Dogs are moving into the next iteration of their relationship with humans – as service animals to help out in more emotional ways. CC-licensed photo by My Photo Journeys on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Emotionally supported. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Smart gardening firm’s shutdown a reminder of Internet of Things’ fickle nature • Ars Technica
Scharon Harding:
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AeroGarden, which sells Wi-Fi-connected indoor gardening systems, is going out of business on January 1. While Scotts Miracle-Gro has continued selling AeroGarden products after announcing the impending shutdown, the future of the devices’ companion app is uncertain.
AeroGarden systems use hydroponics and LED lights to grow indoor gardens without requiring sunlight or soil. The smart gardening system arrived in 2006, and Scotts Miracle-Gro took over complete ownership in 2020. Some AeroGardens work with the iOS and Android apps that connect to the gardens via Wi-Fi and tell users when their plants need water or nutrients. AeroGarden also marketed the app as a way for users to easily monitor multiple AeroGardens and control the amount of light, water, and nutrients they should receive. The app offers gardening tips and can access AeroGarden customer service representatives and AeroGarden communities on Facebook and other social media outlets.
Regarding the reasoning for the company’s closure, AeroGarden’s FAQ page only states: “This was a difficult decision, but one that became necessary due to a number of challenges with this business.”
It’s possible that AeroGarden struggled to compete with rivals, which include cheaper options for gardens and seed pods that are sold on Amazon and other retailers or made through DIY efforts.
AeroGarden’s closure is somewhat more surprising considering that it updated its app in June. But now it’s unknown how long the app will be available. In an announcement last week, AeroGarden said that its app “will be available for an extended period of time” and that it’ll inform customers about the app’s “longer-term status as we work through the transition period.”
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Oh no! How will people know when their plants need light, water and food now? We invented/discovered (delete to taste) farming 10,000 years ago, but of course those doofuses didn’t do it properly, with an app. Imagine, we could all have starved and vanished from the face of the earth.
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People think they already know everything they need to make decisions • Ars Technica
John Timmer:
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The world is full of people who have excessive confidence in their own abilities. This is famously described as the Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes how people who lack expertise in something will necessarily lack the knowledge needed to recognize their own limits. Now, a different set of researchers has come out with what might be viewed as a corollary to Dunning-Kruger: People have a strong tendency to believe that they always have enough data to make an informed decision—regardless of what information they actually have.
The work, done by Hunter Gehlbach, Carly Robinson, and Angus Fletcher, is based on an experiment in which they intentionally gave people only partial, biased information, finding that people never seemed to consider they might only have a partial picture. “Because people assume they have adequate information, they enter judgment and decision-making processes with less humility and more confidence than they might if they were worrying whether they knew the whole story or not,” they write. The good news? When given the full picture, most people are willing to change their opinions.
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I find the last bit hard to believe, but OK – it is good news if it’s replicated.
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Google signs advanced nuclear clean energy agreement with Kairos Power • Google Blog
Michael Terrell is senior director, energy and climate at Google:
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Since pioneering the first corporate purchase agreements for renewable electricity over a decade ago, Google has played a pivotal role in accelerating clean energy solutions, including the next generation of advanced clean technologies.
Now, we’re building on these efforts by signing the world’s first corporate agreement to purchase nuclear energy from multiple small modular reactors (SMRs) to be developed by Kairos Power. The initial phase of work is intended to bring Kairos Power’s first SMR online quickly and safely by 2030, followed by additional reactor deployments through 2035. Overall, this deal will enable up to 500 MW of new 24/7 carbon-free power to U.S. electricity grids and help more communities benefit from clean and affordable nuclear power.
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Google says it’s doing this because 1) AI needs a lot more power 2) nuclear is a “clean, round-the-clock power source”. Back in 2007, Google had a “RE less than C” project, which stood for “renewable energy costing less than coal”, but abandoned it in 2011, giving rather unclear reasons why.
And now, we’re back with nuclear. The wheel turns.
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Tesla and storytelling • Dustin Curtis
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Tesla and Musk had a rare opportunity to use the event [where they showed off the robotaxi, robobus and humanoid robots controlled by.. humans] as an inspiring statement of mission and purpose. They could have told a story about why Tesla exists, why it is working on these products in particular, and how everything fits into the tapestry of the company’s overall mission. Musk could have explained that the Robotaxi has always been part of Tesla’s ambitious “master plan,” and then given a progress update on how the plan is being executed while showing the demo vehicles and robots. That would have been something worth watching and a story worth telling. But Musk didn’t tell that story. He showed off half-finished products and then threw a party.
Over the years, I’ve come to believe that being able to put whatever you’re working on into the context of a bigger story is as important as making it work well–whether it’s a building, a company, an essay, a piece of software, or a hamburger. Good storytelling is good craftsmanship. Without a good story, without clear context and purpose, it’s hard to maintain the essence of a thing, and far too easy to make poor design decisions. When you develop the full story behind why and how you’re building something, you can make decisions based on principle instead of opinion, and if you can communicate that story well to others, you can way more easily get them to understand your vision. This applies to everything from product development to sales and marketing.
The products Tesla has been working on are undeniably inspiring objects of a very optimistic future. Most companies focus on at most the next few iterations of their products, but Tesla is unique in that it defines the future for itself and then pulls it kicking and screaming into the present. Electric cars were impractical/impossible, and then Tesla made them ubiquitous. Humanoid robots have always been confined to science fiction, but Tesla is going to make them, too. The way Tesla operates is an inspiring story in and of itself.
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Tesla’s now got a long record of completely failing to live up to its promises (on self-driving and so on). Curtis seems convinced it’s totally different, which I find odd, but it’s a point of view.
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Hackers take control of robot vacuums in multiple cities, yell racial slurs • ABC News Australia
Julian Fell:
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Robot vacuums in multiple US cities were hacked in the space of a few days, with the attacker physically controlling them and yelling obscenities through their onboard speakers.
The affected robots were all Chinese-made Ecovacs Deebot X2s — the exact model that the ABC was able to hack into as proof of a critical security flaw earlier in the month.
Minnesota lawyer Daniel Swenson was watching TV when his robot started to malfunction.
“It sounded like a broken-up radio signal or something,” he told the ABC. “You could hear snippets of maybe a voice.” Through the Ecovacs app, he saw that a stranger was accessing its live camera feed and remote control feature.
Dismissing it as some kind of glitch, Mr Swenson reset his password, rebooted the robot and sat back down on the couch beside his wife and 13-year-old son.
Almost straight away, it started to move again. This time, there was no ambiguity about what was coming out of the speaker. A voice was yelling racist obscenities, loud and clear, right in front of Mr Swenson’s son.
“F*** n******s,” screamed the voice, over and over again.
“I got the impression it was a kid, maybe a teenager [speaking],” said Swenson. “Maybe they were just jumping from device to device messing with families.”
The second time around, he turned it off.
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Hackable vacuum cleaners! Unsurprising that it’s a Chinese model, which have a terrible reputation for software security, and thus a ton of hackers (and script kiddies) looking to crack them.
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Tina Brown, the queen of legacy media, takes her diary to Substack • The New York Times
Jessica Testa:
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For some prominent writers, joining the newsletter platform Substack has become a declaration of independence from traditional news organizations, or an ambitious attempt to build a new model for publishing.
For Tina Brown, a Brit who became synonymous with Manhattan media in the 1980s and ’90s, it is something less grandiose. It is simply a chance to have fun.
“This is just an extra something I’ll be doing on a Monday afternoon,” she said in an interview last week.
Her newsletter, Fresh Hell, is set to debut on Tuesday. In an introductory note to readers, she said the title referred to the experience of waking “every day to a news alert from Hades.” The newsletter, she said, would be written mostly in weekly “notebook form,” rather than “Big Think columns.”
“Writing in that private voice is what I’m interested in doing now,” Ms. Brown, 70, said in the interview, held in her apartment in the Sutton Place neighborhood of Manhattan.She hopes the diary approach will also help in “limbering up” her voice for a planned memoir, she said. A subscription will cost $6 per month or $50 per year.
Ms. Brown may not be trying to reinvent media, unlike several of her newsletter cohorts. But her decision to join Substack is a coup for the company, which considers prestigious names to be magnets for more readers and writers. In recent weeks, Van Jones, a CNN commentator, and Jane Pratt, another influential magazine editor, have also joined the platform.
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I think it will be verrrry interesting to see how many people are prepared to pay money to Tina Brown for her thoughts. There will have to be a lot of very insider-y content to make people even consider it. (Thanks Greg B for the link.)
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ChatGPT will happily write you a thinly disguised horoscope • Simon Willison’s Weblog
Simon Willison:
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There’s a meme floating around at the moment where you ask ChatGPT the following and it appears to offer deep insight into your personality:
From all of our interactions what is one thing that you can tell me about myself that I may not know about myselfDon’t be fooled into thinking there’s anything deep going on here. It’s effectively acting like a horoscope, hooking into the poorly understood memory feature that OpenAI first announced in February and rolled out fully in September.
…It turns out there’s a name for the psychological trick that ChatGPT is inadvertently playing on us here: the Barnum effect. Wikipedia describes it thus:
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[…] a common psychological phenomenon whereby individuals give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically to them, yet which are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. This effect can provide a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some paranormal beliefs and practices, such as astrology, fortune telling, aura reading, and some types of personality tests.
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I think we can add ChatGPT personality insights to that list of practices! The problem with this particular meme is that it directly reinforces a commonly held but inaccurate mental model of how ChatGPT works.
The meme implies that ChatGPT has been learning about your personality through your interactions with it, which implies that it pays attention to your ongoing conversations with it and can refer back to them later on.
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It’s amazing how easily people are fooled by this. As much as by real horoscopes, I suppose. Except a different generation who think machines are clear-sighted machines.
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TV ads to target households on individual streets • Daily Telegraph via MSN
James Warrington:
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Households on individual streets will be targeted with personalised adverts under plans being rolled out by Channel 4.
The channel is to use new technology which will allow brands to tailor who sees their advert by enabling them to select a demographic within a specific location down to street level.
For example, someone watching Made in Chelsea on Channel 4’s streaming service could be served an ad for a fashion brand in a local outlet to them if a particular fashion trend is being discussed.
Advertisers can further optimise their campaign by selecting from 26 programme genres, as well as time of day and device the show is being watched on.
It forms part of a wider update to Channel 4’s streaming platform that the broadcaster hopes could boost revenues by as much as £10m. The company will launch a new private marketplace enabling brands to buy advertising space directly in real-time.
This will allow advertisers to amend their campaigns to respond to events, whether that be real-world events such as local weather or developments in fictional storylines within TV shows. Channel 4’s new ad targeting also includes more detailed data to track whether a viewer has made a purchase after seeing an ad, as well as new viewer profiles for brands to target.
For instance, a brand wishing to reach holidaymakers will be able to choose from profiles such as frequent flyer, low-cost airline flyer, package holiday makers and budget hotel bookers.
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The joy of smart TVs, eh.
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Dogs are entering a new wave of domestication • The Atlantic
Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods:
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In just a generation, we humans have abruptly changed the rules on our dogs. With urbanization increasing and space at a premium, the wild, abandoned places where children and dogs used to roam have disappeared from many American communities. Dogs have gone from working all day and sleeping outside to relaxing on the couch and sleeping in our beds.
They are more a part of our families than ever—which means they share our indoor, sedentary lifestyle. Americans once wanted a dog that barked at every noise, but modern life best suits a pet that will settle nicely under the desk during remote work, politely greet guests, make friends with cats, and play nice (but not hump) in the dog park.
Thousands of years of domestication couldn’t prepare dogs for this abrupt transition. However, after studying the cognition of 101 Canine Companion service-dog puppies at the Duke Puppy Kindergarten, we realized that these dogs are uniquely well adapted to life in the 21st century. Service dogs (the real, certified kind, not the ones whose humans bought their vests on Amazon) are highly trained professionals. They assist with specific tasks that their person cannot perform alone, such as helping to load laundry into the washer, turning on lights, and opening doors.
Between all that effort, service dogs fit into the life of their person in a way that many able-bodied dog owners want their pets to fit into theirs. For the happiness of dogs and their owners, humans need to breed and train more dogs like service animals, embarking on a new wave of dog domestication to help them fit into the new world we have created.
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Credit cards don’t require signatures any more. So why do we still sign? • WSJ
Oyin Adedoyin:
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The big financial moments in life used to be marked with a flourish of a pen. Buying a house. A car. Breakfast.
Not anymore. Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express dropped the requirement to sign for charges like restaurant checks in 2018. They don’t look at our scribbles to verify identity or stop fraud. Taps, clicks and electronic signatures took over the heavy lifting for many everyday purchases—and many contracts, loan applications and even Social Security forms. The John Hancock was written off as a relic useful mainly to inflate the value of sports memorabilia.
But signatures didn’t die.
We continue to be asked to sign with ink on paper or using fingers on touch screens at many restaurants, bars and other businesses. And people keep signing card receipts out of habit—even when there is no blank space for it—because it feels weird not to, payment networks and retail groups say.
“Traditions have this odd way of sticking around,” said Doug Kantor, general counsel of the National Association of Convenience Stores.
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Correction: financial traditions have an odd way of sticking around in the US. I haven’t seen anyone sign anything physically for about a decade, excepting very particular legal documents.
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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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