Just over 30 years ago, Netscape Navigator was released. The mugs have lasted better but didn’t change the world like it did. CC-licensed photo by Steve Bowbrick on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Directional. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is • The Atlantic
Charlie Warzel:
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So much of the conversation around misinformation suggests that its primary job is to persuade. But as Michael Caulfield, an information researcher at the University of Washington, has argued, “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”
This distinction is important, in part because it assigns agency to those who consume and share obviously fake information. What is clear from comments such as Kremer’s is that she is not a dupe; although she may come off as deeply incurious and shameless, she is publicly admitting to being an active participant in the far right’s world-building project, where feel is always greater than real.
What we’re witnessing online during and in the aftermath of these hurricanes is a group of people desperate to protect the dark, fictitious world they’ve built. Rather than deal with the realities of a warming planet hurling once-in-a-generation storms at them every few weeks, they’d rather malign and threaten meteorologists, who, in their minds, are “nothing but a trained subversive liar programmed to spew stupid shit to support the global warming bullshit,” as one X user put it.
It is a strategy designed to silence voices of reason, because those voices threaten to expose the cracks in their current worldview. But their efforts are doomed, futile. As one dispirited meteorologist wrote on X this week, “Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes.” She followed with: “I can’t believe I just had to type that.”
What is clear is that a new framework is needed to describe this fracturing. Misinformation is too technical, too freighted, and, after almost a decade of Trump, too political. Nor does it explain what is really happening, which is nothing less than a cultural assault on any person or institution that operates in reality.
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Warzel’s so right about this: what we’re seeing now is not an effort to change minds any more. Social networks have become places filled with experts, but stuffed with even more inexperts who have a different view and will shout them down.
To prove Warzel’s (and my) point, on Twitter his article was demeaned for wanting government regulation of content (by Marc Andreessen, literary critic, and others).
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The editors protecting Wikipedia from AI hoaxes • 404 Media
Emanuel Maiberg:
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A group of Wikipedia editors have formed WikiProject AI Cleanup, “a collaboration to combat the increasing problem of unsourced, poorly-written AI-generated content on Wikipedia.”
The group’s goal is to protect one of the world’s largest repositories of information from the same kind of misleading AI-generated information that has plagued Google search results, books sold on Amazon, and academic journals.
“A few of us had noticed the prevalence of unnatural writing that showed clear signs of being AI-generated, and we managed to replicate similar ‘styles’ using ChatGPT,” Ilyas Lebleu, a founding member of WikiProject AI Cleanup, told me in an email. “Discovering some common AI catchphrases allowed us to quickly spot some of the most egregious examples of generated articles, which we quickly wanted to formalize into an organized project to compile our findings and techniques.”
In many cases, WikiProject AI Cleanup finds AI-generated content on Wikipedia with the same methods others have used to find AI-generated content in scientific journals and Google Books, namely by searching for phrases commonly used by ChatGPT. One egregious example is this Wikipedia article about the Chester Mental Health Center, which in November of 2023 included the phrase “As of my last knowledge update in January 2022,” referring to the last time the large language model was updated.
Other instances are harder to detect.
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There’s an impressive one given, which is a long new article about an Ottoman fortress which has tons of detail. Also, never existed.
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WordPress.org’s latest move involves taking control of a WP Engine plugin • The Verge
Wes Davis:
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WordPress.org has taken over a popular WP Engine plugin in order “to remove commercial upsells and fix a security problem,” WordPress cofounder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg announced today. This “minimal” update, which he labels a fork of the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin, is now called “Secure Custom Fields.”
It’s not clear what security problem Mullenweg is referring to in the post. He writes that he’s “invoking point 18 of the plugin directory guidelines,” in which the WordPress team reserves several rights, including removing a plugin, or changing it “without developer consent.” Mullenweg explains that the move has to do with WP Engine’s recently-filed lawsuit against him and Automattic.
Similar situations have happened before, but not at this scale. This is a rare and unusual situation brought on by WP Engine’s legal attacks, we do not anticipate this happening for other plugins.
WP Engine’s ACF team claimed on X that WordPress has never “unilaterally and forcibly” taken a plugin “from its creator without consent.”
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The WordPress drama is shifting from low key mad to slightly higher key mad, all orchestrated by Mullenweg. I still don’t understand what the justification for his animus is: if WP Engine doesn’t contribute to the open source project, and just makes money from it, that’s completely allowed under the licence. Mullenweg seems to think it should be different. This will not end well: the antipathy that is building up between the well-funded WP Engine and the code-controlling WordPress is going to boil over soon.
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The scourge of ‘win probability’ in sports • The Atlantic
Ross Andersen:
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To watch baseball or any other sport is to confront the fundamental unpredictability of the universe, its utter refusal to bend to your wishes, no matter how fervent. In recent years, some broadcasters have sought to soothe this existential uncertainty with statistics.
This season, ESPN announced that a special graphic would appear on all of its Major League Baseball telecasts. In the upper-left corner of the screen, just above the score, each team’s chance of winning the game is expressed as a percentage—a whole number, reassuring in its roundness, that is recalculated after every at-bat. Its predictions may help tame the wild and fearful id of your fandom, restricting your imagination of what might happen next to a narrow and respectable range.
You might think that so insistently reminding fans of their team’s “Win Probability” would be against ESPN’s interests. If your team is down by several runs in the eighth inning, your hopes will already be fading. But to see that sinking feeling represented on the screen, in a crisp and precise-sounding 4%, could make an early bedtime more enticing. The producers of reality shows such as The Amazing Race know this, which is why they use quick cuts and split screens to deceive fans into thinking that teams are closer than they really are, and that the outcome is less certain than it really is.
But ESPN has a more evolved consumer in mind. We got a clue as to who this person might be in March, when Phil Orlins, a vice president of production at the company, previewed the graphic. Orlins said that Win Probability would speak “to the way people think about sports right now,” especially people “who have a wager on the game.”
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Ugh. Might have guessed it would come down to betting: people trying to arbitrage a wager on the odds of a win. I find the win percentage predictions tedious: I watch sports not because I know the result, but because I don’t, and mad things can happen in sports.
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The retreat To Muskworld • niedermeyer.io
E.W. Niedermeyer:
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Almost eight years ago, Elon Musk announced that every Tesla made from that moment forward would be capable of Level 5 autonomous driving with nothing more than a software update. It was a pivotal moment in Tesla’s history, committing the company to not just succeed as an electric automaker, but solve one of the most ambitious AI and robotics challenges possible. To create confidence in that staggering aspiration, Tesla released a video of a Model X driving around Palo Alto autonomously to the Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black,” claiming that the driver behind the wheel was only there “for legal purposes.”
Eight long and hype-filled years later, Tesla is still looking for ways to build confidence in its ability to deliver a “general solution to self-driving” through hype and spectacle, even as companies like Waymo deliver the reality of 100,000 driverless taxi rides per week. Rather than meeting the competitive challenge from Waymo with real driverless rides on real public streets, Tesla’s latest ploy for credibility sees the firm retreating ever deeper into fantasy, building what can only be described as a temporary theme park on a movie studio lot for its first ever “driverless” demonstration.
This contrast is instructive. The “Paint It Black” video of eight years ago was no more “real” or “fake” than yesterday’s “We, Robot” demonstration, but at least it had the pretense of reality: it depicted a real car on real roads. Tesla’s latest spectacle likely cost orders of magnitude more to produce, but it didn’t even purport to show any actual real-world capability. The entire thing was pure fantasy, in a contained fantasy world, built on a movie theater lot that exists for the sole purpose of producing such spectacles.
This trajectory, from simulating future capability on public roads to creating a fantasy world for fantasy cars to show off fantasy capabilities, should worry Tesla’s supporters.…Ultimately, Musk’s increasingly-degenerate gambling run is slouching toward one last big coinflip: the 2024 presidential election.
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That coinflip is not far away. SpaceX had a successful day, demonstrating a self-driving rocket; Tesla didn’t. The question of what happens to Musk if Harris wins remains open.
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Google’s dominant search business is under attack, from TikTok to AI • WSJ
Suzanne Vranica and Miles Kruppa:
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Google’s share of the U.S. search ad market is expected to drop below 50% next year for the first time in over a decade, according to the research firm eMarketer.
Amazon is expected to have 22.3% of the market this year, with 17.6% growth, compared with Google’s 50.5% share and its 7.6% growth.
“This space has been ripe for a shake-up for a long period of time,” said Brendan Alberts, head of search and commerce at the ad-buying firm Dentsu.
Google remains in an enviable position: far ahead of the pack in the search market, with plenty of resources to counter moves by its rivals. Still, advertisers are eager for more competition.
“For the first time in probably 15 years, we will have viable alternatives to Google,” said Nii Ahene, a veteran digital-advertising executive.
The generative-AI boom is transforming search products, which will increasingly serve up fully formed answers to user queries or summaries of the results. Google this past week rolled out ads in the AI-generated summaries it has begun placing at the top of search results. The ads will only show up on mobile searches in the U.S. at first, Google said.
In one example of how the new search ads might appear, Google showed a listing for a Tide pen that is available on the Albertsons website in an AI overview responding to the query, “How do I get a grass stain out of jeans?”
“We’re confident in this approach to monetizing our AI-powered experiences,” said Brendon Kraham, a Google vice president overseeing the search ads business. “We’ve been here before navigating these kinds of changes.”
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This was discussed on a recent episode of Dithering, where Ben Thompson made the good point that the Dominant Thing is never disrupted by something that does the same. Google disrupted Microsoft not by doing Windows, but by doing search. Mobile disrupted the desktop web by offering different possibilities such as Uber.
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ADM’s CCS project can’t seal the deal • CTVC
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In the first major US initiative of its kind, ADM (Archer-Daniels-Midland) launched CCS [carbon capture and storage] operations at its Decatur, Illinois ethanol plant in 2021. This involves capturing CO2 emissions from the plant, purifying and compressing the CO2 into a liquid-like form, then transporting it into CO2 injection wells to be injected into sealed-off geologic formations ~5,550 feet (1.69km) underground for permanent sequestration. Next to these injection wells, which require federal permits known as Class VIs, are two deep monitoring wells that track the movement of the injected CO2 plume, the integrity of the injection well, and groundwater quality.
However, at the end of last year, ADM said it detected “some corrosion” in a section of one monitoring well, and subsequently plugged the well and no longer uses it. This March, the company reportedly discovered possible leakage in the rock formation above the CO2 injection well, at a depth of 5,000 feet — just above the zone where ADM is permitted to inject (5,553-7,043 feet underground). Tests confirmed the presence of CO2.
By August, the EPA issued a violation notice alleging that the company hadn’t complied with its federal permit. And at the end of September, while investigating, ADM said it discovered more potential movement of fluid “between different formations” 5,000 feet underground, prompting worries that the leak violates the Clean Drinking Water Act (although drinking water wells are only 110 feet deep).
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CCS has always seemed like a daft idea. Now we’re seeing it’s impractical too.
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Carbon Mapper releases first emissions detections from the Tanager-1 satellite • Carbon Mapper
Carbon Mapper Inc.:
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“To meet ambitious climate goals, it is important for philanthropy to lead carefully and follow fast. This is exactly what we have done with our investment in the Carbon Mapper coalition. We were methodical in how we built an emissions monitoring program to drive transparency and actionable emissions insights, and we have delivered,” said Richard Lawrence, Founder and Executive Chairman of High Tide Foundation. “Now is the time to quickly scale up investments to get this data into the right hands so we can accelerate global actions to cut methane and CO2.”
To make this data accessible and actionable, Carbon Mapper makes all of its methane and CO2 detections publicly available for noncommercial use on its data portal, a web platform that is updated on an ongoing basis with observations and emissions data from remote sensing sources.
“Reducing methane pollution starts with measuring it,” said Michael R. Bloomberg, UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions and Founder of Bloomberg L.P. and Bloomberg Philanthropies. “Data from the Tanager-1 satellite is providing us with the real-time data necessary to pinpoint methane leaks at their source and clean them up. This new technology is crucial to curbing emissions from one of the biggest contributors to climate change.”
Emissions data from Carbon Mapper alongside data from other monitoring programs will be critical to helping governments deliver on the Global Methane Pledge, an unprecedented agreement led by the United States and the European Union to reduce global methane emissions by 30% by 2030. It can also be transformative across major emitting sectors such as energy, waste and agriculture, empowering companies to identify and verify emissions reductions across their supply chains and deliver on stated commitments such as the Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter.
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What’s obvious from two minutes on the data portal is that the US – California and Texas – have the biggest number of methane plumes. Sort them, you’ve sorted a lot.
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Mosaic Netscape 0.9 was released 30 years ago on Sunday • jwz
Jamie Zawinski was one of the founders of Netscape and, later, Mozilla:
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According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded. At some point late that night I wandered off and wrote the first version of the page that loaded when you pressed the “What’s Cool” button in the toolbar. (A couple days later, Jim Clark would go ballistic in a company-wide email because I had included a link to Bianca’s Smut Shack.)
For those of you who are unaware of these finer details, 0.9 was the first release of the Netscape browser (which begat Firefox) available to the general public. This beta release was an unannounced surprise. Prior to this, everyone assumed that what we were doing was going to be a standard for-sale product where you sent off your $35 and then some time later got a disc in the mail with a license key. That we just said, “Here’s our FTP site, come get it, go crazy” was, at the time, shocking to people.
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Now, his bio says ” I’m the proprietor of DNA Lounge, a world famous and award-winning all ages dance club and live music venue in San Francisco, and of DNA Pizza, our attached cafe and pizzeria.”
Though the question of whether you had to pay for Netscape did puzzle a lot of people (myself included) for quite a while. If you downloaded it personally but used it in a company was that a.. personal licence? Commercial one? And would they come after you and find out? All obviated eventually by Microsoft making Internet Explorer free.
Arguably, though, this is when the internet really became the internet.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? |
Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 