Racism has a different face these days – it comes in the form of fake science journals funded by tech bosses. CC-licensed photo by Paul M Walsh 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Revealed: International ‘race science’ network secretly funded by US tech boss • The Guardian

David Pegg, Tom Burgis, Hannah Devlin and Jason Wilson:

»

An international network of “race science” activists seeking to influence public debate with discredited ideas on race and eugenics has been operating with secret funding from a multimillionaire US tech entrepreneur.

Undercover filming has revealed the existence of the organisation, formed two years ago as the Human Diversity Foundation. Its members have used podcasts, videos, an online magazine and research papers to seed “dangerous ideology” about the supposed genetic superiority of certain ethnic groups.

The anti-racism campaign Hope Not Hate began investigating after encountering the group’s English organiser, a former religious studies teacher, at a far-right conference. Undercover footage was shared with the Guardian, which conducted further research alongside Hope Not Hate and reporting partners in Germany.

HDF received more than $1m from Andrew Conru, a Seattle businessman who made his fortune from dating websites, the recordings reveal. After being approached by the Guardian, Conru pulled his support, saying the group appeared to have deviated from its original mission of “non-partisan academic research”.

While it remains a fringe outfit, HDF is part of a movement to rehabilitate so-called race science as a topic of open debate. Labelled scientific racism by mainstream academics, it seeks to prove biological differences between races such as higher average IQ or a tendency to commit crime. Its supporters claim inequality between groups is largely explained by genetics rather than external factors like discrimination.

Dr Rebecca Sear, the director of the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University, described it as a “dangerous ideology” with political aims and real-world consequences.

“Scientific racism has been used to argue against any policies that attempt to reduce inequalities between racial groups,” she said. It was also deployed to “argue for more restrictive immigration policies, such as reducing immigration from supposedly ‘low IQ’ populations”.

«

Adam Rutherford, who’s a respected (and respectable) scientist, had a Twitter thread about how this group tried to reel him in a while ago. He didn’t bite. There’s also a Channel 4 documentary coming out on Monday.
unique link to this extract

About that brawl between the WordPress co-founder and WP Engine… • Computerworld

Steven Vaughan-Nichols:

»

the more you look into this conflict, the clearer it becomes that this is no battle between a spunky old-school, open-source leader against a big bad commercial company and more a conflict between a capitalist who wants a bigger share of the WordPress pie and a company that had been doing quite well from the status quo.

If you spend a lot of time following open-source businesses like me, this might sound all too familiar. In the last few years, one successful open-source company after another, such as Hashicorp, Redis, and CockRoachDB, abandoned open source for “fauxpen source” licenses to try to make more money.  All these were already multi-hundred-million dollar businesses, but they wanted more. Much more. 

Greed is a powerful thing.

That appears to be the case here, too. WordPress can’t try the relicensing move. It’s licensed under the General Public License version 2 (GPLv2), This license is both irrevocable and requires any derived work to be licensed under the same license. What Mullenweg can and is doing, though, is trying to shake down WP Engine for more money.

As my fellow journalist Matthew Ingram pointed out in an excellent essay on the conflict, “Matt is not just the plucky founder of a nonprofit open-source project, he’s a wealthy CEO of a for-profit corporation that is attacking a competitor, and using his status as the founder of the nonprofit to extract money from that competitor.”

From where I sit, this is not a battle over open source. It’s a fight between someone worth hundreds of millions and a company worth billions. When you’re trying to figure out what’s going on in any conflict, whether it’s a family fight, a divorce, or a business fight, one of the best rules of thumb is to follow the money. What it’s telling me here is it’s about the cash. 

Unfortunately, this battle can potentially affect me and everyone who uses WordPress and WP Express in particular. I didn’t need this. None of us do.  

«

This seems the best summation I’ve seen of this mad situation.
unique link to this extract

How I fell back in love with iPhone photography • The New Yorker

Kyle Chayka:

»

There’s a Japanese word, komorebi, that describes beams of light and dappled shadows that result when the sun shines through trees. When I take my dog on walks around my leafy neighborhood in Washington, D.C., komorebi is what most often catches my eye, especially in this autumnal moment when dense, green summer foliage is starting to thin and turn golden. As the sun sets and the shadows grow long on the edge of a precipitous valley near my apartment, the foliage creates fluttering patterns of warm and cool colors.

I try to photograph these apparitions with my iPhone camera, but I’m always disappointed in the results: the device’s automated image processing treats contrast as a problem to be solved, aggressively darkening the highlights and lightening up the shadows to achieve a bland flatness. Little of the lambent atmosphere I see in real life survives in the image.

Downloading a new camera app recently changed things for me. Halide, which launched in 2017, is an elegant program that can be used in place of your phone’s default camera. It mimics the controls of a digital S.L.R., allowing, for instance, the user to manually adjust the focal length. Halide is a complex app that’s suited for experienced photographers (the name comes from a chemical used in photographic film), but it can also be made very simple, because in August it added a new setting called Process Zero.

Once the mode is switched on, the camera does as little processing as possible, avoiding artificial-intelligence optimization and any other dramatic editing of the photo. (It still performs basic tasks like correcting the white balance and lens distortion.) The iPhone typically merges many separate images together to create one composite; with Halide, you get a single digital image that preserves the richness and the contrast of what you see in front of you. Shadows survive.

«

Haven’t tried this (and naturally the article doesn’t carry comparative photos – it’s the New Yorker!) but it’s certainly an interesting observation. There are lots of camera apps for the iPhone; it can be as many kinds of SLR as you want.
unique link to this extract

FTC tames subscriptions with final ‘click to cancel’ rule • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

»

The US Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday announced a final “click-to-cancel” rule that aims to simplify the process of ending unwanted subscriptions to products and services.

The “Rule Concerning Recurring Subscriptions and Other Negative Option Programs” addresses business practices that make it more difficult for consumers to cancel subscriptions.

“Too often, businesses make people jump through endless hoops just to cancel a subscription,” said FTC Chair Lina Khan in a statement. “The FTC’s rule will end these tricks and traps, saving Americans time and money. Nobody should be stuck paying for a service they no longer want.”

A “negative option program” refers to a business term or condition that allows a merchant to take a consumer’s silence or inaction as a sign of consent. A one-year subscription that gets renewed after a year without notice or consent, for example, would qualify as a negative option.

According to a 2022 survey conducted by C+R Research, consumers on average underestimate the amount they spend monthly on subscription fees by more than 2.5 times, a finding that suggests people lose track of how much they’re spending.

«

This is going to break hearts at the New York Times’s subscription division, where for ages the only way to cancel has been to ring between 9am and 9.10am on the second Tuesday of the month if the moon was full the night before.
unique link to this extract

I’m not sexy enough for my AI • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

»

Elizabeth Laraki, a design partner at Electric Capital, shared a story on X this week about how her speaker photo, when shared on social, looked slightly different than it did when she provided it to the conference she was attending. Laraki contacted the conference and discovered that their social media manager fed it into an AI and it basically invented a hint of a bra underneath her clothes.
We’ve known for a while that many popular image generators are trained on pornographic material, as well as child sexual abuse material. We also know that generators have all sorts of biases built into them and will over-sexualize photos of women and certain races. So this is not a huge surprise.

But the thing that I find the most interesting here is that what happened to Laraki was because the conference’s social media manager wanted to better format her photo to share on social platforms. I’ve tried to articulate this point a few different ways over the years, but I’ve never been quite satisfied with it. I am continually amazed at how much of the supposed utility of generative AI is based around solving completely made up problems created by social platforms.

«

The comparison of the photos truly is weird. The AI just wants to sex them up. Both weird and worrying.
unique link to this extract

Amazon goes nuclear, to invest more than $500m to develop small modular reactors • CNBC

Diana Olick:

»

Amazon Web Services is investing more than $500m in nuclear power, announcing three projects from Virginia to Washington state. AWS, Amazon’s subsidiary in cloud computing, has a massive and increasing need for clean energy as it expands its services into generative AI. It’s also a part of Amazon’s path to net-zero carbon emissions.

AWS announced it has signed an agreement with Dominion Energy, Virginia’s utility company, to explore the development of a small modular nuclear reactor, or SMR, near Dominion’s existing North Anna nuclear power station. Nuclear reactors produce no carbon emissions.

An SMR is an advanced type of nuclear reactor with a smaller footprint that allows it to be built closer to the grid. They also have faster construction times than traditional reactors, allowing them to come online sooner.

Amazon is the latest large tech company to buy into nuclear power to fuel the growing demands from data centers. Earlier this week, Google announced it will purchase power from SMR developer Kairos Power. Constellation Energy is restarting Three Mile Island to power Microsoft data centers.

“We see the need for gigawatts of power in the coming years, and there’s not going to be enough wind and solar projects to be able to meet the needs, and so nuclear is a great opportunity,” said Matthew Garman, CEO of AWS.

«

OK, so who’s next? Apple? Facebook? All that AI isn’t going to power itself, you know.
unique link to this extract

In South Korea, deepfake porn wrecks women’s lives and deepens gender conflict • AP News

Hyung-Jin Kim:

»

Three years after the 30-year-old South Korean woman received a barrage of online fake images that depicted her nude, she is still being treated for trauma. She struggles to talk with men. Using a mobile phone brings back the nightmare.

“It completely trampled me, even though it wasn’t a direct physical attack on my body,” she said in a phone interview with The Associated Press. She didn’t want her name revealed because of privacy concerns.

Many other South Korean women recently have come forward to share similar stories as South Korea grapples with a deluge of non-consensual, explicit deepfake videos and images that have become much more accessible and easier to create.

It was not until last week that parliament revised a law to make watching or possessing deepfake porn content illegal.

Most suspected perpetrators in South Korea are teenage boys. Observers say the boys target female friends, relatives and acquaintances — also mostly minors — as a prank, out of curiosity or misogyny. The attacks raise serious questions about school programs but also threaten to worsen an already troubled divide between men and women.

Deepfake porn in South Korea gained attention after unconfirmed lists of schools that had victims spread online in August. Many girls and women have hastily removed photos and videos from their Instagram, Facebook and other social media accounts. Thousands of young women have staged protests demanding stronger steps against deepfake porn. Politicians, academics and activists have held forums.

«

Noted the schools angle here last month: this seems to be growing.
unique link to this extract

Elon Musk’s X still struggles to grow subscription revenue • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

Elon Musk’s plan to reduce X’s dependence on advertising revenue by increasing paid subscriptions is still not taking off. According to a new, third-party analysis of the X Premium subscription service by app intelligence firm Appfigures, X has pulled in approximately $200m in in-app purchase revenue across iOS and Android since the original 2021 launch of the subscription formerly known as Twitter Blue.

There are some caveats to this figure. For starters, the sum is based only on those purchases made via the mobile app, not the mobile web or desktop web. That means the true sum is likely higher, especially given X offers a discount for web purchases.

Then there are the commission fees to consider. After paying app store commissions, X will have made a minimum of $140m, the firm estimates. However, that figure will also likely be higher because Apple and Google discount commissions from 30% to 15% in year two. (Appfigures doesn’t have a way to reliably calculate how many subscriptions are associated with each commission rate, we’re told).

For further context, though Twitter Blue was launched in 2021, it was relaunched in December 2022 as Twitter under Musk pushed into non-advertising revenue. Within the first three months post-relaunch, the service brought in only $11m in mobile app subscriptions, per data from app data provider Sensor Tower. A year ago, the company now called X launched two additional subscriptions, Basic and Premium+.

While there’s no way to definitively determine how many of X’s users are paying for X Premium subscriptions, there are ways to back into some estimates here, at least in terms of native mobile subscribers.

«

The backing in is pretty rough and ready, but leads – even generously – to paid subscriber numbers of fewer than 4 million users. There are various other estimates about income for “creators” (read: engagement baiters with blue ticks). Bloomberg said earlier this year that X revenue was just under $1.5bn, so subscriptions still don’t really matter.

And in not-mattering-related news…
unique link to this extract

Elon Musk’s X dodges EU’s DMA as bloc decides platform isn’t important enough for fairness controls • TechCrunch

Natasha Lomas:

»

Elon Musk’s X won’t be regulated under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) the Commission decided Wednesday, despite the social media platform hitting usage thresholds earlier this year.

The decision means X won’t be subject to the DMA’s list of operational ‘dos and don’ts’ — in areas like its use of third party data and user consent to tracking ads — for the foreseeable future. The pan-EU regime targets Big Tech with up-front rules that are generally aimed at ensuring fairer dealing with individual and business users (so far seven companies have been designated as DMA gatekeepers for a total of two dozen “core platform services”, including other social media giants like Meta and TikTok).

While not joining the DMA gatekeeper club is undoubtedly good news for Musk, since he dodges the regulatory risk of being subject to the bloc’s flagship market contestability regime — where penalties for violations can reach up to 10% of global annual turnover (or more for repeat breaches) — the reason for X not being designated may sting his ego: the Commission has decided X is not an important gateway for businesses to reach consumers.

Think of it as the EU throwing shade on the bottom-feeding caliber of X’s ad business these days. Or, tl;dr, if most of your ads are for drop-shipping companies flogging dubious-looking earwax cleaners or polyester rugs so violently patterned they could make a sofa-sitter seasick your business is irrelevant.
Still, X will surely be happy to flutter free of any DMA risk. The platform had submitted arguments against being designated when it notified the EU back in May that it had hit the 45 million monthly active users and 10,000 business users bar. We’ve contacted X’s press line for comment.

«

unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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.

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. 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:

»

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.”

«

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.
unique link to this extract

People think they already know everything they need to make decisions • Ars Technica

John Timmer:

»

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.

«

I find the last bit hard to believe, but OK – it is good news if it’s replicated.
unique link to this extract

Google signs advanced nuclear clean energy agreement with Kairos Power • Google Blog

Michael Terrell is senior director, energy and climate at Google:

»

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.

«

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.
unique link to this extract

Tesla and storytelling • Dustin Curtis

»

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.

«

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.
unique link to this extract

Hackers take control of robot vacuums in multiple cities, yell racial slurs • ABC News Australia

Julian Fell:

»

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.

«

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.
unique link to this extract

Tina Brown, the queen of legacy media, takes her diary to Substack • The New York Times

Jessica Testa:

»

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.

«

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.)
unique link to this extract

ChatGPT will happily write you a thinly disguised horoscope • Simon Willison’s Weblog

Simon Willison:

»

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 myself

Don’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:

»

[…] 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.

«

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.

«

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.
unique link to this extract

TV ads to target households on individual streets • Daily Telegraph via MSN

James Warrington:

»

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.

«

The joy of smart TVs, eh.
unique link to this extract

Dogs are entering a new wave of domestication • The Atlantic

Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods:

»

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.

«

unique link to this extract

Credit cards don’t require signatures any more. So why do we still sign? • WSJ

Oyin Adedoyin:

»

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.

«

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.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Is the Postcode Address File honestly worth £487m? The Royal Mail would like us to believe so. CC-licensed photo by Stuart Orford 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. Double helping, lucky you. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Apple study reveals critical flaws in AI’s logical reasoning abilities • MacRumors

Hartley Charlton:

»

Apple’s AI research team has uncovered significant weaknesses in the reasoning abilities of large language models, according to a newly published study.

The study, published on arXiv, outlines Apple’s evaluation of a range of leading language models, including those from OpenAI, Meta, and other prominent developers, to determine how well these models could handle mathematical reasoning tasks. The findings reveal that even slight changes in the phrasing of questions can cause major discrepancies in model performance that can undermine their reliability in scenarios requiring logical consistency.

Apple draws attention to a persistent problem in language models: their reliance on pattern matching rather than genuine logical reasoning. In several tests, the researchers demonstrated that adding irrelevant information to a question—details that should not affect the mathematical outcome—can lead to vastly different answers from the models.

One example given in the paper involves a simple math problem asking how many kiwis a person collected over several days. When irrelevant details about the size of some kiwis were introduced, models such as OpenAI’s o1 and Meta’s Llama incorrectly adjusted the final total, despite the extra information having no bearing on the solution: “We found no evidence of formal reasoning in language models. Their behavior is better explained by sophisticated pattern matching—so fragile, in fact, that changing names can alter results by ~10%.”

This fragility in reasoning prompted the researchers to conclude that the models do not use real logic to solve problems but instead rely on sophisticated pattern recognition learned during training.

«

These things can’t reason! It’s worth saying again – they’re stochastic parrots. I used ChatGPT the other day because I wanted a list of weather conditions, and separately a list of types of music groups (eg quartet, band, etc). But I’d never trust or expect them to do reasoning about content. People won’t trust the media, with content created by humans who’ve worked at refining their processes for years, but they’ll trust a machine? People are strange.
unique link to this extract

Chinese scientists use quantum computers to crack military-grade encryption — quantum attack poses a “real and substantial threat” to RSA and AES • Tom’s Hardware

Mark Tyson:

»

Chinese researchers claim to have uncovered a “real and substantial threat” to the classical cryptography widely used in banking and the military sectors. According to a report published by the South China Morning Post, the researchers utilized a D-Wave quantum computer to mount the first successful quantum attack on widely used cryptographic algorithms. These algorithms, classed as substitution–permutation network (SPN) cryptographic algorithms, are at the heart of widely used standards like the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).

The Chinese-language research paper is titled Quantum Annealing Public Key Cryptographic Attack Algorithm Based on D-Wave Advantage. The paper outlines how two technical approaches grounded in the quantum annealing algorithm can be used to challenge classical RSA cryptographic security.

The first attack route is “entirely based on D-Wave computers,” explains the paper. It coaxes the Canadian quantum computer into a cryptographic attack by presenting the combination of an optimization problem and exponential space search problem to the computer. The issues are solved using the Ising and QUBO models.

The second proposed attack incorporates classical computing-based cryptographic technology, such as the Schnorr signature algorithm and the Babai rounding technique, layered with a quantum annealing algorithm, to work “beyond the reach of traditional computing methods.”Applying the above techniques, with the help of the D-Wave quantum computer, the team led by Wang Chao of Shanghai University claim to have successfully breached the widely used SPN structure.

«

This feels important, but it’s also pretty impenetrable if you haven’t followed the quantum computing field. And I haven’t.
unique link to this extract

Taylor Lorenz’s plan to dance on legacy media’s grave • The New Yorker

Kyle Chayka:

»

In 2024, [former Verge, Business Insider, Daily Dot, The Atlantic, Washington Post, New York Times journalist Taylor] Lorenz told me, she no longer sees a reason to remain associated with the mainstream media. “I don’t need it for credibility,” she said. “I don’t need it to reach an audience. I don’t know what it does other than connote prestige for a shrinking amount of people.” She added, leaning into exactly the sort of rivalrous drama that plays well online, “Legacy media sucks, it’s crumbling, and, by the way, I’m going to dance on the grave of a lot of these places.”

In some ways, Lorenz’s decision feels belated. Around 2020, a wave of high-profile journalists left traditional outlets to take lucrative deals to launch newsletters at Substack. Lorenz told me that Substack offered her a deal back then, but she turned it down because she felt she needed the imprimatur of an institution to “get more eyes on my work” and persuade people to “take it seriously.” In the years since, the insurgent creator economy has tempted more journalists away to run upstart operations, and consumers have grown increasingly accustomed to paying piecemeal for access to individual writers.

Johnny Harris, formerly a video producer at Vox, developed his own documentary YouTube channel that now has nearly six million subscribers and covers subjects ranging from the criminal investigations of Donald Trump to the threat of China invading Taiwan. In August, the video producer Becca Farsace left the Verge to commit full time to her own YouTube channel, citing the fact that her old employers said she was not guaranteed the rights to content on her social-media channels. “It made me feel like the Verge owned me,” she said in a launch video for her channel, which hosts gadget reviews and now has more than a hundred thousand subscribers. Matthew Yglesias, who decamped to Substack from Vox (a site he co-founded) in 2020, says he has accrued roughly eight-thousand paid subscribers, and, according to Business Insider, he is “likely grossing at least $1.4 million a year.”

«

Like all these systems, a few people are absolutely raking it in, and many, many more are absolutely not.
unique link to this extract

Invisible text that AI chatbots understand and humans can’t? Yep, it’s a thing • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

What if there was a way to sneak malicious instructions into Claude, Copilot, or other top-name AI chatbots and get confidential data out of them by using characters large language models can recognize and their human users can’t? As it turns out, there was—and in some cases still is.

The invisible characters, the result of a quirk in the Unicode text encoding standard, create an ideal covert channel that can make it easier for attackers to conceal malicious payloads fed into an LLM. The hidden text can similarly obfuscate the exfiltration of passwords, financial information, or other secrets out of the same AI-powered bots. Because the hidden text can be combined with normal text, users can unwittingly paste it into prompts. The secret content can also be appended to visible text in chatbot output.

…To demonstrate the utility of “ASCII smuggling”—the term used to describe the embedding of invisible characters mirroring those contained in the American Standard Code for Information Interchange—researcher and term creator Johann Rehberger created two proof-of-concept (POC) attacks earlier this year that used the technique in hacks against Microsoft 365 Copilot. The service allows Microsoft users to use Copilot to process emails, documents, or any other content connected to their accounts. Both attacks searched a user’s inbox for sensitive secrets—in one case, sales figures and, in the other, a one-time passcode.

When found, the attacks induced Copilot to express the secrets in invisible characters and append them to a URL, along with instructions for the user to visit the link. Because the confidential information isn’t visible, the link appeared benign, so many users would see little reason not to click on it as instructed by Copilot. And with that, the invisible string of non-renderable characters covertly conveyed the secret messages inside to Rehberger’s server. Microsoft introduced mitigations for the attack several months after Rehberger privately reported it. The POCs are nonetheless enlightening.

«

Prompt injection takes many forms; I don’t think SQL injection was vulnerable to it (though control characters could count). New tech, variants of old forms of attack.
unique link to this extract

The Optimus robots at Tesla’s Cybercab event were humans in disguise • The Verge

Wes Davis:

»

Tesla made sure its Optimus robots were a big part of its extravagant, in-person Cybercab reveal last week. The robots mingled with the crowd, served drinks to and played games with guests, and danced inside a gazebo. Seemingly most surprisingly, they could even talk. But it was mostly just a show.

It’s obvious when you watch the videos from the event, of course. If Optimus really was a fully autonomous machine that could immediately react to verbal and visual cues while talking, one-on-one, to human beings in a dimly lit crowd, that would be mind-blowing.

Attendee Robert Scoble posted that he’d learned humans were “remote assisting” the robots, later clarifying that an engineer had told him the robots used AI to walk, spotted Electrek. Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas wrote that the robots “relied on tele-ops (human intervention)” in a note, the outlet reports.

There are obvious tells to back those claims up, like the fact that the robots all have different voices or that their responses were immediate, with gesticulation to match.

It doesn’t feel like Tesla was going out of its way to make anyone think the Optimus machines were acting on their own. In another video that Jalopnik pointed to, an Optimus’ voice jokingly told Scoble that “it might be some” when he asked it how much it was controlled by AI.

«

It’s just so pathetic. Musk has nothing to show, but he feels he needs to show something, so he shows rubbish.
unique link to this extract

“I’m suing the council for £495m because they won’t give me back my bin bag” • Wales Online

Conor Gogarty:

»

A man has filed a court claim against Newport council in a “last resort” to get back almost half a billion pounds’ worth of Bitcoin. A mix-up saw James Howells’ hard drive dumped at a recycling centre in 2013 causing him to lose access to cryptocurrency coins which have since rocketed in value.

WalesOnline has seen a court document that says Mr Howells, 39, is suing the council for £495,314,800 in damages, which was the peak valuation of his 8,000 Bitcoins from earlier this year. But he told us this is not a reflection of “what is really going on” and the point is to “leverage” the council into agreeing to an excavation of its landfill to avoid a legal battle. Mr Howells says he has assembled a team of experts who would carry out the £10million dig at no cost to the council. He is also offering the council 10% of the coins’ value if recovered.

The case is due to be heard in December after what Mr Howells described as more than a decade of being “largely ignored” by the council. “I’m still allocating 10% of the value for the council even though they have been problematic throughout,” he said. “That would be £41m based on today’s rate but in the future it could be hundreds of millions. If they had spoken to me in 2013 this place would look like Las Vegas now. Newport would look like Dubai. That’s the kind of opportunity they’ve missed.”

The hard drive disaster unfolded after a miscommunication between the IT engineer and his then-partner. Mr Howells, who learned about Bitcoin in 2009 by spending time on IT forums, believes he was one of the very first miners of the cryptocurrency. In basic terms he created the 8,000 coins himself and they cost him nothing beyond pennies’ worth of electricity to run his laptop. He stored the private key needed to access the coins on a 2.5in hard drive which he put in a drawer at his home office.

In August 2013 he had a clearout of equipment. Looking through his drawers he came across two hard drives of the same size. One contained the Bitcoin data while the other was blank. Mistakenly he put the Bitcoin one into a black bin liner.

«

Alex Hern’s finest moment (for me) as a reporter was tracking this guy down in the first place, in November 2013, based on a few posts on Reddit. The saga grinds on, it seems.
unique link to this extract

Missing immune cells may explain why COVID-19 vaccine protection quickly wanes • Science

Jon Cohen:

»

Neither vaccinations nor immunity from infections seem to thwart SARS-CoV-2 for long. The frequency of new infections within a few months of a previous bout or a shot is one of COVID-19’s most vexing puzzles. Now, scientists have learned that a little-known type of immune cell in the bone marrow may play a major role in this failure.

The study, which appeared last month in Nature Medicine, found that people who received repeated doses of vaccine, and in some cases also became infected with SARS-CoV-2, largely failed to make special antibody-producing cells called long-lived plasma cells (LLPCs). “That’s really, really interesting,” says Mark Slifka, an immunologist at the Oregon Health & Science University who was not involved with the work. The study authors say their finding may indicate a way to make better COVID-19 vaccines: by altering how they present the spike surface protein of SARS-CoV-2 to a person’s immune cells.

Durability is an age-old bugaboo of vaccine designers. Some vaccines, particularly ones made from weakened versions of viruses, can protect people for decades, even life. Yet others lose effectiveness within months. “We really haven’t overcome this challenge,” says Akiko Iwasaki, a Yale University immunologist who is developing a nasal COVID-19 vaccine she hopes can be given often enough to get around the durability problem.

«

I wondered if this was just about mRNA vaccination; that if you had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 before a vaccination, whether you might have the LLPCs. However:

»

An earlier study of bone marrow from 20 people who had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 but never vaccinated against it also found that they were “deficient” in LLPCs specific to SARS-CoV-2 compared with those for tetanus.

«

unique link to this extract

I wish I went before Mary Shelley in this storytelling contest • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Mike Drucker:

»

“‘We will each write a ghost story,’ said Lord Byron; and his proposition was acceded to. There were four of us.” – Mary Shelley, in the introduction to Frankenstein.

Wow, Mary! Wow. Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. I can’t imagine anything more chilling. In fact, it’s so chilling that I think we should probably call off the rest of the storytelling contest right now. I don’t even need to take my turn.

Oh, are you sure?

Still?

Because I kind of wish I had gone first. My thing isn’t even that scary. Or about humankind. It’s just, well, did everyone else do this overnight? Because I feel like Mary Shelley may have pre-written her idea. All I’m saying is it feels pretty fleshed out already. I’m not trying to accuse anyone of anything. It’s just, I thought we were telling stories we came up with in the last twenty-four hours and not workshopping full novel ideas.

No, I didn’t dislike the story. It’s not about a ghost, so it doesn’t fit in the rules laid out by Lord Byron, but I love it! “A Modern Prometheus,” yeah, no, I get it. It’s really smart. And it makes you think about playing God and stuff, even though none of us would be able to play God that way. I know it’s a metaphor, but maybe try a more approachable idea for hubris? Just if you’re trying to pitch this later. I don’t even know that many people who have electricity, so it’s like, who’s going to get the message? Half the people who read this will just want the monster to wave his hands at fire or something.

«

This just gets better and better.
unique link to this extract

TikTok knows its app is harming kids, new internal documents show • NPR

Bobby Allyn, Sylvia Goodman and Dara Kerr:

»

For the first time, internal TikTok communications have been made public that show a company unconcerned with the harms the app poses for American teenagers. This is despite its own research validating many child safety concerns.

The confidential material was part of a more than two-year investigation into TikTok by 14 attorneys general that led to state officials suing the company on Tuesday. The lawsuit alleges that TikTok was designed with the express intention of addicting young people to the app. The states argue the multi-billion-dollar company deceived the public about the risks.

In each of the separate lawsuits state regulators filed, dozens of internal communications, documents and research data were redacted — blacked-out from public view — since authorities entered into confidentiality agreements with TikTok.

But in one of the lawsuits, filed by the Kentucky Attorney General’s Office, the redactions were faulty. This was revealed when Kentucky Public Radio copied-and-pasted excerpts of the redacted material, bringing to light some 30 pages of documents that had been kept secret.

After Kentucky Public Radio published excerpts of the redacted material, a state judge sealed the entire complaint following a request from the attorney general’s office “to ensure that any settlement documents and related information, confidential commercial and trade secret information, and other protected information was not improperly disseminated,” according to an emergency motion to seal the complaint filed on Wednesday by Kentucky officials.

«

unique link to this extract

No, the Postcode Address File should not cost £487m • Peter K Wells

Peter Wells:

»

In 2021 the UK government’s Geospatial Commission prepared a briefing paper for some discussions about address data. It has been released to the journalist James O’Malley after a freedom of information request.

The paper was prepared in response to the long-running campaign asking the government to deliver on political commitments to make the list of UK addresses – and other non-personal geospatial data – freely available. People could then use the data to improve public services or build innovative new businesses.

The paper includes the mind-boggling statement that a government project in 2016 estimated that the cost to the UK government of buying back UK address data [in effect the Postcode Address File, or PAF] from the Royal Mail would be £487m. 

Yes, you read that right. That figure was four hundred and eighty seven million pounds.

It’s a big number and – if true – one that would call into question the whole campaign.

But it doesn’t hold up to critical scrutiny and, unfortunately, the 2021 paper repeats this estimate without questioning it.

The civil service needs to be less credulous when it comes to claims over the financial value of data assets, and the UK government needs some fresh analysis.

«

The PAF generates £30m in revenue and £3m in profit annually. A £487m valuation is 162 P/E and makes the PAF worth 15% of Royal Mail’s entire business. How about the government nationalises it and promises to pay Royal Mail £3m for the next 163 years?
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: There should be a double helping of emails. Apologies. WordPress keeps screwing around with the design of its blog pages, and that screws with my scripts which collate and schedule the posts. Fingers crossed.

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.

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 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:

»

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.

«

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).
unique link to this extract

The editors protecting Wikipedia from AI hoaxes • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

»

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.

«

There’s an impressive one given, which is a long new article about an Ottoman fortress which has tons of detail. Also, never existed.
unique link to this extract

WordPress.org’s latest move involves taking control of a WP Engine plugin • The Verge

Wes Davis:

»

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.”

«

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.
unique link to this extract

The scourge of ‘win probability’ in sports • The Atlantic

Ross Andersen:

»

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.”

«

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.
unique link to this extract

The retreat To Muskworld • niedermeyer.io

E.W. Niedermeyer:

»

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.

«

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.
unique link to this extract

Google’s dominant search business is under attack, from TikTok to AI • WSJ

Suzanne Vranica and Miles Kruppa:

»

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.”

«

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.
unique link to this extract

ADM’s CCS project can’t seal the deal • CTVC

»

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).

«

CCS has always seemed like a daft idea. Now we’re seeing it’s impractical too.
unique link to this extract

Carbon Mapper releases first emissions detections from the Tanager-1 satellite • Carbon Mapper

Carbon Mapper Inc.:

»

“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.

«

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.
unique link to this extract

Mosaic Netscape 0.9 was released 30 years ago on Sunday • jwz

Jamie Zawinski was one of the founders of Netscape and, later, Mozilla:

»

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.

«

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.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Kickers in American football have discovered the benefits of physical training – and are now making field goals almost from the halfway line. CC-licensed photo by Ed Schipul 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 10 links for you. Flying. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The future of live news online sucks • Read Max

Max Read:

»

On Wednesday evening, where did you go to find up-to-the-minute news about Hurricane Milton? If you checked X.com at around 8 p.m., as the storm made landfall in Tampa and Sarasota, and clicked on the prominent “Hurricane Milton” link in the “Happening now” sidebar, you were taken to a landing page with a few videos from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and an exhortation to “check back later” because there was “nothing to see now.” Three hours later, at 11 p.m., nothing new had been added:

There was, of course, plenty to see on Wednesday night; it was just that it was basically impossible to find any of it on Twitter. The landing page was empty; the FYP feed worse than useless; the machine-curated hashtag pages a mix of days-old posts and influencers I’d never heard of sharing the same handful of images and videos. This was not a problem of “misinformation,” to be clear, so much as one of “no information”: Twitter seemed effectively incapable of serving me even relevant, up-to-the-minute fake stuff, let alone any actual news. Unless you’d already searched out and made a list of local journalists, meteorologists, and storm chasers, it was impossible to tell from Twitter alone where the storm was, how hard it was hitting, what its effects looked like, or how people were responding.

Instead–in place of the professional and citizen journalists, the eager experts, and the volunteer aggregators–what I found was clipped videos from a bunch of fucking freaks.

…It–really!–wasn’t always this way. For most of the Obama-Trump Era–the Long 2010s–Twitter was the website to go to for up-to-the-minute updates about Things That Were Happening–hurricanes, invasions, elections–from journalists, experts, and people on the ground. It was far from perfect; it was relatively easy for hoaxes to spread and morons to gain attention. But it more or less worked: Twitter’s search and sorting mechanisms, helped along by the many users who treated “posting about news” as an uncompensated part-time job, tended to surface interesting and relevant information in a timely fashion.

But “News,” even breaking news, is not really a priority for Twitter anymore, nor is it for any social-media platform.

«

This is a good point. I too was trying to find information about the hurricane; Twitter was basically a waste of time. Nowhere is good. In the comments, people suggested that YouTube is now the place to go for live info.
unique link to this extract

Hacked ‘AI Girlfriend’ data shows prompts describing child sexual abuse • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

A hacker has targeted a website that lets users create their own “uncensored” AI-powered sexual partners and stolen a massive database of users’ interactions with their chatbots.

The data, taken from a site called Muah.ai and viewed by 404 Media, includes chatbot prompts that reveal users’ sexual fantasies. In many instances, users are trying to create chatbots that roleplay child sexual abuse scenarios. These prompts are in turn linked to email addresses, many of which appear to be personal accounts with users’ real names.

“I went to the site to jerk off (to an *adult* scenario, to be clear) and noticed that it looked like it [the Muah.ai website] was put together pretty poorly,” the hacker told 404 Media. “It’s basically a handful of open-source projects duct-taped together. I started poking around and found some vulnerabilities relatively quickly. At the start it was mostly just curiosity but I decided to contact you once I saw what was in the database.”

The administrator of Muah.ai, who used the name Harvard Han, told 404 Media in an email that “the data breach was financed by our competitors in the uncensored AI industry who are profit driven, whereas Muah AI becomes a target for being a community driven project.” The site’s operators detected that it was hacked last week.

Han didn’t provide 404 Media with any evidence for their claim, and the hacker said they do work in the tech industry but not on AI.

“We have a team of moderation staff that suspend and delete ALL child related chatbots on our card gallery, discord, reddit, etc,” Han added

«

Suuuure they have a team that does that. Sure they do. Of course they do. Open source projects running websites always have loads of administrators doing that sort of thing.
unique link to this extract

How to hire a dark net hitman • How to Survive the Internet

Jamie Bartlett:

»

Besa Mafia was a dark net site offering hitmen for hire. It worked something like this: a user could connect to the site using the Tor browser and request a hit. They’d send over some bitcoin (prices started from $5,000 USD for ‘death by shotgun’). Then they’d upload the name, address, photographs, of who they wanted killed. Plus any extra requests: make it look like a bungled robbery; need it done next week, etc. The website owner, a mysterious Romanian called ‘Yura’ would then connect them with a specialist hitman to carry out the commission.   

I know all about the dark net. I wrote a book about it and still jump on often to see what the latest trends are. Yes: you can buy all manner of illicit goods there. Stolen credit cards, identity documents, drugs (of course). You can purchase ransomware-as-a-service and chat with hackers to hire. You can download child sexual abuse images. But there has always been one area shrouded in mystery, even for me. Can you really order a hitman with a few clicks? There have always been hitman sites, I saw one while researching my book. But do they work? Are they real?  

Finally [the podcast] Kill List provides an answer. As he poked around, IT-guy Chris stumbled across a vulnerability on the site, and was able to access the ‘back end’. From there he could see what Yura could see: hundreds of names. Each one, a person someone else wanted dead. And next to each name: photographs, addresses, commute routes, phone numbers. Victims were from all over the world. Switzerland, Spain, the Czech Republic, the US, the UK. And alongside each, gruesome requests:  

Make it look like a road accident  

I would just like his person to be shot and killed. Where, how and what week does not bother me

This person needs to go away, but disposed of without a trace  

Need target killed, make it look like an accident  

And in 175 cases there was also evidence of a successful bitcoin payment. In other words: people had paid real money to have them killed.  

«

It’s now a big BBC podcast, which is a remarkable achievement. Hacking for good.
unique link to this extract

They’re better, longer and more valuable than ever: the NFL’s newest superstars are kickers • WSJ

Andrew Beaton and Rosie Ettenheim:

»

This season, teams are making more field goals per game than ever— even as they’re also hitting them from more far-flung distances. Some 29% of this year’s attempts have been from 50-plus yards, far and away the most in NFL history. At the same time, 76% of those long-distance kicks have gone in, which is easily the highest percentage ever. 

Somehow kickers are becoming more accurate and more powerful at the same time. Last week alone, there were 15 tries from at least 50 yards—and 12 of them went in. 

The shift has completely transformed some of football’s most basic dynamics. Now, offenses are often just a couple first downs away from a spot on the field where they can plausibly try a field goal instead of punting. It’s why field goals are at an all-time high, even though this is also an era when coaches are more inclined to leave kickers on the sideline and go for it on fourth downs. 

Those inside the game say there are a number of forces at work, from the precision of long-snappers to the technology used in training and a ball that flies better through the air. But they also say it boils down to something simple: kickers have gotten both far stronger and more technically sound than prior generations. 

The widespread proliferation of kicking camps has allowed kids to hone their crafts beginning at a young age. And kickers, who weren’t historically known as gym rats, now rigorously approach strength training. That’s why former NFL kicker Jay Feely says it’s “similar to Tiger Woods” and how he changed golf by adding power—forcing his competitors to do the same to keep up. 

“It’s unbelievable,” Feely says. “Now coaches expect to make these kicks, and so they’re more willing to attempt these kicks.”

«

The maths needs a little explanation (for non-gridiron fans): the end zone is 10 yards long, and the goalposts are at the end. So a 50-yard kick is made from the opponents’ 40-yard line, which is 10 yards inside their half. The way that physicality is changing sports shows up in all sorts of subtle ways.
unique link to this extract

How everyone got lost in Netflix’s endless library • The New York Times

Willy Staley:

»

For a company like Apple, where the streaming business is practically an afterthought, the shows it produces are stashed away in the app and hardly spoken of, no matter how big their budget and how impressive the talent involved. In some instances, streamers have shelved finished movies entirely so they could write down the losses on their taxes. These are the incentives of the streaming marketplace pushed to their logical extremes: mass entertainment completely severed from market signal — paradoxically by entities that know more about our viewing habits than ever before.

Which isn’t to say that the streamers don’t make hits and that people don’t watch and enjoy a lot of streaming television, as Netflix’s 183 billion viewer hours in 2023 can attest. But it can certainly account for the rise of so-called Mid TV: shows that look expensive, are reasonably smart and packed with talent and somehow manage to be, in the Times TV critic James Poniewozik’s words, “. . . fine?” There’s no denying that, in the long journey prestige TV has taken from “The Wire” to “The Bear,” a certain slackness has crept in: comedies without many jokes, dramas without any stakes, a pronounced preference for backward-looking plotting that fixates on characters’ traumas, a plague of visibly Canadian filming locations, “Barry.”

The first generation of prestige shows was created by veterans of linear TV who longed for creative freedom but knew the rudiments of the business, the things that kept you watching through the commercial breaks: pacing, structure, believable dialogue. But the leash has been off for a decade now, and eventually you face the same problem [original Netflix series] Richie Rich did: when you’re drowning in cash, it’s always tempting to say yes.

Maybe the most disorienting outcome of this information poverty has been the significant disconnects that can — and do — arise between what people watch and what we think we’re watching. This has been a persistent element of TV criticism since at least “Mad Men,” but it’s hard not to sense that things have gotten worse since then.

«

A thoughtful essay: it’s notable how Netflix is getting absolutely roasted for cancelling “Kaos”, a clever series based on the Greek myths, after one season. Meanwhile Apple keeps turning up with Slow Horses, which will next year hit Season 5. There’s entirely too much Mid TV.
unique link to this extract

Forums are still alive, active, and a treasure trove of information • Aftermath

Chris Person:

»

When I want information, like the real stuff, I go to forums. Over the years, forums did not really get smaller, so much as the rest of the internet just got bigger. Reddit, Discord and Facebook groups have filled a lot of that space, but there is just certain information that requires the dedication of adults who have specifically signed up to be in one kind of community. This blog is a salute to those forums that are either worth participating in or at least looking at in bewilderment.

What follows is a list of forums that range from at least interesting to good. I will attempt to contextualize the ones I know well. This post is by no means supposed to be complete and will be updated whenever I find more good forums.

«

Forums tend to have the problem, for me, that you need to do a ton of digging through to find the useful stuff. Though it’s not that different on social media! Perhaps one forgets the pain.

Anyhow, if you’re in need of a forum about something or other (which probably doesn’t show up in search results), this is for you.
unique link to this extract

Have we reached peak human life span? • The New York Times

Dana Smith:

»

The oldest human on record, Jeanne Calment of France, lived to the age of 122. What are the odds that the rest of us get there, too?

Not high, barring a transformative medical breakthrough, according to research published Monday in the journal Nature Aging.

The study looked at data on life expectancy at birth collected between 1990 and 2019 from some of the places where people typically live the longest: Australia, France, Italy, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. Data from the United States was also included, though the country’s life expectancy is lower.

The researchers found that while average life expectancies increased during that time in all of the locations, the rates at which they rose slowed down. The one exception was Hong Kong, where life expectancy did not decelerate.

The data suggests that after decades of life expectancy marching upward thanks to medical and technological advancements, humans could be closing in on the limits of what’s possible for average life span.

“We’re basically suggesting that as long as we live now is about as long as we’re going to live,” said S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois Chicago, who led the study. He predicted maximum life expectancy will end up around 87 years — approximately 84 for men, and 90 for women — an average age that several countries are already close to achieving.

«

Without some amazing bit of genetic wizardry (telomeres get hyped up every ten years or so as a new group of people rediscover them), it seems like only 15% of women could ever be centenarians, and 5% of men. The question always is, are those extra years the ones you want to live?
unique link to this extract

How North Korea infiltrated the crypto industry • Coindesk

Sam Kessler:

»

• CoinDesk identified more than a dozen crypto companies that unknowingly hired IT workers from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), including such well-established blockchain projects as Injective, ZeroLend, Fantom, Sushi, Yearn Finance and Cosmos Hub.

• The workers used fake IDs, successfully navigated interviews, passed reference checks and presented genuine work histories.

• Hiring DPRK workers is against the law in the U.S. and other countries that sanction North Korea. It also presents a security risk: CoinDesk encountered multiple examples of companies hiring DPRK IT workers and subsequently getting hacked.

• “Everyone is struggling to filter out these people,” said Zaki Manian, a prominent blockchain developer who says he inadvertently hired two DPRK IT workers to help develop the Cosmos Hub blockchain in 2021.

«

I think this is the same story, in essence, as the Mandiant story a week ago, but showing that it was concentrated in the crypto industry – of course: slack hiring, desperate for workers, and easy access to lots of untraceable money. If you’re a country which is a pariah state then what’s not to like about the crypto industry?
unique link to this extract

The fight that nearly destroyed the Letterboxd community • WIRED

Adam Bumas:

»

THINGS LIKE THIS don’t happen on Letterboxd. It’s supposed to be a place where movie nerds share their love of cinema, a throwback to the internet’s pre-Facebook halcyon days. But lately, it’s been reeling from a disagreement between the site’s users and staff that got so big, major directors started weighing in. To make matters worse, it wasn’t some argument about Marvel movies or Martin Scorsese. It was about anime.

The trouble started on September 9, when Letterboxd’s curators updated the platform’s official list of top-rated movies. Usually, the list changes only when a new movie gets rated highly enough to remove another from the top 250, but Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion had gone from No. 23 overall to off the list entirely. In a comment on the list, curator Dave Vis called the removal “an effort to align our eligibility rules,” made after “careful consideration.”

Letterboxd’s users, by and large, didn’t agree that the effort had been very careful. The comment section of the “official top 100 animation” list, which also removed End of Evangelion, became a pressure chamber of fury, disagreement, and confusion, filled with the kind of negativity and argument the site has made a point of avoiding.

Letterboxd has grown steadily since its 2011 launch, and now boasts more than 15 million users. Until now, it has largely steered clear of growing pains, even as the platform took off during people’s Covid-19-lockdown-induced movie marathons. If anything, it has become a source for memes on other platforms like TikTok and X. But the drawback of creating a community modeled after the 2000s internet is re-creating the same tensions between moderators and users that plagued early social media platforms, which is pretty much what happened when End of Evangelion fell off the top lists.

«

You’re telling me that social patterns repeat again and again on the internet? Amazing.
unique link to this extract

PC shipments stuck in neutral despite AI buzz • The Register

Dan Robinson:

»

The PC market is not showing many signs of a rebound, despite the hype around AI PCs, with market watchers split over whether unit shipments are up or down slightly.

Those magical AI PC boxes were supposed to fire up buyer enthusiasm and spur the somewhat listless market for desktop and laptop systems into significant growth territory, but that doesn’t appear to be happening.

According to the latest figures from Gartner, global PC shipments totaled 62.9m units during Q3 of this year, representing a 1.3% decline compared with the same period last year. However, this does follow three consecutive quarters of modest growth.

“Even with a full line-up of Windows-based AI PCs for both Arm and x86 in the third quarter of 2024, AI PCs did not boost the demand for PCs since buyers have yet to see their clear benefits or business value,” commented Gartner Director Analyst Mikako Kitagawa.

This is perhaps understandable when AI PCs are largely just a marketing concept, and vendors can’t agree on exactly what the the definition of an AI PC should be. Even worse, some buyers of Arm-based Copilot+ machines discovered that their performance isn’t actually very good with some applications.

«

The hope that sprinkling some AI fairy dust on PCs would suddenly turn them into must-replace boxes was always overblown. I feel we’re past the point where they’re a commodity, and nothing exciting will ever happen in PCs again.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The US wants to get rid of all its lead water pipes in ten years – a decade after the Flint scandal. CC-licensed photo by Louise Devitt 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. Like the petrol. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google faces US government attempt to break it up • The Guardian

Jack Simpson:

»

The Department of Justice has filed court papers that say it is considering enforcing “structural remedies” that would prevent Google from using some of its products such as Chrome, Android and Play, which the DoJ argues give the company an advantage over rivals.

Other actions being considered include blocking Google from paying to have its search engine pre-installed on smartphones and other devices.

Google, which is owned by Alphabet, said it would challenge any case by the DoJ and that the proposals marked an “overreach” by the government that would harm consumers.

The latest filing comes after a court ruling in August in favour of the DoJ that found Google, which controls 90% of the global search market, had violated antitrust laws and spent billions building up an illegal monopoly. The ruling paved the way for the current lawsuit by the justice department that will rule on potential actions to counteract Google’s market domination.

The filing said Google’s conduct had resulted in “interlocking and pernicious harms” to users, and the importance of restoring competition to a market, which was “indispensable” to Americans, could not be overstated.

The judgment said: “Plaintiffs are considering behavioural and structural remedies that would prevent Google from using products such as Chrome, Play, and Android to advantage Google search and Google search-related products and features – including emerging search access points and features, such as artificial intelligence –over rivals or new entrants.”

The move may also prevent Google from being able to pay major phone companies such as Apple and Samsung for Chrome to be the default browser on their devices. In 2021, Google paid companies $26.3bn to ensure its search engine was the default option in the products.

«

To be decided by the judge some time next summer, but the landscape in a few years will likely look very different.
unique link to this extract

Biden sets 10-year deadline for US cities to replace lead pipes nationwide • AP News

Matthew Daly and Michael Phillis:

»

A decade after the Flint, Michigan, water crisis raised alarms about the continuing dangers of lead in tap water, President Joe Biden on Tuesday set a 10-year deadline for cities across the nation to replace their lead pipes, finalizing an aggressive approach aimed at ensuring that drinking water is safe for all Americans.

Biden announced the final Environmental Protection Agency rule during a visit to the swing state of Wisconsin in the final month of a tight presidential campaign. The announcement highlights an issue — safe drinking water — that Kamala Harris has prioritized as vice president and during her presidential campaign. The new rule supplants a looser standard set by former President Donald Trump’s administration that did not include a universal requirement to replace lead pipes.

“Folks, what is a government for if it cannot protect the public health?” Biden asked a crowd of union members at a cavernous Department of Public Works warehouse in Milwaukee. The city has the fifth-highest number of lead pipes in the nation, according to the EPA.

Decades after the dangers of lead pipes were clear, more than 9 million lead pipes remain in use, a fact Biden called shameful.

«

Ten years later, and there’s another ten years to go? I thought Britain might have done better, but then found this June 2023 article which says that there are at least three million lead pipes in the network. It turns out to be a shockingly high proportion – a third of homes have some lead piping.
unique link to this extract

FEMA adds misinformation to its list of disasters to clean up • The Verge

Lauren Feiner:

»

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is fighting misinformation on top of a major storm cleanup in Florida as Hurricane Milton rapidly intensifies just after Hurricane Helene rocked the state.

FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell told reporters on a call Tuesday that misinformation around the storms is “absolutely the worst I have ever seen,” according to Politico. FEMA posted a rumor response page about the hurricane, and though it’s not the first time it’s taken that kind of approach, Criswell said, “I anticipated some of this, but not to the extent that we’re seeing.”

FEMA’s rumor response page includes fact-checks to claims made by former President Donald Trump, like that the agency will only provide $750 to disaster survivors. FEMA says that’s just the amount provided quickly through “Serious Needs Assistance” for food and emergency supplies, but survivors could still be eligible for other types of funds, too. Other fact-checks include debunking the false claim that FEMA disaster response resources were diverted to border issues. FEMA says “Disaster Relief Fund money has not been diverted to other, non-disaster related efforts.”

Elon Musk, one of Trump’s most prominent tech backers, has also contributed to the misinformation, according to FEMA officials. Musk claimed on X last week that FEMA was “actively blocking citizens who try to help.” FEMA’s acting director for response and recovery, Keith Turi, told ABC that’s “absolutely not true. FEMA does not block anyone from helping or assisting. We do not confiscate supplies and use them for other purposes. In fact, we do the exact opposite.”

«

Personally I’m already wondering what happens to Musk’s interest in X/Twitter if (as increasingly seems possible) Trump does not win. Will he really think it’s worth burning all that money for something which failed to achieve what he wanted in propaganda terms? Will he just let it decline, or will he try to sell it?
unique link to this extract

Xiaohongshu helps Southeast Asia with tourism recovery post Covid-19 • Rest of World

Zhaoyin Feng:

»

At 5 a.m., the air around Ijen volcano in eastern Java, Indonesia, is thick with bright yellow smoke. Undeterred, young Chinese tourists don gas masks and flock to the rim of the active volcano crater at sunrise, eager to capture the perfect photo. Steps away from a sheer drop into the turquoise volcanic lake, some whip out their phones to check Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social media app, for the best vantage point. Within hours, their snapshots may join the thousands already shared on the platform. 

Aang Koen is familiar with this phenomenon. The 48-year-old Indonesian owns a travel agency in Surabaya and organizes tours to Ijen. For years, his clientele was predominantly European, but since early 2023, Koen’s business has undergone a dramatic shift. Now, 60% of his clients are Chinese, most of whom found him on Xiaohongshu. 

“My business is getting famous,” he told Rest of World. Ijen was little-known among Chinese travelers before the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, Koen said, but the volcano rim pictures on Xiaohongshu have made it a popular destination. Almost all of his Chinese clients asked to include Ijen in their tours.

Xiaohongshu is often referred to as “China’s Instagram,” but it offers something that Instagram and other social media apps generally do not: in-depth, user-generated travel advice and itineraries. Travel posts on the app often include comprehensive hotel and restaurant reviews, tips on transportation logistics, and curated lists of shops and attractions, all complemented by stunning snapshots. With over 300 million monthly active users, Xiaohongshu has become a beloved resource among young Chinese travelers, many of whom consider it their go-to travel guide.

«

Literally the rest of the world, and pretty much unknown to almost anyone in the western world. Apart from you, of course.
unique link to this extract

The bill finally comes due for Elon Musk • The Verge

Andrew Hawkins:

»

For almost as long as he’s been CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk has been bullshitting us about self-driving cars. 

In 2016, he said Tesla self-driving cars were “two years away.” A year later, it was “six months, definitely,” and customers would be able to actually sleep in their Tesla in “two years.” In 2018, it was still a “year away” and would be “200% safer” than human driving. In 2019, he said there would be “feature complete full self-driving this year.” There hasn’t been a year go by without Musk promising the imminent arrival of a fully driverless Tesla. 

This week, it’s finally here. Or at least that’s what Musk says.

On October 10th, Tesla will reveal its long-awaited “robotaxi,” a supposedly fully autonomous vehicle that Musk has said will catapult the company into trillion-dollar status. It will be some combination of “Uber and Airbnb,” Musk said during a recent earnings call, allowing Tesla owners to serve as landlords for their driverless cars as they roam about the cityscape, picking up and dropping off strangers. And it will be futuristic in its design, with Bloomberg reporting that it will be a two-seater with butterfly wing doors. Musk has been calling it the “Cybercab.”

The event, which will be held on the film lot of Warner Bros. in Burbank, California, will be the culmination of almost a decade of blown deadlines and broken promises from Musk, a moment when the richest man in the world will finally be forced to stop hiding behind his own bluster and actually show us what he’s been working on. 

«

I detect a certain amount of scepticism on the part of Mr Hawkins here. All, one has to agree, justified.
unique link to this extract

Protein structure prediction wins the Nobel • Ars Technica

John Timmer:

»

Chemically, proteins are a linear string of amino acids linked together, with living creatures typically having the choice of 20 different amino acids for each position along the string. Most of those 20 have distinctive chemical properties: some are acidic, others basic; some may be negatively charged, others positively charged, and still others neutral, etc. These properties allow different areas of the string to interact with each other, causing it to fold up into a complex three-dimensional structure. That structure is essential for the protein’s function.

Typically, figuring out the structure involves laborious biochemistry to purify the protein, followed by a number of imaging techniques to determine where each of its atoms resides. But in theory, all of that should be predictable since the structure is just the product of chemistry and physics. Since any amino acid could potentially interact with any other on the chain, however, the complexity of making predictions rises very rapidly with the length of the protein. Extend it out past a dozen amino acids long, and it could quickly humble the most powerful supercomputers.

A lot of work over the years went into trying to figure out computational shortcuts. DeepMind, by contrast, did what it did best and put an AI on the case. For protein folding, the AI was trained on two large existing data sets. One included every protein structure that had been solved through lab work, allowing it to extract general principles for how different amino acids typically interact. The second was the sequence of every protein we’ve determined, allowing it to identify proteins related through evolution and determine what sorts of flexibility can be tolerated in a given structure.

The net result is software that produced reasonable structural predictions, easily beating every other software package we’d developed in a regular computational challenge. DeepMind has since used it to generate predictions for most of the existing protein-coding genes in the databases (it still struggles with excessively long ones) and has continued to upgrade the software. The predictions aren’t perfect, and some appear to stumble badly, but when the alternative is simply a string of amino acids and a shrug, this represents a major advance.

«

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry went jointly to Demis Hassabis and John Junper of DeepMind for their AlphaFold work (described above), and also to Professor David Baker, who did a variant of that. Notable how quickly this has won the Nobel: AlphaFold only appeared in 2020.
unique link to this extract

Quantifying ‘The Kevin Bacon Game’: a statistical exploration of Hollywood’s most connected actors • Stat Significant

Daniel Parris:

»

This modeling technique also broadly applies to the film industry, where we can create networks using actors as nodes and movies as edges. Consider the following example graph with Jack Nicholson, Adam Sandler, and Leonardo DiCaprio:

Nicholson and Sandler were in Anger Management together.
DiCaprio and Nicholson were both in The Departed.
The resulting graph looks something like this:

We can build a network featuring every actor in Hollywood and then calculate which figures are most central to the film industry’s casting graph. Below is an example network of the 50 most connected actors in entertainment (to use more than 50 examples would render the visual unreadable). The actors (nodes) that are largest and most central, like Morgan Freeman and Bruce Willis, are ideal fodder for the Kevin Bacon game—a cheat code for connecting disparate careers via extensive movie credits.

An example network of actors connected by co-starring film credits.

We’ll use “eigenvector centrality” to measure an actor’s network importance, which considers both direct connections and the influence of second and third-order connections. A higher score means an actor is more central to our casting network.

When we calculate our centrality metric for every actor in the film industry, our top scorers are prolific performers who have appeared in numerous ensemble projects (which is not surprising at all).

«

I won’t spoil the surprise, but see if you can guess who the most connected actor is. (It’s no longer Kevin Bacon, though with all the adverts he’s doing for EE, maybe he could claim still to be. Brm-tish.)
unique link to this extract

How Meta brings in millions off political violence • The Markup

Colin Lecher and Tomas Apodaca:

»

After the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in July, the merchandise started showing up on Facebook.

Trump, fist in the air, face bloodied from a bullet, appeared on everything. Coffee mugs. Hawaiian shirts. Trading cards. Commemorative coins. Heart ornaments. Ads for these products used images captured at the scene by Doug Mills for the New York Times and Evan Vucci for the Associated Press, showing Trump yelling “fight” after the shooting. The Trump campaign itself even offered some gear commemorating his survival.

As the Secret Service drew scrutiny and law enforcement searched for a motive, online advertisers saw a business opportunity in the moment, pumping out Facebook ads to supporters hungry for merch.

In the 10 weeks after the shooting, advertisers paid Meta between $593,000 and $813,000 for political ads that explicitly mentioned the assassination attempt, according to The Markup’s analysis. (Meta provides only estimates of spending and reach for ads in its database.) 

Even Facebook itself has acknowledged that polarizing content and misinformation on its platform has incited real-life violence. An analysis by CalMatters and The Markup found that the reverse is also true: real-world violence can sometimes open new revenue opportunities for Meta.

While the spending on assassination ads represents a sliver of Meta’s $100 billion-plus ad revenue, the company also builds its bottom line when tragedies like war and mass shootings occur, in the United States and beyond. After the October 7th attack on Israel last year and the country’s response in Gaza, Meta saw a major increase in dollars spent related to the conflict, according to our review.

«

You could say: oh but Meta isn’t taking a position! But the difference is that in the age of print newspapers, there would have been questions raised before these adverts would get printed; they might even be rejected on the grounds of poor taste, or profiting from political violence – which implicitly normalises it.
unique link to this extract

Reach bosses in drive to increase websites’ story volumes • HoldtheFrontPage

Paul Linford:

»

Bosses at [UK newspaper group] Reach plc have launched a drive to increase story count across its network of regional websites in a bid to boost online traffic.

Company chiefs want to increase article volume in order to boost page views, which have been badly hit by algorithm changes from major referrers such as Google and Facebook.

While there are no individual targets for journalists, reporters on office-based shifts will be expected to generate more stories in order to increase the overall volume of articles on the group’s ‘Live’ newsbrands.

One internal email, seen by HTFP, suggests an average count of eight stories a shift for reporters working in the office, although this would not apply to those who are sent out on stories.

The email, sent by a senior Reach editor, states: “We need to make more of shifts where people are not going out as drivers of volume. In practice, if you’re on a general shift and you’re not on a job, it should be at least eight stories a shift.”

The latest IPSOS traffic figures published by HTFP last week showed a mixed picture for Reach’s leading websites.

While Birmingham Live increased its page views by a third during August compared to the same month in 2023, other big city brands such as the Liverpool Echo, Chronicle Live, Bristol Post and Nottingham Post all saw significant year-on-year decreases.

The overall thinking behind the latest move was set out out in an email from Paul Rowland, editorial director of the Live network, which has also been seen by HTFP.

«

When I finished at The Guardian (ten years ago), I thought I was doing OK if I got three stories written in a day, as much as anything because there were probably only three stories worth writing. Eight is just bonkers. There truly isn’t that much news, especially not at the local level. And this is all going to be AI-driven, until the AIs take it all over.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Chagos Islands have beautiful seas – but if they change hands, the .io domain could cease to exist. Then what? CC-licensed photo by Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office 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 11 links for you. Subject to treaty. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

India holds record for internet shutdowns with 771 since 2016 • Rest of World

Ananya Bhattacharya:

»

On September 10, when the northeast Indian state of Manipur announced a five-day internet shutdown in response to student-led protests, citizens were livid — but not surprised.

India has been a leader in internet shutdowns, by a huge margin, for nearly a decade, according to data shared by digital rights watchdog Access Now.

While some authoritarian regimes, such as those in China, North Korea, and Russia systematically censor, surveil, or limit the internet, India’s citizens have relatively free access. But India is unique among democratic countries for its frequent enforcement of blackouts. Between 2016 and 2023, India shut down the internet 771 times, Access Now’s data shows.

Myanmar and Ukraine ranked second on the list of internet shutdowns in 2023 and 2022, respectively. “These are regions obviously embroiled in conflict. And if you look at the margin between India and the second spot — massive,” Namrata Maheshwari, senior policy counsel at Access Now, told Rest of World. “There is no form of an internet shutdown that is proportionate or necessary.”

Reasons for the blackouts in India have included the government’s attempts to control agitation surrounding the Citizenship Amendment Act, suppress the farmers’ protests, and curb cheating during exams, according to Software Freedom Law Center, India’s tracker on internet shutdowns.

The majority of shutdowns in India have historically occurred in Jammu and Kashmir, a region at the center of a decades-long dispute between India, Pakistan, and China. In August 2019, it experienced  552 consecutive days of internet blackout, the world’s longest shutdown in history.

«

The irony – or perhaps explanation – is that India’s population absolutely loves the internet, and being connected. So being cut off this much is one of the most frustrating things they can experience.
unique link to this extract

The disappearance of an internet domain • Every

Gareth Edwards:

»

On October 3, the British government announced that it was giving up sovereignty over a small tropical atoll in the Indian Ocean known as the Chagos Islands. The islands would be handed over to the neighboring island country of Mauritius, about 1,100 miles off the southeastern coast of Africa. 

The story did not make the tech press, but perhaps it should have. The decision to transfer the islands to their new owner [by signing a treaty] will result in the loss of one of the tech and gaming industry’s preferred top-level domains: .io.

Whether it’s Github.io, gaming site itch.io, or even Google I/O (which arguably kicked off the trend in 2008), .io has been a constant presence in the tech lexicon. Its popularity is sometimes explained by how it represents the abbreviation for “input/output,” or the data received and processed by any system. What’s not often acknowledged is that it’s more than a quippy domain. It’s a country code top-level domain (ccTLD) related to a nation—meaning it involves politics far beyond the digital world.

…Once this treaty is signed, the British Indian Ocean Territory will cease to exist. Various international bodies will update their records. In particular, the International Standard for Organization (ISO) will remove country code “IO” from its specification. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which creates and delegates top-level domains, uses this specification to determine which top-level country domains should exist. Once IO is removed, the IANA will refuse to allow any new registrations with a .io domain. It will also automatically begin the process of retiring existing ones. (There is no official count of the number of extant .io domains.)

Officially, .io—and countless websites—will disappear. At a time when domains can go for millions of dollars, it’s a shocking reminder that there are forces outside of the internet that still affect our digital lives.

«

IANA will probably – probably – do something to keep this going, since there’s a lot of money sloshing around in those domains.
unique link to this extract

US states sue TikTok, claiming its addictive features harm youth mental health • The Guardian

Johana Bhuiyan, Nick Robins-Early and agencies:

»

More than a dozen states and the District of Columbia filed lawsuits against TikTok on Tuesday, alleging the popular short-form video app is damaging children’s mental health with a product designed to be used compulsively and excessively.

The lawsuits stem from a national investigation into TikTok, which was launched in March 2022 by a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general from several states, including California, Kentucky and New Jersey. All of the complaints were filed in state courts and claim that TikTok’s algorithm is especially dangerous given the platform’s widespread use among young people and its ability to deliver quick hits of dopamine. Design choices such as infinite scrolling, push notifications and in-app purchases prey on youth and create addictive habits among users, prosecutors allege. There are over 170m monthly active TikTok users in the US, and over a billion worldwide.

At the heart of each lawsuit is the TikTok algorithm, which powers what users see on the platform by populating the app’s main “For You” feed with content tailored to people’s interests.

In its filings, the District of Columbia called the algorithm “dopamine-inducing”, and said it was created to be intentionally addictive so the company could trap many young users into excessive use and keep them on its app for hours on end. TikTok does this despite knowing that these behaviors will lead to “profound psychological and physiological harms”, such as anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia and other long-lasting problems, the complaint said.

«

Popcorn time, though probably won’t reach a court until some time in 2025, and properly until 2026. There’s still a US ban due in January 2025 unless ByteDance sells the US division to a US owner.
unique link to this extract

Starlink was offered for free to those hit by Hurricane Helene. It is not actually free • The Register

Brandon Vigliarolo:

»

The free Starlink service Elon Musk and SpaceX so graciously promised for communities devastated by Hurricane Helene in the US is not actually entirely free, according to those living in the aftermath – and the satellite operator’s own signup page.

There is a significant caveat: you are still expected to foot the bill for the hardware.

Starlink’s Twitter account declared last week, in a post with tens of millions of views, that “Starlink is now free for 30 days.” The world’s richest man, with a net worth of approximately $260bn, followed up by saying, in quite the PR coup, that all Starlink terminals would now work automatically “without [the] need for payment in the areas affected by Hurricane Helene.” 

But try to sign up for the ostensibly “free” service in an area Starlink has designated as a Helene disaster zone, and surprise: You still have to pay for the terminal (normally $350, but reportedly discounted to $299 for disaster relief, though that’s not reflected in Starlink’s signup page), plus shipping and tax, bringing the grand total to just shy of $400.

You can see for yourself in the video: putting in the address of city hall in Boone, North Carolina, one of the areas wrecked by the lethal super storm, shows folks recovering from the disaster are still expected to pay hundreds for that that free, month-long Starlink service. Though better than nothing at all, it is not quite the humanitarian aid it was promoted and heralded as.

«

There’s also the question of being signed up to an auto-renewing contract – so one needs to cancel within 30 days.
unique link to this extract

How to delete Your 23andme data • Lifehacker

Beth Skwarecki:

»

So far there is no definitive word about the company being sold, with or without its data. However, it’s reasonable to expect that the company could be sold, and that owner could inherit the data. Something similar happened when MyHeritage bought Promethease, another DNA analysis company, in 2020.

Currently, your data may already be shared with other companies. If you signed up to participate in research studies through 23andme, “de-identified” data about you (including genetic data) has likely been given to research institutions and pharma companies. For example, 23andme has a data licensing agreement with GSK (formerly GlaxoSmithKline) to use the 23andme database to “conduct drug target discovery and other research.” 

This isn’t a possible future scenario, but rather the current operation of the business. Licensing agreements like these are a big part of how 23andme makes money. Or intends to make money. Or possibly once made money. They’re not doing so great at the money making thing these days. 

Deleting your 23andme data doesn’t necessarily withdraw it from studies, especially since the data was “de-identified,” that is, stripped from your name and personal information. It does mean that your data will not be used in future research projects.

«

OK, but how do you delete your data?

»

If you would like to keep any of your data, sign in to your account and visit your user settings page. (You can also opt out of research studies there.). Click View on the 23andme Data card.

You’ll be asked to enter your date of birth to confirm your identity. In theory this is where you can download your data, but I can’t test this—I have a 23andme account, but I must have given the company a fake date of birth all those years ago. The website just tells me to contact Customer Care.

«

Well, huh. Kind of sold us a pup there, Lifehacker.
unique link to this extract

Monday, October 7 2024 • Scripting News

Dave Winer has hit 30 years of blogging:

»

Blogging started out as a programming adventure and eventually became a form of literature. How about that. I’m up for doing more of that if you all are. But please expect to make contributions, don’t expect it all to come to you for free, because as we know nothing really is free. #

Today’s the big day. Thanks to John Naughton’s wonderful piece in the Guardian, I’m hearing from people all over the world about what blogging means to them. I appreciate all of the messages, but would appreciate them even more if they were on your blog. We need to keep using the tech. Blogging is kind of lost, and I would like to see that change. Every time you post something you’re proud of on a social media site, how about taking a moment and posting it to your blog too. And while there, if appropriate, link to something from some part of your post, even though the social media sites don’t support linking, the web is still there and it still does. #

Interestingly, the clock at the bottom of the nightly emails does not agree with the clock on the home page of Scripting News. It’s a hard thing to test in real life. And it’s completely fitting, given the motto of the blog is: it’s even worse than it appears, which could be the motto of all programmers everywhere, and probably bloggers too. We always focus on the bad news, of course — that’s human nature — but always remember, it could actually be worse. #

«

Is blogging going to make a comeback? There are many, many more ways to express oneself nowadays. Is Substack blogging? (I think so.) Is social media? (Arguably not, too difficult to roll back through time.)
unique link to this extract

What happens if a hurricane smashes Tampa, Florida? • The Big Newsletter

Matt Stoller:

»

Tampa hasn’t been hit directly by a big storm since 1921, and it has grown a lot since then.

Hopefully, [Hurricane] Milton doesn’t hit the city directly, and it may not. These big storms almost always tend to avoid the most catastrophic hits. But let’s go over some of the consequences if it does. First, Tampa has an important port, managing 33 million tons of cargo a year. It’s the biggest exporter of fertilizer in America, and is the biggest importer of gasoline and jet fuel used in Florida. So that means we can expect significant supply shocks, and probably environmental damage. Utilities are already stretched because of Helene, so replacing electrical equipment is going to be difficult. All the major supplies for recovery, everything from lumber to ice to drinking water to skilled labor, are already being sucked into North Carolina to deal with the after-effects of Helene.

In addition, MacDill Air Force Base is in Tampa, which is where CENTCOM, the command center for U.S. forces in the Middle East, is located. So we could see modest disruptions to U.S. military operations. Tampa is near important NASA assets like Cape Canaveral, so there are space and defense contractors in the city.

There’s a lot more than that, of course, since Tampa is a major metropolitan area, an important hub for fishing, tourism, medicine, manufacturing and finance. It has convenient rail lines and highways to pair with its deepwater port, serving as a trans-shipment point for moving goods throughout Florida. Beyond Tampa, a good chunk of Florida is in the path of this storm, with unpredictable consequences. For instance, I wrote earlier about the shortage of IV fluids due to problems in North Carolina. It turns out another large IV solutions manufacturing plant in Daytona Beach is in the path of Milton. Yikes.

The insured losses could be massive, and we could face shortages of all sorts of random and important stuff. But more than these elements, we might lose an entire city, an apocalyptic level of destruction. And increasingly in Florida, there is no way to insure anything. In fact, the state itself, through its Citizens Property Insurance Corp., self-insures against natural disasters, because private insurers just won’t do business in Florida anymore. That means Florida property owners – who in aggregate own about $4 trillion – could enter a death spiral where they can’t get insurance, and so can’t get financing.

«

Milton is expected to make landfall on Thursday morning, UK time. Fingers crossed.
unique link to this extract

The connected TV industry’s unprecedented “surveillance” • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

The companies behind the streaming industry, including smart TV and streaming stick manufacturers and streaming service providers, have developed a “surveillance system” that has “long undermined privacy and consumer protection,” according to a report from the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) published today and sent to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Unprecedented tracking techniques aimed at pleasing advertisers have resulted in connected TVs (CTVs) being a “privacy nightmare,” according to Jeffrey Chester, report co-author and CDD executive director, resulting in calls for stronger regulation.

The 48-page report, How TV Watches Us: Commercial Surveillance in the Streaming Era [PDF], cites Ars Technica, other news publications, trade publications, blog posts, and statements from big players in streaming—from Amazon to NBCUniversal and Tubi, to LG, Samsung, and Vizio. It provides a detailed overview of the various ways that streaming services and streaming hardware target viewers in newfound ways that the CDD argues pose severe privacy risks. The nonprofit composed the report as part of efforts to encourage regulation. Today, the CDD sent letters to the FTC [PDF], Federal Communications Commission (FCC), California attorney general [PDF], and California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) [PDF], regarding its concerns.

“Not only does CTV operate in ways that are unfair to consumers, it is also putting them and their families at risk as it gathers and uses sensitive data about health, children, race, and political interests,” Chester said in a statement.

…The report notes “misleading” privacy policies that have minimal information on data collection and tracking methods and the use of marketing tactics like cookie-less IDs and identity graphs that make promises of not collecting or sharing personal information “meaningless.”

“As a consequence, buying a smart TV set in today’s connected television marketplace is akin to bringing a digital Trojan Horse into one’s home,” it says.

«

unique link to this extract

Machine learning pioneers win Nobel prize in physics • The Guardian

Ian Sample:

»

Two researchers who helped lay the foundations for modern artificial intelligence – although one later warned of its potential harms – have been awarded the 2024 Nobel prize in physics.

Inspired by the workings of the brain, John Hopfield, a US professor emeritus at Princeton University, and Geoffrey Hinton, a British-Canadian professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, built artificial neural networks that store and retrieve memories like the human brain, and learn from information fed into them.

Hinton, 76, who is often called “the godfather of AI”, made headlines last year when he quit Google and warned about the dangers of machines outsmarting humans.

The scientists’ pioneering work began in the 1980s and demonstrated how computer programs that draw on neural networks and statistics could form the basis for an entire field, which paved the way for swift and accurate language translation, facial recognition systems, and the generative AI that underpins chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude.

Hopfield, 91, was honoured for building “an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data”, while Hinton invented a method that can “independently discover properties in data”, an important feature of the large artificial neural networks in use today.

In 1982, Hopfield built a neural network that stored images and other information as patterns, mimicking the way memories are stored in the brain. The network was able to recall images when prompted with similar patterns, akin to identifying a song heard only briefly in a noisy bar.

Hinton built on Hopfield’s research by incorporating probabilities into a multilayered version of the neural network, leading to a program that could recognise, classify and even generate images after being fed a training set of pictures.

«

Doesn’t feel like physics, though, does it. Are we in The Three-Body Problem? Has physics stopped?
unique link to this extract

How the US lost the solar power race to China • Bloomberg

David Fickling:

»

Washington blames China’s dominance of the solar industry on what are routinely dubbed “unfair trade practices.” But that’s just a comforting myth. China’s edge doesn’t come from a conspiratorial plot hatched by an authoritarian government. It hasn’t been driven by state-owned manufacturers, subsidized loans to factories, tariffs on imported modules or theft of foreign technological expertise. Instead, it’s come from private businesses convinced of a bright future, investing aggressively and luring global talent to a booming industry — exactly the entrepreneurial mix that made the US an industrial powerhouse.

The fall of America as a solar superpower is a tragedy of errors where myopic corporate leadership, timid financing, oligopolistic complacency and policy chaos allowed the US and Europe to neglect their own clean-tech industries. That left a yawning gap that was filled by Chinese start-ups, sprouting like saplings in a forest clearing. If rich democracies are playing to win the clean technology revolution, they need to learn the lessons of what went wrong, rather than just comfort themselves with fairy tales.

To understand what happened, I visited two places: Hemlock, Michigan, a tiny community of 1,408 people that used to produce about one-quarter of the world’s PV-grade polysilicon, and Leshan, China, which is now home to some of the world’s biggest polysilicon factories. The similarities and differences between the towns tell the story of how the US won the 20th century’s technological battle — and how it risks losing its way in the decades ahead.

… the core questions are often almost impossible to answer. Is [China’s] Tongwei’s cheap electricity from a state-owned utility a form of government subsidy? What about [US company] Hemlock’s tax credits protecting it from high power prices? Chinese businesses can often get cheap land in industrial parks, something that’s often considered a subsidy. But does zoning US land for industrial usage count as a subsidy too? Most countries have tax credits for research and development and compete to lower their corporate tax rates to encourage investment. The factor that determines whether such initiatives are considered statist industrial policy (bad), or building a business-friendly environment (good), is usually whether they’re being done by a foreign government, or our own.

«

Long piece, but worthwhile.
unique link to this extract

Threads knows it has an engagement bait problem • The Verge

Jess Weatherbed:

»

If you’ve noticed more engagement bait appearing across your Threads feed, you’re not alone. Meta is aware of the issue and looking at how to address it, according to Instagram boss Adam Mosseri. “We’ve seen an increase in engagement-bait on Threads and we’re working to get it under control,” Mosseri said on Threads in response to comments flagging the issue.

Engagement bait on Threads typically covers posts with banal questions or invites for open-ended discussions to encourage other users to interact. Because Threads, like Instagram, pushes users to see an algorithmic feed of posts by default, getting more interactions can snowball a simple post into virality.

When asked about comparisons between Threads and X in a recent Decoder interview, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg alluded to the fact that comment engagement was a fundamental aspect of a “very good discussion-oriented platform.”

“Not all comments or replies are good,” said Mosseri. “Mark’s comment is more about the Twitter pioneering a format where the reply can be elevated, which is a good thing, but that doesn’t mean that every reply should be.” The thread that Mosseri replied to cites one example of a bait post, featuring a seemingly AI-generated image paired with an incendiary take on politeness that had pulled in more than 17,000 responses.

«

You’d think – you’d think! – that by now Meta would know what does and doesn’t work for engagement, and what reaction clickbait would get. It’s hard to shake a tiny suspicion that Meta doesn’t mind the wild engagement for now because it keeps people on the site.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Set your watches: in about 40 million years Mar’s moon Phobos will spiral down into the planet. CC-licensed photo by Andrea Luck 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. Orbiting. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

US wiretap systems targeted in China-linked hack • WSJ

Sarah Krouse, Dustin Volz, Aruna Viswanatha and Robert McMillan:

»

A cyberattack tied to the Chinese government penetrated the networks of a swath of US broadband providers, potentially accessing information from systems the federal government uses for court-authorized network wiretapping requests.

For months or longer, the hackers might have held access to network infrastructure used to cooperate with lawful US requests for communications data, according to people familiar with the matter, which amounts to a major national security risk. The attackers also had access to other tranches of more generic internet traffic, they said.

Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies are among the companies whose networks were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the people said. 

The widespread compromise is considered a potentially catastrophic security breach and was carried out by a sophisticated Chinese hacking group dubbed Salt Typhoon. It appeared to be geared toward intelligence collection, the people said. 

Spokesmen for AT&T, Verizon and Lumen declined to comment on the Salt Typhoon campaign.

Companies are generally required to disclose material cyber intrusions to securities regulators within a short time, but in rare cases, federal authorities can grant them an exemption from doing so on national security grounds.

The surveillance systems believed to be at issue are used to cooperate with requests for domestic information related to criminal and national security investigations. Under federal law, telecommunications and broadband companies must allow authorities to intercept electronic information pursuant to a court order. It couldn’t be determined if systems that support foreign intelligence surveillance were also vulnerable in the breach.

«

You asked for an example demonstrating what people mean when they say that backdoor systems won’t only be used by “the good guys.”
unique link to this extract

Google must crack open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

»

Google’s Android app store is an illegal monopoly — and now it will have to change.

Today, Judge James Donato issued his final ruling in Epic v. Google, ordering Google to effectively open up the Google Play app store to competition for three whole years. Google will have to distribute rival third-party app stores within Google Play, and it must give rival third-party app stores access to the full catalog of Google Play apps, unless developers opt out individually.

These were Epic’s biggest asks, and they might change the Android app marketplace forever — if they aren’t immediately paused or blocked on appeal.

And they’re not all that Epic has won today.

Starting November 1st, 2024, and ending November 1st, 2027, Google must also:
• Stop requiring Google Play Billing for apps distributed on the Google Play Store (the jury found that Google had illegally tied its payment system to its app store)
• Let Android developers tell users about other ways to pay from within the Play Store
• Let Android developers link to ways to download their apps outside of the Play Store
• Let Android developers set their own prices for apps irrespective of Play Billing

Google also can’t:
• Share app revenue “with any person or entity that distributes Android apps” or plans to launch an app store or app platform
• Offer developers money or perks to launch their apps on the Play Store exclusively or first
• Offer developers money or perks not to launch their apps on rival stores
• Offer device makers or carriers money or perks to preinstall the Play Store
• Offer device makers or carriers money or perks not to preinstall rival stores

«

Google’s downfall in this case – unlike Apple’s when Epic brought the same complaint – is that it has done all sorts of deals favouring one developer or another, whereas Apple is just consistently brutal to everyone.

However this won’t be an overnight change: Google gets eight months to come up with the system to implement this.
unique link to this extract

What happened to Elon Musk? • The Atlantic

Lora Kelley talks to Charlie Warzel:

»

Lora: Why is Musk getting so involved in this presidential election, and with Trump (who apparently said he would give Musk a role leading a government-efficiency commission if he wins)? Is he making some kind of play to be a great man of history, or is he after power in a potential Trump administration?

Charlie: Elon Musk basically bought Donald Trump at the top. He endorsed him moments after the first assassination attempt, when Trump was riding a wave of positive attention, when Joe Biden was still in the race and it looked like Trump was probably going to dominate him. So much has changed since Musk endorsed Trump in July. If he were truly a savvy political operator, he would be hedging his bets right now, saying I can’t fully alienate myself from one political party, because I have all these government contracts and so many other interests that I need to be able to at least sit in a room with with Democrats.

I think the fact that he has effectively just become the in-house social-media team for Donald Trump speaks to the fact that he’s not just making a political calculation. He’s not playing a game of 3-D chess. It seems to me that he’s truly radicalized.

Here’s a guy who has, like, six jobs and has decided to spend most of his time tweeting propaganda for a political candidate and hosting him on his platform. Does he want another job? It’s entirely possible. But I really think what he wants more than anything else is to be that sort of Rupert Murdoch person for this political group. He seems to be trying to fit himself into the role of power broker.

Lora: In some ways, Musk’s turn feels surprising. But has he always sort of been like this?

Charlie: I started covering Musk in the 2010s. And there were signs of this stuff—picking the fight with the cave diver, the way he would dismiss claims around Tesla, irresponsibly tweeting in ways that had the power to move stock prices. He was a loose cannon and showed a lot of signs of his disregard for the rule of law and authority.

«

Plus, as Warzel points out, there’s been a certain amount of audience capture, which means Musk has begun to perform for those who celebrate his behaviour, reinforcing it.
unique link to this extract

Fake News! The Top 100 Community Noted Twitter accounts • MeidasTouch News

Ron Filipkowski:

»

I wanted to note some other trends with the Worst 100. Many of the accounts are foreign, and most of those are from Asia. Many of them were permanently banned under the old regime but were reinstated by Musk. Many are not political – they just post fake stuff for clicks and focus on pop culture, the entertainment industry, or post false information about the weather, science, the environment, etc..

49 of the Top 100 worst offending accounts are overtly political. 48 of the 49 most Community Noted political accounts are right-wing. Only one – ‘Blade of the Sun’ is from the Left. Ironically, many of these accounts complain in their bios that they are “anti-fake news” or “anti-woke” while posting one lie and fake video after another. Six of the accounts have been permanently suspended, but for reasons other than posting false info. Most of the accounts have well over 100K followers and many over 1 million. Elon Musk follows many of them and has retweeted them often – including the Community Noted posts. Elon Musk himself checks in at #55 of the list of worst offenders with 89 posts getting Community Noted. 

Another big problem is that Musk has actually created an incentive structure to post fake things. Sensationalized claims get amplified by his algorithm and lots of clicks. There is financial incentive to continue to do it. You don’t face any suspensions and false posts tend to draw more engagement than true ones. Forty of the Worst 100 are monetized subscription accounts – so Musk is actually paying them to post fake things.

«

Included in that top 100 is the New York Post (“the only major American media company to make the top 100”) and, scraping in at No.96, ex-PM Rishi Sunak (“the most prominent politician to make the list”, where by “prominent” he means “had an important job”, because there are some right nutters in there).

Basically, all of the top 10 Most Noted should be on your blocklist. Perhaps the next 10 too. Worth pointing out that Community Notes predated Musk; it was called “Birdwatch” and launched in 2021.
unique link to this extract

How long will life exist on Earth? • The Atlantic

Ross Andersen:

»

Wikipedia’s “Timeline of the Far Future” is one of my favorite webpages from the internet’s pre-slop era. A Londoner named Nick Webb created it on the morning of December 22, 2010. “Certain events in the future of the universe can be predicted with a comfortable level of accuracy,” he wrote at the top of the page. He then proposed a chronological list of 33 such events, beginning with the joining of Asia and Australia 40 million years from now. He noted that around this same time, Mars’s moon Phobos would complete its slow death spiral into the red planet’s surface. A community of 1,533 editors have since expanded the timeline to 160 events, including the heat death of the universe. I like to imagine these people on laptops in living rooms and cafés across the world, compiling obscure bits of speculative science into a secular Book of Revelation.

Like the best sci-fi world building, the Timeline of the Far Future can give you a key bump of the sublime. It reminds you that even the sturdiest-seeming features of our world are ephemeral, that in 1,100 years, Earth’s axis will point to a new North Star. In 250,000 years, an undersea volcano will pop up in the Pacific, adding an extra island to Hawaii. In the 1 million years that the Great Pyramid will take to erode, the sun will travel only about 1/200th of its orbit around the Milky Way, but in doing so, it will move into a new field of stars. Our current constellations will go all wobbly in the sky and then vanish.

Some aspects of the timeline are more certain than others. We know that most animals will look different 10 million years from now. We know that the continents will slowly drift together to form a new Pangaea. Africa will slam into Eurasia, sealing off the Mediterranean basin and raising a new Himalaya-like range across France, Italy, and Spain. In 400 million years, Saturn will have lost its rings. Earth will have replenished its fossil fuels.

«

Wait a minute – replenished its fossil fuels with what? Or should that be who?
unique link to this extract

Apple shares trailer for ‘Submerged’ immersive Vision Pro short film • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

Announced back in July, Submerged is a short film that’s set in World War II, and it follows a group of sailors that are struggling to survive a deadly torpedo attack. It was created by Austrian filmmaker Edward Berger, who directed 2022 movie All Quiet on the Western Front.

Apple has not provided details on the length of Submerged, but most Apple Immersive Video content is on the shorter side. Apple has been regularly adding Immersive Video to the Vision Pro since the device came out last February. The immersive content is in 3D, and is meant to make the viewer feel like they are part of the scene.

Apple Immersive Video content can be viewed in the Apple TV app in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, France, Germany, Japan, Singapore, the U.K., and the U.S. Users in China can watch the content through the Migu Video and Tencent Video apps.

Submerged is set to premiere on the Vision Pro on Thursday, October 10.

«

There’s a one-minute YouTube promo for the film (which is 17 minutes long) in the article. It’s hard to know what it would really be like, because if you don’t have a Vision Pro, you won’t know what immersive video is like. (Seems like they decided to take “immersive” seriously, with all the water.)

But good to see that Apple is actually trying to create some content for the Vision Pro.
unique link to this extract

As bird flu spreads, two new cases diagnosed in California • The New York Times

Apoorva Mandavilli:

»

Two more people were diagnosed with bird flu this week, even as scientists in Missouri continued to investigate a possible cluster of infections in that state, federal health officials said at a news briefing on Friday.

In California, two farmworkers who were exposed to infected dairy cattle at different farms tested positive for the virus, called H5N1, state health officials said on Thursday. Those cases bring the total this year to 16, not including those under investigation.

The cases do not come as a surprise, because the number of infected herds in California has risen to 56 from 16 two weeks ago, said Dr. Nirav Shah, the principal deputy director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“As there are more herds that test positive, there are more workers who are exposed, and where there are more workers who are exposed, the chances of human infection increase,” he said. The risk to the public remains low, he added.

Still, experts said that the appearance of H5N1 in multiple states was worrisome.

«

Watching brief. That’s all it is, nothing else. Not at all.
unique link to this extract

Regeneron head says weight-loss drugs could cause “more harm than good” • Financial Times

Oliver Barnes:

»

The co-founder of Regeneron has warned that blockbuster weight-loss drugs could cause “more harm than good” unless the rapid muscle loss associated with the treatments is solved, as the US biotech pushes ahead with trials of muscle-preserving medicines.

Clinical studies suggest that patients treated with the new class of weight-loss drugs, known as GLP-1s, lose muscle at far faster rates than people losing weight from diet or exercise, exposing them to health problems, said George Yancopoulos, who also serves as Regeneron’s chief scientific officer.

For the two in every five patients who discontinue the treatments within a year, according to a 2024 JAMA study, this means that they are likely to rebound to their original weight with less muscle and a higher body fat percentage, “adding insult to injury”, said Yancopoulos.

“I do think that the GLPs should be viewed with a lot of concern in terms of the way they’re actually being used in the real world,” said Yancopoulos. “They could be leading to successive changes in body composition that could be creating more harm than good in the long term.”

Regeneron is among a growing list of drugmakers researching experimental drugs to preserve lean muscle mass in combination with GLP-1 drugs as a route into a potentially $130bn-a-year market that is dominated by Ozempic and Wegovy maker Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, the company behind Mounjaro and Zepbound.

Regeneron, a $111bn biotech that specialises in antibody treatments, is testing a drug called trevogrumab, which blocks the hormone myostatin, which limits muscle growth, in combination with Wegovy in mid-stage trials.

«

Damn. And we thought we were doing so well with peak obesity.
unique link to this extract

Uber and Lyft drivers use Teslas as makeshift robotaxis, raising safety concerns • Reuters

Akash Sriram and Abhirup Roy:

»

A self-driving Tesla carrying a passenger for Uber rammed into an SUV at an intersection in suburban Las Vegas in April, an accident that sparked new concerns that a growing stable of self-styled “robotaxis” is exploiting a regulatory gray area in US cities, putting lives at risk.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk aims to show off plans for a robotaxi, or self-driving car used for ride-hailing services, on Oct. 10, and he has long contemplated a Tesla-run taxi network of autonomous vehicles owned by individuals.

Do-it-yourself versions, however, are already proliferating, according to 11 ride-hail drivers who use Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) software. Many say the software, which costs $99 per month, has limitations, but that they use it because it helps reduce drivers’ stress and therefore allows them to work longer hours and earn more money.

Reuters is first to report about the Las Vegas accident and a related inquiry by federal safety officials, and of the broad use by ride-hail drivers of Tesla autonomous software.

While test versions of self-driving cabs with human backup drivers from robotaxi operators such as Alphabet’s Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise are heavily regulated, state and federal authorities say Tesla drivers alone are responsible for their vehicles, whether or not they use driver-assist software. Waymo and Cruise use test versions of software categorized as fully autonomous while Tesla FSD is categorized as a level requiring driver oversight.

«

It’s just a common-or-garden shunt though isn’t it. Whether or not the driver had “FSD” (which isn’t) on or not, if they’re in the driving seat, they’re responsible. By contrast the legal situation for the actual robotaxis operated by Waymo and GM is different.

But it does show that being a taxi driver is tedious and tiring. Of course you’d use driver assistance software if you could.
unique link to this extract

Police seldom disclose use of facial recognition despite false arrests • The Washington Post

Douglas MacMillan, David Ovalle and Aaron Schaffer:

»

Police departments in 15 states provided The Post with rarely seen records documenting their use of facial recognition in more than 1,000 criminal investigations over the past four years. According to the arrest reports in those cases and interviews with people who were arrested, authorities routinely failed to inform defendants about their use of the software — denying them the opportunity to contest the results of an emerging technology that is prone to error, especially when identifying people of color.

In fact, the records show that officers often obscured their reliance on the software in public-facing reports, saying that they identified suspects “through investigative means” or that a human source such as a witness or police officer made the initial identification.

In Evansville, Ind., for example, police said they identified a man who beat up a stranger on the street from his tattooed arms, long hair and previous jail booking photos. And in Pflugerville, Tex., police said they learned the name of a man who helped steal $12,500 in merchandise from Ulta Beauty “by utilization of investigative databases.”

Both of these suspects were identified with the aid of facial recognition, according to internal police records — information that was never shared with the accused, according to them or their attorneys. A spokeswoman for Pflugerville declined to answer questions about this case. Evansville police did not respond to requests for comment.

«

The problem is that there have been multiple wrongful arrests, including one person who spent six days in jail for using credit cards to buy things in a state he had never visited. (Quite hard to prove you’ve never been somewhere.)
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Increasing the number of steps you take each day is definitely correlated with living longer, and if you raise them you benefit. CC-licensed photo by Timo Newton-Syms 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. It’s about hyperbole. Get excited!

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

Someone put facial recognition tech onto Meta’s smart glasses to instantly dox strangers • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

A pair of students at Harvard have built what big tech companies refused to release publicly due to the overwhelming risks and danger involved: smart glasses with facial recognition technology that automatically looks up someone’s face and identifies them. The students have gone a step further too. Their customized glasses also pull other information about their subject from around the web, including their home address, phone number, and family members. 

The project is designed to raise awareness of what is possible with this technology, and the pair are not releasing their code, AnhPhu Nguyen, one of the creators, told 404 Media. But the experiment, tested in some cases on unsuspecting people in the real world according to a demo video, still shows the razor thin line between a world in which people can move around with relative anonymity, to one where your identity and personal information can be pulled up in an instant by strangers.

Nguyen and co-creator Caine Ardayfio call the project I-XRAY. It uses a pair of Meta’s commercially available Ray Ban smart glasses, and allows a user to “just go from face to name,” Nguyen said.

The demo video posted to X on Tuesday shows the pair using the tech against various people. In one of the first examples, Ardayfio walks towards the wearer. “To use it, you just put the glasses on, and then as you walk by people, the glasses will detect when somebody’s face is in frame,” the video says. “After a few seconds, their personal information pops up on your phone.”

«

It’s very impressive. Unexpectedly, the effect of being able to recognise people and get their context is that you seem to make a lot more friends, or get friendly reactions. People like being recognised and having their achievements mentioned. After all, who wouldn’t?

Give it time: this is going to get faster, more accurate, and the samizdat will become everyday.
unique link to this extract

No man’s hand: artificial intelligence does not improve police report writing speed • Journal of Experimental Criminology

Ian Adams, Matt Barter, Kyle McLean, Hunter Boehme and Irick Geary at various US universities:

»

Objectives: This study examines the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce the time police officers spend writing reports, a task that consumes a significant portion of their workday.

Methods: In a pre-registered randomized controlled trial, we test this claim within the patrol division of a medium-sized police department (n = 85) at the individual report level (n = 755). Analyses utilize mixed-effects regression accounting for the nested structure of report-writing.

Results: AI assistance did not significantly affect the duration of writing police reports. Alternative specifications beyond those specified in the pre-registration, including a difference-in-differences approach observing report duration over a full year (n = 6084), confirm the null findings are robust.

«

That’s going to be a disappointment for the police in Colorado who thought chatbots would be good for this job.
unique link to this extract

Why the US can’t impose its will over global trade in electric cars • Financial Times

Alan Beattie:

»

middle-income countries such as Turkey and Brazil wanting to increase domestic EV consumption are actively courting Chinese producers.

And even taking into account the protectionist motive, Joe Biden’s administration may well have a point about the security threats of EVs as “smartphones on wheels”, with manufacturers able to collect personal data and potentially control the cars remotely. But this is an unpropitious environment for the American sheriff to stick up “WANTED FOR DATA RUSTLING” posters around the place and try to run Chinese producers out of town.

The lure of US market access, via which Washington traditionally exerts control over other countries’ trade and tech policies, is weaker than it ought to be. American consumer preferences and the domination of the Detroit carmakers have left the US EV market pitifully under-developed. EVs in 2023 had a 10% share of total sales compared with 38% in China and 21% in the EU, and even the EV tax credits in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act have so far had only limited effect.

EV prices relative to traditional vehicles in the US market are higher than in China and the EU, and Washington has reduced competitive pressure by walling off its market to Chinese exporters with 100% tariffs.

…Strict implementation might simply force carmakers to create a separate North American supply chain with non-Chinese software. In that case, Dunne says, the global car market could divide in two: a high-priced low-tech island comprising the US and Canada and a cheaper, more digitally connected market for the rest of the world. (Mexico, which is part of the US-Canada trade bloc but also exports cars outside it, would probably straddle the two.)

It’s somewhat against the historical grain for US companies to be behind on technology and its households weak on consumption. But that’s where we’ve ended up with EVs.

«

unique link to this extract

Israel could bomb Iran’s oil. Energy markets aren’t panicking • POLITICO

Ben Lefebrvre:

»

The risk of an escalating war between Israel and Iran is testing the global market’s faith that crude oil prices would be insulated from a widening of hostilities across the Middle East.

For decades, conflicts in the oil-rich region frequently spooked oil markets and weighed on the economy. But now, Middle East military skirmishes are causing more shrugs than drastic price spikes — a welcome development for the Biden administration, which has faced political criticism from Republicans over fuel prices and is trying to contain the fallout from Iran’s launch of nearly 200 missiles into Israel on Tuesday.

Increased oil production from the United States, Brazil and other places in the past two decades has diversified the global fuel supply, which means oil markets rely less on Middle East shipments that Tehran could disrupt, energy and security analysts told POLITICO.

“For those of us who spend our lives looking at the effects of a [Middle East] crisis on oil prices, obviously the past 10-plus years have been a complete washout,” said Michael Knights, an analyst at the think tank The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “No matter how insane the thing is, it has a minimal impact on oil. The market has proven time and time again it can make up shortfalls.”

«

Whatever this is, it’s not 1973 all over again: we’re not going to see those queues at the fuel pumps.
unique link to this extract

The Before and After – Columbia Journalism Review

Lauren Watson on the effect of Facebook removing news links in Canada:

»

Meta’s retreat from journalism didn’t stop Canadians from seeking out news—but it did prevent them from finding information from legitimate sources. According to a report by the Media Ecosystem Observatory, a research collaboration between McGill University and the University of Toronto, in the year since the ban went into effect, Canadians have seen less reporting online, even as they continue to use Meta to read, watch, and listen to news: 70% of survey respondents do so on Facebook, 65% on Instagram.

Some of that can be explained by screenshots of articles, which tripled in frequency in the four months following the ban [by Facebook after a Canadian law demanding payment if it included news links]. But the researchers also found that only 22% of Canadians are aware that Meta has bailed on journalism. That has turned Canadian newsgathering on social media into a game of telephone—out-of-context photos and summaries absent links to the articles from which they’ve been sourced—that few even know is being played.

“It would be one thing if they made the absence clear, but they went from blocking the news to facilitating the bamboozling of the news,” David Beers, the founding editor of The Tyee, told me. “If you were an old-fashioned Orwellian dictator, you couldn’t come up with a more clever plan.”

When fall arrived, Meta’s news ban faced its first major test, in Canada’s worst wildfire season to date. In British Columbia, more than three hundred and eighty fires burned; some twenty thousand people were placed under evacuation orders. Canadian officials observed that public service announcements were failing to get around.

“I find it astonishing,” David Eby, the province’s premier, said in a press conference, “that we are at this stage of the crisis and the owners of Facebook and Instagram have not come forward and said, ‘Look, we’re trying to make a point with the federal government, but it’s more important that people are safe, it’s more important that they have access to basic information through our networks, and then we can deal with our concerns with the federal government and their new laws later.’” Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, complained that Meta’s actions were “inconceivable.”

«

unique link to this extract

Here’s an easy way our trains could usefully connect us • The Times

Tom Whipple:

»

Over the years, there has not been a lot about my daily commute that has been consistent. There have been times during engineering works when I have not been certain when my morning train will arrive. There have been times during strikes when I have not been certain when, or even whether, it will leave.

What has been consistent though, through Covid, floods and industrial action, has been the knowledge that if I’ve forgotten to download an important document beforehand, then the journey will be even more frustrating. Because, despite the jaunty promises of the train operator, I know that for much of the journey the supposed train Wi-Fi is unlikely to help much. And it won’t help at all if I happen to be going past Ascot.

Party conference season has come to an end. We have been told we must face hard choices if we are to achieve growth. We have seen depressing graphs of what our productivity rates have become because those hard choices have gone unmade.

Here is my idea for getting a bit of growth, without hard choices. It won’t involve scarring the Cotswolds countryside or spending Covid-style billions on bat surveys and newt tunnels so that we can finally build a new road. It just involves making the wretched train Wi-Fi work — like it does in other countries.

Each morning I look across a carriage full of open laptops. I see web pages failing to open, emails failing to send. I see people trying to use their mobile hotspots but doing little better. Most of all I see people — who often look like they are paid pretty high hourly rates — trying, and failing, to work.

This is not just my commute. There are many subjects on which journalists are ill-equipped to speak but there is one on which we are world experts: being sent to random parts of the country and trying to work on trains. So believe me when I say that this is a problem everywhere.

This year a report in The Sunday Times revealed that our train wifi network is so dilapidated that operators are being forced to ration access. It also reported that the system could be upgraded across the country for £200m.

«

Which really isn’t a lot of money in the scheme of things.
unique link to this extract

The tragedy of the commons is a false and dangerous myth • Aeon Essays

Michelle Nijhuis:

»

In December 1968, the ecologist and biologist Garrett Hardin had an essay published in the journal Science called ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’. His proposition was simple and unsparing: humans, when left to their own devices, compete with one another for resources until the resources run out. ‘Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest,’ he wrote. ‘Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.’ Hardin’s argument made intuitive sense, and provided a temptingly simple explanation for catastrophes of all kinds – traffic jams, dirty public toilets, species extinction. His essay, widely read and accepted, would become one of the most-cited scientific papers of all time.

Even before Hardin’s ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ was published, however, the young political scientist Elinor Ostrom had proven him wrong. While Hardin speculated that the tragedy of the commons could be avoided only through total privatisation or total government control, Ostrom had witnessed groundwater users near her native Los Angeles hammer out a system for sharing their coveted resource. Over the next several decades, as a professor at Indiana University Bloomington, she studied collaborative management systems developed by cattle herders in Switzerland, forest dwellers in Japan, and irrigators in the Philippines. These communities had found ways of both preserving a shared resource – pasture, trees, water – and providing their members with a living. Some had been deftly avoiding the tragedy of the commons for centuries; Ostrom was simply one of the first scientists to pay close attention to their traditions, and analyse how and why they worked.

«

Except.. what Ostrom demonstrated was that if there are community safeguards and punishments for overuse, then the commons won’t be overexploited. Without that, we see the TOTC (paper available here) occur again and again: overfishing, pollution, even climate change. (The original paper itself is a somewhat Malthusian treatise on the limited planet; it reads oddly in the modern context.)
unique link to this extract

The iPhone content machine: a visual essay • On my Om

Om Malik:

»

Apple’s iPhone 16 launch event differed greatly from most of its past events. It was larger and more overwhelming. There were fewer familiar faces among the attendees, and there was also a new type of attendee — content creators. They were busy filing short bursts of information to their followers in vertical formats: videos, selfies at Apple Park and occasional comments about the products themselves.

I decided to become a fly on the wall and chronicle the spectacle unfolding in front of me. I focused on those who were there to create content about the devices, not the devices themselves. It was fun to just float among the crowds with my Nikon Zf and a 40mm lens.

It was a wonderful spectacle — just to bask in this new kind of raw media energy. Content for the sake of content. Events for the sake of content. Fog of content. It’s the new way of the world.

«

Malik decided just to take some photos, and very good photos they are. (The big closeup is John Gruber, of Daring Fireball.) One person – not Gruber – commented that the attendees this year seemed essentially clueless about Apple, and about the executives they were talking to who tend to have long histories at the company:

»

My feeling is that they “saw” the keynote but didn’t actually “watch” it. It’s the same difference as “hearing” music versus “listening” to it. They’re more focused on how to later take selfies next to the new products, not necessarily think deeply about why the products were created and what impact they could have.

«

unique link to this extract

Craft and creativity • The Bookseller

Nadim Sadek:

»

There are less perceivably creative people in our world. The architects who design perfect arches. Whoever invented the wheel. The master-distiller, blending liquids in casks of sherry and port to make that perfect single-malt. Or a nurse who finds a way to make an old woman comfortable by playing her songs from her childhood. These days, also the TikToker who produces a new meme, combining a societal insight with a memorable tune and perhaps a signature dance. 

Each human is creative. But not each human can craft, whether it’s with paintbrushes, words or filters on a social-media site.

AI solves this. It’s not a Stradivarius. It’s not a Porsche. It’s not squirrel-hair brush. But it is a new expresser, a means of fashioning an artefact from a creative impulse without having to master the craft of expression.

So long as you can articulate your notion, AI can make a decent stab at producing an artefact to represent your creativity. It’ll make music to your command. Write words. Produce an image. Whatever you’re trying to conceive and give birth to, AI disintermediates the historic imperative of “crafting”. It takes your ideas and makes them evident. Others can see what you intend. People can relate to what you wish to convey. 

…If you’re reading this, you’re likely either a crafter, or someone involved in the craft-trade, including book publishing. AI is challenging the status quo. And it’s a positive thing.

«

I’m really not sure that this is a view widely shared by those who have to decide what to publish.
unique link to this extract

Effect of daily steps and sedentary time on death and cardiovascular risk • Kudos

»

The study (in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, March 2024) suggested that an increase in the number of daily steps is associated with a lower risk of both death and cardiovascular disease (CVD). Here, the greatest benefit was observed between 9,000 and 10,500 steps per day. This optimal range for lowering health risks remains consistent regardless of whether a person has high or low levels of sedentary time. Specifically, individuals with high sedentary time (more than 10.5 hours per day) had a higher risk of death if they walked fewer steps, compared to those with lower sedentary time. Also, even a modest increase in daily steps (between 4,000 and 4,500 steps) can significantly lower the risk of death and CVD.

Increasing daily steps to around 9,000 to 10,500 can significantly lower the risk of death and CVD, independent of sedentary time. Even a small increase in daily steps can have a positive impact on health, and reducing sedentary time further improves these benefits.

«

OK, no excuse now! Though Strava data suggests that those who do 9,000 steps per day are in the top 3% of walkers. The fact that increasing steps is helps seems obvious – it’s exercise. But this has come from “device data” – hip-worn accelerometers worn over the course of three years (2013-2015) by 100,000 participants in the UK aged between 40 and 69.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified