Your 44th and 60th birthdays mark a point of no return for your body. Unfortunately. CC-licensed photo by Shannon McGee on Flickr.
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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
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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.
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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):
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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.
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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:
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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.
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Batteries replacing coal? Sounds good.
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What is it like to be a smartphone? • New Cartographies
Nicholas Carr:
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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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| • 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 