drafting their research in note form and asking ChatGPT to write their articles.

As an experienced teacher, I am familiar with pedagogical best practices. I scaffolded assignments. I researched ways to incorporate generative AI in my lesson plans, and I designed activities to draw attention to its limitations. I reminded students that ChatGPT may alter the meaning of a text when prompted to revise, that it can yield biased and inaccurate information, that it does not generate stylistically strong writing and, for those grade-oriented students, that it does not result in A-level work. It did not matter. The students still used it.

In one activity, my students drafted a paragraph in class, fed their work to ChatGPT with a revision prompt, and then compared the output with their original writing. However, these types of comparative analyses failed because most of my students were not developed enough as writers to analyze the subtleties of meaning or evaluate style. “It makes my writing look fancy,” one PhD student protested when I pointed to weaknesses in AI-revised text.

…I found myself spending many hours grading writing that I knew was generated by AI. I noted where arguments were unsound. I pointed to weaknesses such as stylistic quirks that I knew to be common to ChatGPT (I noticed a sudden surge of phrases such as “delves into”). That is, I found myself spending more time giving feedback to AI than to my students.

So I quit.

«

unique link to this extract

---

How Gemini successfully picked out my next read • Pocket Lint

Eli Becht:

»

When I’m in a reading slump, I like to go online and get suggestions for my next book. This includes asking people on Reddit or browsing through lists on apps like Goodreads, but I tried something different this time. I recently made the switch from Google Assistant to Google Gemini on my Android, and I decided to let it figure out what my next read was. It’s useful in the workplace, so why not reading suggestions?

Instead of letting it pick blindly, I told Gemini my favorite book is The Hobbit, and asked for five suggestions for what to read next. I’m as wary as they come when it involves AI, but I came away impressed with the response. Instead of coming back with a generic answer, Gemini backed up its suggestions with tidbits about the books and helped sell me on why I should choose one of them as my next read.

With a famous book like The Hobbit, you can easily guess one of the suggestions. Other than The Lord of the Rings, Gemini recommended The Princess Bride by William Golding, The Earthsea Cycle by Ursula K. Le Guin, Watership Down by Richard Adams, and The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis.

Gemini sort of cheated by recommending an entire series, like Earthsea and Narnia, but it’s hard to argue with the results.

In fact, Gemini understood me so well that I have already read four of the five suggestions, and they are all sitting on my shelf. The only book I haven’t read is Watership Down, so I’ll need to add that one to my cart.

«

That’s a pretty terrible starting point, so I tried: favourite book Ringworld but I have read all the Ringworld series; favourite author Philip K Dick but I have read all the PKD books. ChatGPT recommended The Mote in God’s Eye (not bad, though I’ve read it), The Three-Body Problem (excellent but ditto) and The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester (great, ditto).

Next time round it offered Blindsight by Peter Watts (never heard of it/him), The Algebraist by Iain M Banks (know him ofc) and Eon by Greg Bear (think I’ve read it). So not bad if you push it.
unique link to this extract

---

We may have passed peak obesity • Financial Times

John Burn-Murdoch:

»

Around the world, obesity rates have been stubbornly climbing for decades, if anything accelerating in recent years. But now newly released data finds that the US adult obesity rate fell by around two percentage points between 2020 and 2023.

We have known for several years from clinical trials that Ozempic, Wegovy and the new generation of diabetes and weight loss drugs produce large and sustained reductions in body weight. Now with mass public usage taking off — one in eight US adults have used the drugs, with 6% being current users — the results may be showing up at the population level.

While we can’t be certain that the new generation of drugs are behind this reversal, it is highly likely. For one, the decline is steepest among college graduates, the group most likely to be using them.

Crucially, the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which reported the unprecedented decline in obesity levels, uses weight and height measurements taken by medical examiners, not self-reported values. This makes it far more reliable than other surveys. American waistlines really do seem to be shrinking.

What makes this all the more remarkable is the contrast in mechanisms behind the respective declines in smoking and obesity. The former was eventually achieved through decades of campaigning, public health warnings, tax incentives and bans. With obesity, a single pharmaceutical innovation has done what those same methods have repeatedly failed to do.

If you take a step back, this is an astonishing achievement. Weight gain has proved far harder to combat than almost any other public health issue in history. Obesity has been such a formidable foe because everything is stacked against those trying to lose weight.

«

This is amazing. The BBC’s Today programme did an entire segment on it on Saturday morning, and we’re only just getting our heads around the implications of this.
unique link to this extract

---

New molecule can mimic the effects of fasting and exercise • Aarhus University

»

It is well known that regular exercise and periodic fasting have a series of positive effects on the body. Exercise and skipping meals makes for a stronger heart and reduces fat levels in the blood. The explanation lies in the body’s natural reaction in which increasing levels of lactate (the salt of lactic acid) and ketones act as efficient fuel for cells which benefit the body’s organs.

A group of chemistry, metabolism and diabetes researchers from Aarhus University has now created a molecule that can induce the same metabolic effects, without physical exertion or fasting.

The study has just been published in the scientific journal Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

“We’ve developed a molecule that can mimic the body’s natural metabolic response to strenuous exercise and fasting. In practice, the molecule brings the body into a metabolic state corresponding to running 10 kilometers at high speed on an empty stomach,” explains Professor Thomas Poulsen from the Department of Chemistry at Aarhus University. He is one of the leading researchers behind the study.

“When lactate and ketone levels in the blood increase, the production of an appetite-suppressing hormone increases and the level of free fatty acids in the blood decreases. This has a number of health benefits, for example reducing the risk of developing metabolic syndrome.”

…”It can be difficult to maintain motivation to run many kilometers at high speed and go without food. For people with physical ailments such as a weak heart or general weakness, a nutritional supplement can be the key to better recovery,” explains Poulsen.

«

This is mindblowing. Can be taken by mouth (screw you, Ozempic!) and already in human clinical trials.
unique link to this extract

---

Matt Mullenweg: ‘WordPress.org just belongs to me’ • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

“WordPress.org just belongs to me personally,” Mullenweg said during an interview with The Verge. WordPress.org exists outside the commercial realm of Automattic, as a standalone publishing platform that offers free access to its open-source code that people can use to create their own websites. But it’s not a neutral, independent arbiter of the ecosystem. “In my role as owning WordPress.org, I don’t want to promote a company, which is A: legally threatening me and B: using the WordPress trademark. That’s part of why we cut off access from the servers.”

Mullenweg’s feud with WP Engine fans out in a few different directions. He’s criticized WP Engine for not putting enough time and money into developing the open-source WordPress ecosystem, saying that if you gave $1 to the WordPress Foundation, “you’d be a bigger donor than WP Engine.” And Mullenweg has brought up the possibility that WP Engine “hacked” the Automatic-owned WooCommerce plug-in to collect commissions meant for Automattic, which WP Engine has denied. From those arguments, the fight appears to be one over what is and isn’t appropriate in the open-source software world.

But Mullenweg has since sidelined those arguments to make the case that WP Engine — and its “hacked up, bastardized simulacra” of the WordPress open-source code, as he describes it — is infringing on Automattic’s trademark: WordPress.

«

At this point lawsuits are being filed, and one has to think it’s not wise of Mullenweg to try to take on an organisation (WP-Engine) which is backed by a hedge fund worth billions.
unique link to this extract

---

Stop asking people “What do you do?” • WSJ

Joanne Lipman:

»

For people who have taken career breaks, four little words—“What do you do?”—can provoke dread. It seems to conceal a bundle of judgments: What’s your social status? What’s your income? What’s your education? Are you worth my time to talk to?

This has long been an issue for professional women who leave the workforce to raise kids. They describe feeling invisible and being ignored by people they meet. But the dreaded question is now affecting a wider swath of people: stay-at-home fathers, career-changing young people, gig workers, baby boomers forced into retirement and laid-off workers.

“It is truly the absolute worst question you can get when you’re out of work. Society wants to put you in an easy-to-digest box,” says Orlando-based Jen Kling, 40, a consumer brand marketer who has been laid off three times and is now an independent consultant.

It’s also a head-scratcher when trying to frame an answer. When New York entrepreneur James Reichert, 62, moved to Canada temporarily for his then-wife’s job, he printed up business cards that read “Trophy Husband.” When Ashley Scott, 35, a Philadelphia corporate sustainability manager, was laid off from a previous job, she took to telling people she was in grad school. She found that when she said “I’m looking for a job, or I just got laid off… People would look at you like you’re a loser.”

For many of us, work isn’t just a way to pay for our lives; it’s how we define ourselves—and others. We are what we do. Psychologists have a term for this: “enmeshment.” The concept was first coined to describe an unhealthy blurring of boundaries in personal relationships. But it applies with almost absurd accuracy to our relationship with work, when we are so closely linked to our careers that we have no idea who we are without them.

«

unique link to this extract

---

Messages via satellite provides lifeline to iPhone users in Hurricane Helene fallout • 9to5Mac

Ryan Christoffel:

»

Hurricane Helene has caused massive damage and taken over 100 lives across several US states. Many thousands of people are without power and/or cell service. But in the wake of the storm, reports have surfaced about a key iOS 18 feature that has been a lifeline for survivors: Messages via satellite.

Apple added Messages via satellite to millions of iPhones via its recent iOS 18 update. And now, according to reports on social media, it seems the feature arrived just in time.

Here are a few tweets highlighting how useful the feature has proven: Asheville resident;
father contacting son; North Carolina resident.

A common message across social media around the time Helene hit hardest was a call for users to update to iOS 18 so they’ll gain access to this feature. Apple notably shipped iOS 18 and iOS 17.7 simultaneously, leading many to stick with 17 for now.

«

Perhaps I wasn’t the target audience, but I hadn’t heard about iOS 18 offering Messages via satellite. Seems worthwhile. (I still haven’t upgraded to iOS 18; not sure what there is that’s compelling.)
unique link to this extract

---

Quantum advantage for NP approximation? For REAL this time? • Shtetl-Optimized

Scott Aaronson:

»

The other night I spoke at a quantum computing event and was asked—for the hundredth time? the thousandth?—whether I agreed that the quantum algorithm called QAOA was poised revolutionize industries by finding better solutions to NP-hard optimization problems. I replied that while serious, worthwhile research on that algorithm continues, alas, so far I have yet to see a single piece of evidence that QAOA outperforms the best classical heuristics on any problem that anyone cares about. I added I was sad to see the arXiv flooded with thousands of relentlessly upbeat QAOA papers that dodge the speedup question by simply never raising it at all. I said that, in my experience, these papers reliably led outsiders to conclude that surely there must be excellent known speedups from QAOA—since otherwise, why would so many people be writing papers about it?

Anyway, the person right after me talked about a “quantum dating app” (!) they were developing.

«

All the QAOA goes right over my head, but I’m very intrigued by the quantum dating app. Is the idea that you’re compatible with everyone until you meet them? Or (next two © Oliver Johnson) you swipe both right and left? You know where to meet your match but not how fast to go with them?

Your suggestions for how the quantum dating app works welcome.
unique link to this extract

---

Apple releases Depth Pro, an AI model that rewrites the rules of 3D vision • VentureBeat

Michael Nuñez:

»

Apple’s AI research team has developed a new model that could significantly advance how machines perceive depth, potentially transforming industries ranging from augmented reality to autonomous vehicles.

The system, called Depth Pro, is able to generate detailed 3D depth maps from single 2D images in a fraction of a second—without relying on the camera data traditionally needed to make such predictions.

The technology, detailed in a research paper titled “Depth Pro: Sharp Monocular Metric Depth in Less Than a Second,” is a major leap forward in the field of monocular depth estimation, a process that uses just one image to infer depth.

This could have far-reaching applications across sectors where real-time spatial awareness is key. The model’s creators, led by Aleksei Bochkovskii and Vladlen Koltun, describe Depth Pro as one of the fastest and most accurate systems of its kind.

Monocular depth estimation has long been a challenging task, requiring either multiple images or metadata like focal lengths to accurately gauge depth.

But Depth Pro bypasses these requirements, producing high-resolution depth maps in just 0.3 seconds on a standard GPU. The model can create 2.25-megapixel maps with exceptional sharpness, capturing even minute details like hair and vegetation that are often overlooked by other methods.

«

What is a “standard GPU”? Though 0.3 seconds doesn’t sound too shabby, it’s probably not quick enough for driving.. is it?
unique link to this extract

---

• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

---

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified