Incinerators are used to dispose of a lot of British household rubbish – but they’re very polluting. CC-licensed photo by Tim Sheerman-Chase 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 Bluesky.

A selection of 9 links for you. Fired up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI • Bloomberg via NDTV

Rachel Metz, Shirin Ghaffary, Dina Bass and Julia Love:

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OpenAI was on the cusp of a milestone. The startup finished an initial round of training in September for a massive new artificial intelligence model that it hoped would significantly surpass prior versions of the technology behind ChatGPT and move closer to its goal of powerful AI that outperforms humans.

But the model, known internally as Orion, did not hit the company’s desired performance, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss company matters. As of late summer, for example, Orion fell short when trying to answer coding questions that it hadn’t been trained on, the people said. Overall, Orion is so far not considered to be as big a step up from OpenAI’s existing models as GPT-4 was from GPT-3.5, the system that originally powered the company’s flagship chatbot, the people said.

OpenAI isn’t alone in hitting stumbling blocks recently. After years of pushing out increasingly sophisticated AI products at a breakneck pace, three of the leading AI companies are now seeing diminishing returns from their costly efforts to build newer models. At Alphabet Inc.’s Google, an upcoming iteration of its Gemini software is not living up to internal expectations, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. Anthropic, meanwhile, has seen the timetable slip for the release of its long-awaited Claude model called 3.5 Opus.

The companies are facing several challenges. It’s become increasingly difficult to find new, untapped sources of high-quality, human-made training data that can be used to build more advanced AI systems. Orion’s unsatisfactory coding performance was due in part to the lack of sufficient coding data to train on, two people said. At the same time, even modest improvements may not be enough to justify the tremendous costs associated with building and operating new models, or to live up to the expectations that come with branding a product as a major upgrade.

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AI systems are already hitting the asymptotic point, you say?

Also this in the story:

»

Anthropic declined to comment but referred Bloomberg News to a five-hour podcast featuring chief executive officer Dario Amodei that was released Monday.

“People call them scaling laws. That’s a misnomer,” he said on the podcast. “They’re not laws of the universe. They’re empirical regularities. I am going to bet in favour of them continuing, but I’m not certain of that.”

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If someone who was not my editor had told me to go and find some information they already had by listening to a five-hour podcast I would have made it my life’s work to find them and torture them horribly.
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The election proved the media is in crisis. Here’s what it needs to do to regain its relevance • CNN Business

Brian Stelter:

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Some of these trends have been evident for years, but the election results have put an exclamation point on the concerns about distrust and dissatisfaction with the media status quo. Now, a reckoning is underway. Media executives and rank-and-file reporters are wondering what needs to change. What can news outlets do to regain trust and appeal to new audiences without alienating existing readers and viewers?

For the past week, CNN’s media team has been receiving feedback from readers of the Reliable Sources newsletter. Here are some of the concrete recommendations and ideas that have emerged.

First, recognize the scope of the problem: Mainstream media outlets have been losing public trust for decades, particularly among Republicans, but also among Democrats and independents. Alternative sources, often lacking any semblance of journalistic standards, have filled some of the voids. And smart phones, social networks and streaming services have introduced an almost infinite amount of competition for people’s attention. Algorithms have replaced human editors and artificial intelligence systems have started to replace search. These are huge changes that warrant equally big adjustments by news outlets.

Pop the bubbles: Many news consumers, and a good number of journalists, think national news coverage is too Washington-centric. Maybe, CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan commented last week, the media collectively spent “too much time obsessing about polling (where did that get us?) and not enough time talking to people!” O’Sullivan and other correspondents interviewed voters all election season long, but those conversations and focus groups should inform editorial decisions and panel discussions.

Geographic diversity would also help. “When we cover MAGA,” a former ABC News executive said, ruefully, “it’s like going to the zoo to report on an exotic animal.” One logical takeaway: Publishers should embrace the Zoom era and have employees spread out across the country to balance out New York and Washington groupthink.

«

There’s plenty more, but you have to wonder if an organisation with so much inertia is going to be able to adjust. And the journalists too will have to consider quite what journalism looks like in this modern age.
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Google executive picked to supercharge news efforts has resigned • WSJ

Alexandra Bruell:

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Shailesh Prakash, a Google News executive central to the tech giant’s relationships with publishers, has resigned, according to people familiar with the situation.

The high-profile departure comes amid a continuing rift between Google and news outlets over how the search engine drives traffic and uses their content.

Prakash, a vice president and general manager for Google News, joined the tech giant two years ago from the Washington Post, where he spent more than a decade overseeing data and technology.

At Google, he brought an understanding of publishers’ frustrations as they have grappled with traffic declines and seek compensation for the Alphabet unit’s GOOGL -1.51%decrease; red down pointing triangle use of their content. While he oversaw product and engineering for the News group, he also communicated with leaders at news publishers regarding changes related to search and generative AI.

A representative from Google declined to comment on Prakash’s departure.

During his decade-plus tenure at the Post, where he was chief information officer, Prakash helped transform the news outlet’s digital operation and oversaw a number of technology experiments, including an advertising technology and digital publishing business that serviced publishers beyond the Post.

…Google is the greatest source of traffic to publishers’ websites, because when people search for information, the results often direct them to news articles. Publishers have balked in recent years at payment offers from Google, arguing that their content is worth more than Google has been willing to pay.

Currently weighing on publishers is Google’s use of their content to produce generative AI overviews, which respond to search queries with a complete answer, along with a link icon to the publishers’ sites that source the information.

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Burning household rubbish now UK’s dirtiest form of power, BBC finds • BBC News

Esme Stallard, Matt McGrath, Patrick Clahane & Paul Lynch:

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Burning household rubbish in giant incinerators to make electricity is now the dirtiest way the UK generates power, BBC analysis has found.

Nearly half of the rubbish produced in UK homes, including increasing amounts of plastic, is now being incinerated. Scientists warn it is a “disaster for the climate” – and some are calling for a ban on new incinerators.

The BBC examined five years of data from across the country, and found that burning waste produces the same amount of greenhouse gases for each unit of energy as coal power, which was abandoned by the UK last month.

The Environmental Services Association, which represents waste firms, contested our findings and said emissions from dealing with waste are “challenging to avoid”.

Nearly 15 years ago, the government became seriously concerned with the gases being produced from throwing away household rubbish in landfill and their contribution to climate change. In response, it hiked the taxes UK councils paid for burying waste.

Facing massive bills, councils turned to energy-from-waste plants – a type of incinerator that produces electricity from burning rubbish. The number of incinerators surged – in the past five years the number in England alone has risen from 38 to 52. About 3.1% of the UK’s energy comes from waste incinerators.

…In the past few years, more plastic has been going to incinerators and less food waste – which councils are now sending to anaerobic digesters or to be composted. But the government’s own calculations continue to assume that we send the same mix of rubbish as we did back in 2017 – potentially underestimating the scale of the issue.

The BBC’s five-year analysis used data on actual pollution levels recorded by operators at their incinerators, and found that energy-from-waste plants are now producing the same amount of greenhouse gases per unit of electricity as if they were burning coal.

«

Oh. That’s really not what we wanted at all.
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AI-powered bots on X spread disinformation in Ghana’s election • Rest of World

Caroline Haskins:

»

The accounts — which appear to have AI-generated profile photos, and have names such as “Glenn Washington,” “Netflix Series&Movies,” and “Patriot” — also disparage John Mahama, the presidential candidate from the rival left-wing party National Democratic Congress. These posts often use hashtags such as #mahamaisaliar and #DrunkmaniMahama, accusing Mahama of being a drunkard. (Mahama has denied this.)

“The primary goal of the network appears to be to amplify pro-NPP messaging, promote the Bawumia administration and take aim at the opposition National Democratic Congress,” McKenzie Sadeghi, an editor of AI and foreign influence at NewsGuard who contributed to the research, told Rest of World.

Dimitris Dimitriadis, NewsGuard’s director of research and development, said in an interview with Rest of World that the bot accounts tend to post at “regular” and “predictable” intervals, often ten or more times per day. He said the accounts — which tend to be active between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. in Ghana — mostly receive likes and reposts from others in the bot network. These regimented patterns in timing and style tipped the researchers off that the accounts may be fake.

NewsGuard’s research team fed all 171 of the posts from the accounts into a tool from Pangram Labs, which assesses the likelihood of text being generated by AI, Dimitriadis said. The tool concluded that it was “highly likely” that all of the accounts were posting AI-generated content created by ChatGPT.

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Don’t tell me – the moderators at X don’t care. Also, a Newsguard survey recently found that a quarter of (American) respondents thought users with blue ticks were more reliable than those without. (They’re not.)
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Visualizing 13 million BlueSky users • Joel Gustafson

Joel Gustafson:

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Anyone who uses Twitter a lot knows that it’s a big place. Not just that it has a lot of active users, but more that there are lots of different parts.

Over time, everybody develops their own mental map of the landscape, infering how vast and foreign the whole network is from hints and clues, stray tweets escaping containment, and chance encounters in a big account’s replies. But we never get to see the whole thing for real.

We can’t make a map of all of Twitter, because the data isn’t available and scraping it would be difficult and illegal. But we can do it for BlueSky, which has seen massive growth over the last several months thanks to Twitter’s ongoing antagonization of its userbase and Brazil banning Twitter outright in October 2024.

Here’s a sneak peek at the final result.

You can also explore the map interactively at https://aurora.ndimensional.xyz, although you’ll need desktop Chrome/Chromium since it uses WebGPU.

«

It’s an interesting thread, though it tells us what we’d expect: these networks tend to cluster, either by country or topic.
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Guardian quits X social media platform, citing racism and conspiracy theories • Reuters

Andy Bruce:

»

British news publisher the Guardian said on Wednesday it will no longer post to X, citing “disturbing content” on the social media platform, including racism and conspiracy theories.

The left-leaning Guardian, which has 10.7 million followers on X, becomes the first large UK media company to retreat from the platform that Elon Musk purchased in 2022.

Critics say Musk’s hands-off approach has allowed lies and hate speech to spread on the platform formerly known as Twitter.

“We think that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives and that resources could be better used promoting our journalism elsewhere,” the Guardian said in an editorial published on its website.

“This is something we have been considering for a while given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism.”

In response, Musk posted, opens new tab on X and said of the Guardian: “They are irrelevant.”

«

Guardian reporters are still OK to gather info from the site, and (if they want) to post there, and can embed content from it. It seems a slightly odd move: my view is that time spent there all costs Musk money (because it sure isn’t making a profit), and for the Guardian posting there has minimal marginal cost, and its stories might get picked up.

Come a long way from 2007 or so when I was technology editor and did an analysis suggesting that posting there was bringing in thousands of clicks per week for the Technology section alone. (It’s possible that bit.ly, the URL-shortening site which generated the metrics, didn’t ignore bots as well as it should have.)
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How The New York Times beat the algorithm and became Facebook’s top publisher • Sherwood News

Ryan Broderick and Adam Bumas:

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According to Garbage Day data, Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign trounced Trump on Facebook. And the top publisher on the world’s largest social network in the lead-up to the big vote wasn’t some far-right disinformation operation, nor was it even a right-wing tabloid. For the first time in years, the leading news outlet on Facebook was The New York Times.

Times articles have been among the platform’s most popular shared links since August. The standout articles have included election reporting, like their August article about Black men supporting Harris, as well as more general stories, like coverage of the US Open. In October, 7 of the 10 most popular articles on Facebook came from the Gray Lady. Leading the pack was the single most-shared article in more than a year since Garbage Day started tracking: the website’s ongoing coverage of Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, which included multiple references to Harris’ reaction.

The only outgoing link shared more times all year, in fact, was the donation page for the pro-Democrat PAC ActBlue. Across Facebook, the link was shared just under 2 million times after Harris announced her candidacy in July, including 1.4 million times in the first 10 days. For comparison, the most popular Trump donation link peaked at 174,000 shares in October.

That figure is perplexing compared to actual voting results, but the emergence of the Times as the top publisher on Facebook last month is even stranger — especially when you consider the sites that have occupied that spot all year. Between November 2023 and July 2024, the most popular news articles on the platform were all from a blog called Catholic Fundamentalism. Only obituaries for beloved cultural figures like Matthew Perry and Shannen Doherty came close to breaking its run.

«

But but but:

»

Garbage Day data confirms that news engagement on Facebook has cratered since early last year. The Times’ popularity has sent it higher than it’s been in a while, but even still, it’s less than half of where it was in early 2023.

«

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No joke: The Onion parody website buys Alex Jones’ Infowars out of bankruptcy • Reuters

Dietrich Knauth and Katie Paul:

»

Like a headline lifted from the Onion, the parody news website is buying conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars in a bankruptcy auction.

The Onion said in a statement on Thursday it aims to replace Infowars’ “relentless barrage of disinformation” with the Onion’s “noticeably less hateful disinformation.”

Financial terms of the purchase were not disclosed. Infowars’ website was shut down on Thursday and the Onion said it aimed to relaunch the platform in January.

The purchase marks a sharp turn for Infowars, one of the internet’s most notorious purveyors of right-wing conspiracy content and misleadingly marketed, opens new tab dietary supplements.
Founded in 1999, it became a prime example of how online media platforms could exploit tech companies’ hands-off approach to moderating content and disseminate evidence-free claims to vast audiences.

Among those theories were false claims that the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington and the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut were staged.

The Onion, led by a CEO who spent years covering online disinformation and extremism as an NBC News reporter, had the backing of several families of Sandy Hook shooting victims for its bid.
It will acquire Infowars’ intellectual property, including its website, customer lists and inventory, certain social media accounts and the Infowars production equipment, the families said.

Jones filed for bankruptcy protection in 2022 after courts ordered him to pay $1.5bn for defaming the families of 20 students and six staff members killed in the Sandy Hook shooting.

Unable to pay those legal judgments, Jones was forced to auction his assets, including Infowars, in bankruptcy.

«

Irony is, in fact, not dead. It could only have been better if Jones had had to give the title away, rather than getting some money for it in the auction. Not that that will cover his court debts. Update: the sale is on hold because there were only two bidders and.. Jones had a higher bid?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

An update to Apple’s iOS will mean AirTags will share their location with airlines – a boon for finding luggage. CC-licensed photo by Luigi Rosa 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. Localised. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Elon Musk may already be overstaying his welcome in Trump’s orbit • NBC News

Dasha Burns, David Ingram and Julie Tsirkin:

»

Tech billionaire Elon Musk was handed a major win Tuesday evening when President-elect Donald Trump announced that the Tesla and SpaceX CEO would co-lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency” with Vivek Ramaswamy.

The announcement reinforces the closeness that Musk has managed to achieve with Trump, even after the election. But for some people in Trump’s orbit, Musk’s presence has felt overbearing. 

Musk has been so aggressive in pushing his views about Trump’s second term that he’s stepping on the toes of Trump’s transition team and may be overstaying his welcome at Mar-a-Lago, according to two people familiar with the transition who have spent time at the  Palm Beach, Florida, resort over the past week. 

The sources said that Musk’s near-constant presence at Mar-a-Lago in the week since Election Day had begun to wear on people who’ve been in Trump’s inner circle longer than the tech billionaire and who see him as overstepping his role in the transition. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they’re not authorized to speak publicly. 

“He’s behaving as if he’s a co-president and making sure everyone knows it,” one of the people said of Musk. 

“And he’s sure taking lots of credit for the president’s victory. Bragging about America PAC and X to anyone who will listen. He’s trying to make President Trump feel indebted to him. And the president is indebted to no one,” this person added. 

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That the new department (which would have to be created through some sort of Congressional act?) is called “DOGE” would be eye-rolling enough. Politics is about to become “interesting” again, unfortunately. And the clock is already ticking on how long it will be before Musk and Trump fall out.
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Apple AirTags to start sharing bag location directly with airlines • The Washington Post

Chris Dong:

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When Apple introduced its location-tracking device more than three years ago, it quickly became a traveler favorite for one major reason: the ability to keep tabs on checked luggage. Now, AirTags are about to get a major update that will help fliers get reunited with their missing bags.

Apple announced a new feature Monday called “Share Item Location,” providing users the ability to securely communicate an AirTag’s location to third parties — including airlines.

Once rolled out as part of an upcoming iOS update, it could alter how missing items are found, retrieved and returned to their owners at airports around the world.

To start, Apple plans to work with 15 airlines globally, including Delta Air Lines and United Airlines in the United States. These carriers will integrate the new shared tracking technology directly into their customer service processes in the coming months.

Locating mishandled bags, a catchall industry term for lost, damaged or delayed, will look a lot different than today.

“Having an AirTag was great before, but there was no official policy for getting your bag back even if you could show its location to an airline employee,” said Stella Shon, a consumer travel expert for Upgraded Points. “The sharing functionality is a game-changing feature.”

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The airlines are: Aer Lingus, Air Canada, Air New Zealand, Austrian Airlines, British Airways, Brussels Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Eurowings, Iberia, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Lufthansa, Qantas, Singapore Airlines, Swiss International Air Lines, Turkish Airlines, United, Virgin Atlantic, and Vueling. All of a sudden, AirTags seem a worthwhile purchase!
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Romain Bardet: “carbon monoxide can explain the trajectory of some people we didn’t know about a year ago… it’s now up to the authorities to decide whether or not to ban” • Cyclinguptodate

Kieran Wood:

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An aggressive approach called carbon monoxide inhalation, steps into the scientifically new and much riskier realm of inhaling the lightly poisonous gas (carbon monoxide) for the express purpose of performance enhancement. A growing body of recent scientific research suggests inhalation can have a powerful impact on measures of aerobic capacity like VO2max, or maximal oxygen uptake with reported links to teams such as UAE Team Emirates, Team Visma | Lease a Bike and Israel – Premier Tech. 

In an extensive interview with Eurosport upon the end of his career, Bardet was asked for a rider’s view on the controversial topic that currently escapes a WADA ban. “Honestly, I learned about it from the press. You see the studies. Anything is possible. I’ve never heard of anything, but then again, I wouldn’t be surprised. There’s so much research being done into the idea of optimising performance…” the Frenchman assesses. “It’s not surprising that there are some researchers, some teams, some people involved in cycling who are looking elsewhere. There will always be a desire to find competitive advantages.”

Is it a fair advantage though or should the use of carbon monoxide for performance gain be banned? “It’s up to each individual to set the threshold of what seems ethical and fair in the absolute and desperate search for the end result in relation to his or her values. It’s like ketones, like so many things, it’s open to interpretation. And unfortunately, since the rules are not clearly laid down, since this interpretation is left to the discretion of each individual and since we’re in an ultra-competitive sport where only victory counts, we shouldn’t be surprised by possible deviations,” Bardet ponders.

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The Eurosport interview is in French. A report in July quotes one team saying that sure, they use CO rebreathing to monitor riders’ physiology.

Why? How? Because CO binds to haemoglobin (to make carboxyhaemoglobin) and prevents it carrying oxygen, stimulating (in theory) the body to produce more haemoglobin, which is what cyclists want. Except the teams say it’s just to measure haem levels, to see how their training is progressing.

The cycling world can’t seem to decide if it’s good, bad or illegal. (CO in large doses will kill you.)
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23andMe cuts 40% of staff in restructuring • TechCrunch

Maxwell Zeff:

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23andMe announced on Monday it would cut 40% of its workforce, representing more than 200 employees, as part of a restructuring at the company. The genetic testing company is also discontinuing its therapeutics business and winding down its clinical trials; it expects these changes to save $35m annually.

“We are taking these difficult but necessary actions as we restructure 23andMe and focus on the long-term success of our core consumer business and research partnerships,” said CEO and co-founder Anne Wojcicki in a press release. “I want to thank our team for their hard work and dedication to our mission.”
On Tuesday, 23andMe reported $44m in revenue during the second quarter, a decline from $50m during the same period last year.

The mass workforce reductions mark the latest disruption in a tumultuous year for 23andMe. In September, 23andMe’s entire board of directors — including Silicon Valley icons such as YouTube CEO Neal Mohan — resigned following Wojcicki’s attempt to take the company private in August.

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Cutting nearly half your workforce suggests you’re in really deep trouble. But it is: in that second quarter it made a $59m loss. Don’t worry, though: in the year-ago quarter it lost $75m! Things are looking up!

Genomics has been a disappointment to so many: turns out too few people want to have their DNA sequenced to tell them what grisly unavoidable diseases lie in their distant future. Or whether they’re 1/64 Viking.
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Exxon CEO Darren Woods: Donald Trump shouldn’t scrap methane regulations • Semafor

Tim McDonnell:

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US President-elect Donald Trump’s aspiration to unleash a lot more oil and gas drilling domestically faces a fundamental obstacle: the global market is already well-supplied, the CEO of ExxonMobil told Semafor at the opening of COP29.

Darren Woods was in Baku for just one day of the global climate summit, ready to convince world leaders and thousands of highly skeptical activists that companies like Exxon can and should play a more proactive role in solving the climate crisis. But that doesn’t mean transitioning away from fossil fuels, the goal that was adopted by negotiators at COP28 last year, Woods said. Instead, Exxon’s approach is to engineer technologies that allow fossil fuels to be burned with lower carbon emissions, which in Woods’ view will serve the company’s bottom line as much as the global climate. Government policies designed to force a rapid phaseout of oil and gas consumption are the wrong strategy, he said: “A lot of the policies that have been pursued to date, which force you to choose between affordable energy and reduced emissions, aren’t working.”

But Woods agreed with recent comments from Patrick Pouyanné, CEO of TotalEnergies, that the Trump administration shouldn’t move to scrap the Biden administration’s regulation to curb methane emissions from oil and gas operations.

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This is the thing: the market is moving in one direction on fossil fuels, and just as in Trump’s first term when he talked a lot about coal and the market turned away from it, so one should expect the same this time.
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Nicholas Carlson, former Business Insider editor, launches media start-up • The New York Times

Benjamin Mullin:

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Nicholas Carlson has witnessed spectacular failures in the tech and media worlds over the years. As the former top editor of Business Insider, he chronicled the carnage at Yahoo and Groupon, and then watched several Silicon Valley companies and rival publications make an ill-fated “pivot to video.”

Now Mr. Carlson, 41, is trying to put the lessons he learned to good use. He is preparing to debut a media start-up of his own — one with a focus on video.

The new company, Dynamo, is betting big on the growing popularity of video on platforms such as YouTube, TikTok and LinkedIn. It will produce “cinematic” video stories for those platforms, Mr. Carlson said, focusing on business journalism for a core group of strivers that he calls “dynamos.”

The average dynamo — Mr. Carlson considers himself one — is an ambitious, career-oriented viewer who believes that business can explain the world.
And he is quick to assert that his new company has more in common with Mr. Beast, the mega-popular YouTube star, than it does with Facebook Watch, a video service that was shuttered after struggling for years.

“We’re not pivoting to video,” Mr. Carlson said with a laugh. “We’re cannonballing into the deep end of video.”

Many media companies that have created content specifically for social media platforms have had a tough road. But Mr. Carlson said skyrocketing video viewership on tech platforms pointed to a business opportunity that had not been tapped by companies specializing in high-quality video journalism.

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This, and the next story, show how much the media ground is shifting.
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Broadcaster Chris Wallace quits CNN to build future in streaming or podcasting • The Daily Beast

Hugh Dougherty:

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Chris Wallace is quitting CNN after three years as one of its biggest stars, he exclusively told the Daily Beast Monday.

The 77-year-old broadcaster said he will instead find a new home on an independent platform such as streaming or podcasting, which he described as “where the action seems to be.” He highlighted how podcasters including Joe Rogan and Charlamagne tha God had set the agenda during the presidential election, but added, “I don’t flatter myself to think I will have that sort of reach.”

The stunning decision by Wallace to walk away from CNN at the end of his three-year, seven-figure contract, rather than to renegotiate it, is a watershed moment for cable TV. It comes as other anchors face being fired or having salaries cut as declining ratings and cord-cutting hit the industry’s bottom line.

Wallace was one of the main faces of CNN’s election night coverage last week, correctly forecasting that Kamala Harris would need a “miracle” to win as the first exit polls showed the depths of her electoral difficulty. He came to CNN in 2021 after 18 years at Fox News, where he had interviewed Donald Trump repeatedly and earned praise for his handling of the fiery 2020 presidential debate between Trump and Joe Biden.

But he told the Daily Beast that his career in broadcast television–which began on local TV in Chicago in 1973 and spanned NBC’s The Today Show and Meet The Press, ABC’s PrimeTime Live and Fox News Sunday before he joined CNN–will be over when his contract lapses at the end of the year, describing it as “quite liberating.”

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One would hope that Wallace isn’t depending on building a gigantic audience to pay the bills. Best guess is he starts a podcast which is also on YouTube. The Trump years are going to be kerching! times for politics analysts in the US, and Wallace is great at it.
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Russia’s war in Ukraine is powered by ‘Deathonomics’ • WSJ

Georgi Kantchev and Matthew Luxmoore:

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Going to war is now a rational economic choice in Russia’s impoverished hinterlands.

Facing heavy losses in Ukraine, Russia is offering high salaries and bonuses to entice new recruits. In some of the country’s poorest regions, a military wage is as much as five times the average. The families of those who die on the front lines receive large compensation payments from the government.

These are life-changing sums for those left behind. Russian economist Vladislav Inozemtsev calculates that the family of a 35-year-old man who fights for a year and is then killed on the battlefield would receive around 14.5 million rubles, equivalent to $150,000, from his soldier’s salary and death compensation. That is more than he would have earned cumulatively working as a civilian until the age of 60 in some regions. Families are eligible for other bonuses and insurance payouts, too.

“Going to the front and being killed a year later is economically more profitable than a man’s further life,” Inozemtsev said, a phenomenon he calls “deathonomics.”

So many soldiers have now been killed that the payments—totaling as much as $30 billion in the past year as of June—are a telling symptom of how the war is transforming Russian society and the economy at large. Since the start of the invasion, the Kremlin has boosted military spending to post-Soviet highs, offsetting some of the impact of Western sanctions. Weapons factories work around the clock, providing employment and high wages.

Now the mounting death payments are providing an injection of wealth into some of Russia’s poorest areas in return for a steady stream of soldiers for the war effort. Poverty levels are now at their lowest since data collection began in 1995, according to official statistics. Perceptions of what it means to join the military have been transformed.

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It is rather weird; it feels like going back to the Middle Ages, when being a mercenary was a legitimate life choice that someone might make. (Thanks Karsten for the link.)
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Teen infected in Canada’s first bird flu case is in critical condition • The Washington Post

Lena Sun:

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A Canadian teenager infected with bird flu — that country’s first case involving a locally acquired infection — is in critical condition and experiencing difficulty breathing, health officials said Tuesday.
The previously healthy British Columbia teen went to a hospital emergency room Nov. 2 with initial symptoms of pink eye, fever and cough, conditions common to many respiratory illnesses, Bonnie Henry, provincial health officer, said during a news conference. The teen was sent home.

But after the patient’s condition deteriorated, the teen was admitted to BC Children’s Hospital in Vancouver late Friday.

So far, no one who came into contact with the teen has fallen ill.

After a presumptive positive test for bird flu, the teen began receiving Tamiflu, an antiviral treatment. That medication works best when given in the first days of illness but is less effective in treating severe sickness, Henry said.

During the weekend, the teen received treatment to address severe respiratory conditions, Henry said.
“They are experiencing acute respiratory distress,” Henry said.

Severe illness occurs when a profusion of virus particles travel deep into the lungs causing viral pneumonia, making it hard for the body to get oxygen, she said.

Health officials do not yet know how the patient was exposed.

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Totally a watching brief, nothing to be alarmed about, not at all. (Actually it isn’t, unless this thing figures out how to spread between humans.) (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Getting two child seats into the back of a normal car is fine – but three isn’t. A study suggests that limits family sizes. CC-licensed photo by Oregon Department of Transportation 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. Strapped up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Bitcoin hits record high as Trump vows to end crypto crackdown • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Bitcoin hit a new record high late Monday, its value peaking at $89,623 as investors quickly moved to cash in on expectations that Donald Trump will end a White House crackdown that intensified last year on crypto.

While the trading rally has now paused, analysts predict that bitcoin’s value will only continue rising following Trump’s win—perhaps even reaching $100,000 by the end of 2024, CNBC reported.

Bitcoin wasn’t the only winner emerging from the post-election crypto trading. Crypto exchanges like Coinbase also experienced surges in the market, and one of the biggest winners, CNBC reported, was dogecoin, a cryptocurrency linked to Elon Musk, who campaigned for Trump and may join his administration. Dogecoin’s value is up 135% since Trump’s win.

On the campaign trail, Trump began wooing the cryptocurrency industry, seeking donations and votes by promising to make the US the “crypto capital of the planet,” Fortune reported. He announced the launch of his own crypto platform, World Liberty Financial (WLFI), and vowed to “fire” Gary Gensler—the Securities and Commission Exchange (SEC) chair leading the US crypto crackdown—on “day one” in office, Al Jazeera reported.

Whether Trump can actually fire Gensler is still up in the air, The Washington Post reported. It seems more likely that Trump may demote Gensler, The Post reported, since people familiar with the matter suggested that “fully outing” the current SEC chair “could trigger a novel and complicated legal battle over the president’s authorities.” So far, Gensler has made no indications that he will step down once Trump takes office, although The Post noted that wouldn’t be considered unusual.

Sources told The Post that Trump is considering “a mix of current regulators, former federal officials, and financial industry executives,” for leadership positions, “many of whom have publicly expressed pro-crypto views.”

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It’s like digital herpes. You think you’ve got rid of it, and that it’s vanished, but no, it just keeps coming back, bigger than ever.
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‘It gets more and more confused’: can AI replace translators? • The Guardian

Kezza MacDonald:

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Dutch publisher Veen Bosch & Keuning’s announcement that it would use AI translation for commercial fiction has outraged both authors and translators – despite attempts to reassure them with promises that no books will be translated in this way without careful checking and that authors will have to give consent.

“A translator translates more than just words, we build bridges between cultures, taking into account the target readership every step of the way,” says Michele Hutchison, winner of 2020’s International Booker prize for her translation of Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening. “We smuggle in subtle clues to help the reader understand particular cultural elements or traditions. We convey rhythm, poetry, wordplay, metaphor. We research the precise terminology for say agricultural machinery, even in a novel.”

Translators and authors have also pointed out that AI translation requires very careful checking and editing – ideally by someone who knows both languages. At that point, that person may as well be translating the text themselves. Cultural sensitivity is a particular concern, as AI has been known to produce things that are wildly inappropriate.

“Last year a reader flagged some issues in a French edition of one of my books,” says Juno Dawson, author of the Her Majesty’s Royal Coven series. “The translator had used a slightly outdated term to describe a trans person. We were able to change the term before publication. It’s these nuances I suspect AI would miss, meaning that AI generated content would then require stringent editing anyway.”

There are however some scenarios in which machine translation could arguably help the creators of cultural works. For writers working in minority languages, for instance, whose works are not currently translated into English or other languages at all, an AI-assisted translation could bring them to the attention of many more readers. And in video games, localisation can be one of the bigger costs for smaller independent developers, especially those for whom English is not a native language.

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How ChatGPT brought down an online education giant • WSJ

Miles Kruppa:

»

Most companies are starting to figure out how artificial intelligence will change the way they do business. Chegg is trying to avoid becoming its first major victim.

The online education company was for many years the go-to source for students who wanted help with their homework, or a potential tool for plagiarism. The shift to virtual learning during the pandemic sent subscriptions and its stock price to record highs.

Then came ChatGPT. Suddenly students had a free alternative to the answers Chegg spent years developing with thousands of contractors in India. Instead of “Chegging” the solution, they began canceling their subscriptions and plugging questions into chatbots.

Since ChatGPT’s launch, Chegg has lost more than half a million subscribers who pay up to $19.95 a month for prewritten answers to textbook questions and on-demand help from experts. Its stock is down 99% from early 2021, erasing some $14.5bn of market value. Bond traders have doubts the company will continue bringing in enough cash to pay its debts.

Though Chegg has built its own AI products, the company is struggling to convince customers and investors it still has value in a market upended by ChatGPT.

“It’s free, it’s instant, and you don’t really have to worry if the problem is there or not,” Jonah Tang, an MBA candidate at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, said of the advantages of using ChatGPT for homework help over Chegg.

A survey of college students by investment bank Needham found 30% intended to use Chegg this semester, down from 38% in the spring, and 62% planned to use ChatGPT, up from 43%.

“My concern is that the headwinds to Chegg’s top-line aren’t temporary—they’re more structural in nature,” said Needham analyst Ryan MacDonald.

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This is going to require an almighty pivot, or else they’re ruined.
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Taylor Swift fans are leaving X for Bluesky after Trump’s election • WIRED

Vittoria Elliott:

»

Following the us presidential election, Swifties, the name for Taylor Swift’s fans, are fleeing X for Bluesky. X’s owner, billionaire Elon Musk, was one of Donald Trump’s biggest backers, funnelling over $100m into the Trump-supporting America PAC; stumping for the candidate on the campaign trail; and boosting Trump’s messaging on X. Musk also helped Trump tap into a distinctly right-wing male audience. Swifties, who have built a robust community on the platform formerly known as Twitter, took notice. By Thursday, less than 48 hours after Trump won the presidency, they were starting to flock from the platform for good.

“I love the idea of building a new community here and would love not to have to support Elon in any way,” says Justin, who goes by @justin-the-baron.swifties.social on Bluesky and asked to use only his first name for fear of harassment. “Elon is of course a big Trump supporter, which doesn’t align with Taylor’s values or the values of Swifties.”

Though there are Swifties on all sides of the political spectrum, the community prides itself on being a positive and accepting space. After Kamala Harris was announced as the Democratic nominee for president, Swifties began to mobilize to support her. In September, Swift herself endorsed Harris. In an Instagram post announcing her support, Swift cited AI-generated images of herself and her fans that had been used by Trump to imply she’d endorsed him.

…Irene Kim, an organizer with Swifties for Kamala, says that the outpouring of misogyny following the election pushed her and many other Swift fans to abandon X and seek refuge on Bluesky. Though research has found that hate speech and disinformation increased after Musk took over the platform, the election of Trump seems to have supercharged it. A report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that in the 24 hours following Trump’s electoral victory, phrases like “Your body, my choice,” parroting the election night rhetoric of white supremacist Nick Fuentes, rose 4,600% on X.

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Yes, car seat laws reduce the birth rate • Mises Institute

Ryan McMaken:

»

Opponents of the Trump campaign had fun in September with some year-old comments from vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance. Apparently, in a Senate hearing during March 2023, Vance stated that car seat laws have an impact on the number of children parents feel they can afford. As quoted in the Ohio media site cleveland.com:

“I think there’s evidence that some of the things that we’re doing to parents is driving down the number of children that American families are having,” he said. “In particular, there’s evidence that the car seat rules that we’ve imposed — which of course, I want kids to drive in car seats — have driven down the number of babies born in this country by over 100,000.”

Anti-Trump activists got to work mocking the idea, and some suggested that Vance must have simply made these numbers up. 

Most of the mockery was based on the idea that a $100 or $200 dollar car seat is surely not the deciding factor in whether or not to have another child.  This claim may seem perfectly plausible to anyone who has never had children or has only had one or two small children at any given time. Anyone who has actually considered having a third child, however, knows that the cost of the car seat itself is not what dissuades parents from having an additional child. 

Rather, the realities of car seats and car-seat laws mean that a third child adds significant costs and obstacles in the form of a necessarily larger car. As anyone who has three small children knows, it is difficult to fit three car seats in the back seat or an ordinary car. This is why so many people with more than two children end up buying a minivan—which is more costly than a small sedan. The third row of seats is often necessary to accommodate a third car seat. Or, in some cases, the problem may be addressed with a large vehicle, such as a costly full-size SUV, that is sufficiently wide to accommodate a third car seat. 

Anyone who isn’t wealthy and who owns small cars has encountered this problem. When it comes to having a third child, it often becomes necessary to purchase a larger, more expensive car. This is about much more than the cost of a single car seat. 

This has been known for years among more honest researchers. For example, a 2020 study by business professors Jordan Nickerson and David Solomon plainly notes this challenge of finding a back seat in a vehicle that accommodates three car seats. 

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Not what you’d expect, is it. But the study does suggest the effect is real. (Car seats are mandatory up to the age of eight in many states.)
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Apple explains why the M4 Mac mini power button is located on the bottom • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

»

As part of its dramatic redesign, Apple moved the power button on the M4 Mac mini from the back of the machine to the bottom. In a new interview, Apple executives Greg Joswiak and John Ternus addressed this surprisingly controversial decision.

In an interview posted to Chinese video sharing website Bilibili and spotted by ITHome, Ternus and Joswiak explained that the dramatically smaller form factor of the Mac mini forced Apple to find a new position for the power button.

Ternus and Joswiak said (translated):

»

Well, we’ve shrunk the size of it so much, right? It’s equivalent to half the size of the previous generation. So we needed to put the power button in the most appropriate spot because it’s so small. It’s convenient to press. Just tuck your finger in there and hit the button.

In fact, the most important thing is you pretty much never use the power button on your Mac. I don’t even remember the last time I turned on a Mac.

«

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“The most appropriate spot”? I think he meant “most convenient for our manufacturing” – it’s on the plastic part, rather than having to drill into the aluminium.
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New York Times tech guild ends strike • The New York Times

Katie Robertson:

»

The Times Tech Guild, which represents more than 600 tech workers at The New York Times, announced on Monday that it had ended its weeklong strike despite not reaching a deal on a contract.

The union has been on strike since Nov. 4 and has regularly picketed outside The Times’s Manhattan headquarters. The strike was planned to coincide with Election Day, when readership interest is high.

The Times Tech Guild workers, which include software developers, designers and data analysts, will return to their jobs on Tuesday.

Kathy Zhang, the unit chair of the union and a senior analytics manager at The Times, said the strike “showed that we have the full support of subscribers and allies across the country going forward.” She said the union would continue to fight for a fair contract.

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Coded Wordle and Connections and all the rest of the games so well they didn’t fall over like you hoped, eh? And the Guild’s demand to (lest we forget) get a veto over which letters to the editor are published seems likely to vanish too. Tech strikes are hard to make stick when you’ve built the products already.
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Don’t switch off clean power • Notes on Growth

Sam Dumitriu:

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Britain used to be a nuclear superpower. In 1932, the atom was first split in Britain. In 1956, Britain opened the world’s first full-scale commercial nuclear reactor. Less than ten years later, it had built 21 more. As late as 1965, Britain had more nuclear reactors than the rest of the world combined.

Yet Britain hasn’t completed a new nuclear power station in almost 30 years and most of our remaining fleet is set to be taken offline in the next few years. Only Sizewell B, which opened in 1995, is planned to stay online past 2028. Assuming one unit at Hinkley Point C has not been completed by 2029, and Sizewell B will close for two months, then Britain will have no nuclear power whatsoever on the grid. For the first time in more than 70 years, the sun will set on British nuclear power.

For energy security, household bills, and net zero, this situation must be avoided. We can and should extend the life of our existing fleet of Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors (AGRs) to avoid it happening.

What will take nuclear’s place on the grid? Some of the time, it will be renewables like wind and solar. Batteries charged at times of high wind or sun will pick up some of the slack too. But there are limits to intermittent renewables and the short-duration batteries they charge. When the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, our grid will more often than not fall back on expensive, carbon-emitting natural gas. The result will be higher emissions and higher electricity prices.

The planned phase-out of Britain’s remaining AGRs therefore threatens to derail the Government’s Clean Power by 2030 target. This is the finding of the now-Government-owned National Energy Systems Operator, or NESO’s new report into the feasibility of the Government’s “Clean Power by 2030” target.

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Xiaomi SU7 Ultra Prototype laps the Nürburgring in 6:46 minutes • Car and Driver

Jack Fitzgerald:

»

Remember the other week when Ford’s CEO Jim Farley made a surprising announcement that not only has he been driving an electric Chinese sedan for the past six months, but he doesn’t want to give it up? That sedan was the production version of the standard Xiaomi SU7—the first car from Xiaomi, a Chinese consumer electronics brand. Xiaomi’s next step is the higher-performance SU7 Ultra, and a prototype version just lapped the Nürburgring Nordschleife in 6:46.87 minutes, which is hugely impressive, even though it doesn’t qualify for any production-car records.

A video released by the Nürburgring shows the Xiaomi prototype smashing the official lap records for production versions of four-door and electric cars. Not only is the electric sedan’s time remarkable, but the SU7 Ultra managed it while appearing to lose power around the 4:15-minute mark, as indicated by the onboard video.

Anything under seven minutes at the ‘Ring is an achievement worthy of praise, though the SU7 Ultra’s lap wasn’t considered an official production record attempt (the company intends to do that later) and instead falls into the Prototypes and Pre-Production vehicles list.

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Xiaomi really is becoming the anything manufacturer. Phones, fitness trackers, air purifiers.. and now cars. Apple must be envious. And this proof of the speed and maneouvrability of EVs is quite something.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The comma isn’t part of the default iPhone keyboard (you need to press another key to be offered it) but has that affected what people type? CC-licensed photo by Rasmus Olsen 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. Punctual. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Punctuation is dead because the iPhone keyboard killed it • Android Authority

Rita El Khoury:

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Open any social media site today, and you’ll find a slew of tweets, shorts, messages, videos, photos, and more — almost all written with lower capital letters and barely any punctuation. For me, that phenomenon started as a fun observation many years ago, became very irritating as I noticed it more and more, and eventually settled into an unavoidable reality.

People these days don’t use punctuation like they should, despite how much this can irk sticklers for grammar like me. This is especially true for the younger generations, who grew up in the mobile-first age with a smartphone in their hands before they ever saw a full physical QWERTY keyboard.

But I posit that the trend isn’t due to some teenage rebellion, coolness factor, informal texting, or lack of understanding of what the Shift or Caps Lock key can do. No, I think the real reason is a mix of laziness and smartphone use, particularly the iPhone and its terrible keyboard without accessible period or comma keys.

See, even the most grammar-fanatic user, like me, ends up dreading using punctuation when it takes extra taps to add it. I’ve noticed this so often because I always use Gboard on my Android phones, so I punctuate my sentences properly. But on the rare occasion that I dig out my test iPhone 13 to check an app or feature, I end up hating every second of my typing experience because of how tedious it is to add periods or commas to my sentences. So I start skipping them here and there — sometimes, everywhere. So much so that the auto-capitalization stops getting triggered, and I end up with very Gen Z-looking sentences with a random string of lower-cap words separated by nothing more than spaces.

Pundits will say that it’s just an extra tap to add a period (double-tap the space bar) or a comma (switch to the characters layout and tap comma), but it’s one extra tap too many. When you’re firing off replies and messages at a rapid rate, the jarring pause while the keyboard switches to symbols and then switches back to letters is just too annoying, especially if you’re doing it multiple times in one message. I hate pausing mid-sentence so much that I will sacrifice a comma at the altar of speed.

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I don’t really buy this, but it might be worth someone doing some sort of study into this.
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LG’s new stretchable display can grow by 50%, bendy panels can be deformed into new form factors • Tom’s Hardware

Jowi Morales:

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LG Display, one of the global leaders in display technologies, unveiled a new stretchable display prototype that can expand by up to 50%. This makes it the most stretchable display in the industry, more than doubling the previous record of 20% elongation. LG Display showcased the new screen at the LG Science Park in Seoul as part of the Stretchable display national project, with over 100 stakeholders taking part in the event.

This stretchable technology goes beyond expanding its size, though, as you can freely twist, extrude, and fold it without damaging the screen. This gives the technology a limitless number of applications — from clothing and wearable technologies to extruded touchable automotive panels. LG even showed a concept where the stretchable display is sewn or attached directly to firefighter uniforms and displays real-time information to the rest of their team.

The prototype being flexed in the top image is a 12-inch screen with a 100-pixel-per-inch resolution and full RGB color that expands to 18-inches when pulled. LG Display said that it based the stretchable display on a “special silicon material substrate used in contact lenses” and then improved its properties for better “stretchability and flexibility.” It also used a new wiring design structure and a micro-LED light source, allowing users to repeatedly stretch the screen over 10,000 times with no effect on image quality.

The Stretchable display national project is one of the programs spearheaded by the South Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy (MOTIE) and the Korea Planning & Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology. This move has allowed LG Display and South Korea to gain a foothold in the next-generation display market, as well as ensuring that the research, development, and manufacturing supply chain will benefit local companies and organizations. In fact, aside from LG Display which took the lead, the current stretchable display prototype involves over 19 domestic industry and research institutions. So, its commercial success will likely benefit the South Korean economy as a whole.

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The photos in the article really are remarkable.
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How weight loss drugs took over Instagram • Financial Times

Hannah Gordon:

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In one hand, a slender young woman holds up a bottle of clear liquid. The words “Skinny” and “GLP-1” — a new class of weight loss drugs — are visible on the label. In the other hand, she raises up a pipette filled with the liquid, as if to drop it in her open mouth. “Lose up to 15% of your body weight,” reads the caption on the Instagram post. 

The marketing, from a little-known online pharmacy called Skinny Rx, is one of thousands of advertisements that are targeting young women on social media, promising users they can get their hands on “affordable” anti-obesity or anti-diabetic medications in just a few clicks.

In recent weeks, I’ve found my own Instagram feed taken over by the adverts despite never having purchased the drugs. Up to eight consecutive ads will appear for weight loss pills, oral liquids or injectables.

Looking on Meta’s Ads Library, it’s clear I am not the only one. There are more than 5,000 active adverts listed that contained the phrase GLP-1, plus more than 3,100 campaigns that mentioned the GLP-1 drug “semaglutide” and over 4,000 referencing “Ozempic”. As a comparison, popular beauty product terms, such as nail polish and blusher, featured in fewer ads — around 3,000 and 1,100 respectively.

The value of these drugs in treating obesity and diabetes is clear. And marketing for legitimate prescription medications is legal here in the US. But allowing people to be bombarded with advertising that promotes rapid weight loss — at a time when social media platforms face increased pressure to take more responsibility for the content shown to users — is irresponsible, say experts. 

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How much will Twitter matter to Donald Trump this time? • Business Insider

Peter Kafka:

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the big unknown I’m thinking about right now is a pretty simple one: Does Donald Trump know, or care, about what’s happening on Twitter?

Trump famously loved Twitter during his first term in office. But he wasn’t addicted to it the way many of us are — constantly scrolling for things to enrage or delight or distract. Instead, he was using it like a remote control — to program the media’s coverage, and reality itself.

Here’s Trump in 2019 talking to Fox News about the way he used Twitter:

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I have destroyed bills that were going to be voted on that were bad, and I’ve gotten bills passed that were good by using Twitter. And Twitter is really a typewriter for me. It’s really not Twitter — it’s — Twitter goes on television, or if they have breaking news, I’ll tweet, I’ll say, “Watch this — boom.”

I did the Golan Heights to Israel, and I put it out on Twitter. If I put out a news release, nobody’s even going to see it. Today’s Huawei, I put it out on Twitter. People see. That’s not to build Twitter. That’s to say that as soon as it goes out, it goes on television, it goes on Facebook, it goes all over the place, and it’s instant — it really is, to me, it’s a modern way to communicate.

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But note whom Trump was talking to in that interview: Fox News.

Trump 1.0 was a president who understood that digital media was important. But he was first and foremost a president who came of age in the 1970s and ’80s, and his media diet reflected that: print newspapers and magazines, which he would scrawl notes on using a Sharpie. And, above all else: TV.

Trump was the TV president. Trump was transfixed by TV, and that meant TV was the most important medium during his first presidency. If you wanted to communicate with the president, the conventional wisdom became, you did it by going on TV because you knew he’d see it there. Fox News in particular.

That was four years ago, and since then, the TV landscape has continued to bleed money and audience. Election-night ratings last week were down 25% from 2020. Newish mediums and platforms like podcasts, YouTube, and TikTok are ascendant, and Trump and his campaign spent a lot of time and effort over there.

So is it possible that Trump, who is approaching 80 and played songs from 1978 at his rallies, has changed his media diet, too?

I mean, sure? I guess it’s conceivable that he went on Theo Von’s podcast/YouTube show because he’s a big Theo Von fan.

My hunch, though, is that he’s getting his information the way he always has — by watching and reading Old Media. And, as The New York Times reports, by asking whoever’s in his orbit at the moment:

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We need internet culture journalism more than ever • Passionfruit

Steven Asarch:

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During Donald Trump’s election-night victory speech, UFC owner and Trump supporter Dana White thanked several people, including YouTubers the Nelk Boys, podcaster Theo Von, streamer Adin Ross, and podcaster Joe Rogan. 

For those with little internet presence, these names might not be notable. But for the internet-addicted young men who helped carry Trump to four more years in the White House, this was a congratulatory shout-out. These internet edge lords with millions of followers — some who spew antisemitic conspiracy theories and make grand sweeping gestures and endorsements for Trump — are now some of the most powerful creators in American culture. 

Though there is no clear single reason as to why Trump won the election, there’s no doubt that the internet and the chaos it evolved into fueled the anger of young men over the past decade and played a major role. According to exit polls, men between the ages of 18 and 29 shifted rightward by eight percentage points since the 2020 election, citing the economy as a top issue. 

…At Passionfruit, I’ve covered the rise of the conservative gamer, the controversial (and childish) content of Adin Ross, as well as dozens of other stories about how right-wing creators are exploiting the frustrations of young men and rotting our social fabric. Complaints about Star Wars or Marvel making bad TV get shoehorned into the overall culture war, blaming bad writing or dialogue on the “woke mind virus.” That rhetoric becomes a slippery slope, leading young men down rabbit holes to more conservative voices like Charlie Kirk or Ben Shapiro.

But at other newsrooms I’ve worked with, getting anyone to care about internet culture journalism has proven to be a herculean feat. One editor at an outlet (that shall not be named) told me to “focus on more mainstream personalities” since those are the ones “that get clicks.”

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The real missing link, I think, is podcast culture journalism. The problem, though, is that it takes so long to listen to them.
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What are the most commonly used movie clichés? • Stephen Follows

Stephen Follows:

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Last week, a group of friends and I watched Last Action Hero (1993). The script started life as a satire on dumb action moves (its original title was “Extremely Violent”) but was so heavily re-written during development and production that (a) its original writers lost their full writing credit, and (b) it became the exact thing it was looking to send up – i.e. a forgettable dumb action movie.

During the many dull moments we had to chat while the movie draaagggggggged on, the conversation turned to dialogue clichés. Last Action Zero included a number of classics, including “This is not happening”, “I’m just doing my job”, and “Did you hear something?”.

This movie gets a pass on clichés as its intent is to be a semi-parody, so some of those uses could be aimed at being self-aware and (intended at least) for comedic effect.

But what of the whole pantheon of movies? How many cite familour clichés? And which are the ones coming in and out of fashion?

I turned to my database of subtitle files to find out. I generated my long list of 138 dialogue clichés after consulting with screenwriters, reading blogs, and talking it through with Jack Malvern from The Times. With my list in hand, I tracked their appearance in over 72,000 movies released since 1940.

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It’s all very, very American. (Unsurprisingly.) He also looks at those phrases in rapid decline: “We meet again” has fallen off very quickly. “You’d better come in” is basically dead.
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DNA shows Pompeii’s dead aren’t who we thought they were • Ars Technica

Jennifer Ouellette:

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Four Pompeii victims were found in 1974 in what is known as the “House of the golden bracelet.” Three (two adults and one child) were found at the foot of a staircase leading to a garden and the seafront. Archaeologists thought this was likely a father, mother, and their child because of the arrangement of the bodies, as well as a golden bracelet worn on the arm of one of the bodies. But it wasn’t possible to definitely determine the sex of any of the bodies. The hypothesis was that the trio had taken shelter in the stairwell but were killed when it collapsed. A fourth body of a child, about age 4, was found nearby, presumed to have died while trying to escape to the garden.

This new DNA analysis showed that this conventional interpretation was incorrect. All the bodies were male, including the one with the golden bracelet, and none of them were genetically related. It wasn’t possible to glean much information about physical characteristics, but one person had black hair and dark skin, and two others probably had brown eyes. The ancestry of all four was consistent with origins in North Africa or the Mediterranean.

In 1914, nine bodies were found in the garden in front of the “House of the cryptoporticus,” so named because there is an underground passage running along three sides of that garden. Only four were preserved in plaster, including two bodies that seemed to be embracing. Archaeologists suggested they were lovers, mother/daughter, or two sisters. The authors were only able to extract DNA from one of those bodies, revealing that it was male, excluding two of those possible interpretations. His ancestry was of Near Eastern/North African origin.

Pompeii plaster casts in the House of the Golden Bracelet. Credit: Archeological Park of Pompeii
Several bodies were found in the “Villa of the Mysteries” in 1909–1910, known for its decorative frescoes dedicated to Bacchus, the god of wine, religious ecstasy, and fertility. The villa even had a wine press, since it was common for wealthy families to make their own wine and olive oil, among other products. The authors focused on one particular body found lying on top of a layer of ash, wearing an engraved iron and carnelian ring on the left hand. Archaeologists suggested he was probably the custodian of the villa rather than a family member.

The DNA analysis confirmed that this body was a male of mixed genetic ancestry, primarily Eastern Mediterranean and European origin. In short, “The scientific data we provide do not always align with common assumptions,” said co-author David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard University. “These findings challenge traditional gender and familial assumptions.”

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The Matter smart home standard gains support for more devices, including heat pumps and solar panels • The Verge

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:

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However, the launch of the Matter 1.4 specification this week shows some signs that the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA, the organization behind Matter) is using more sticks and fewer carrots to get the smart home industry coalition to cooperate.  

The new spec introduces “enhanced multi-admin,” an improvement on multi-admin — the much-touted interoperability feature that means your Matter smart light can work in multiple ecosystems simultaneously. It brings a solution for making Thread border routers from different companies play nicely together and introduces a potentially easier way to add Matter infrastructure to homes through Wi-Fi routers and access points.

Arguably, these should have all been in place when Matter launched. But now, two years later, the CSA is finally implementing the fixes that could help move the standard forward. 

Matter 1.4 also brings some big updates to energy management support, including adding heat pumps, home batteries, and solar panels as Matter device types.

Disappointingly, security cameras didn’t make it in this time. The CSA’s CTO, Chris LaPré, tells The Verge that while support for cameras is still part of the plan, there’s no timeline for a release. However, he points out that Matter 1.4 now covers almost every other device category in the home, which should provide a solid foundation to move the standard forward.

«

One of the things that Pete Warden didn’t mention in his article quoted yesterday was interoperability, but that’s a big thing too: buying a lightbulb that refuses to work with your ecosystem or loses functionality all matters (ha) too.
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If I want to get fitter, should I wear a fitness watch? • Tim Harford

Tim Harford got a new smartwatch, and wondered whether its quantification of many fitness elements would make him get fitter:

»

In 2022, Lancet Digital Health published a systematic review that tried to bring together all the credible research done to that date, covering 164,000 people. The study came to exactly the conclusion you might expect, if you weren’t tying yourself in knots of counterintuition: fitness trackers do help people to be fitter.

More specifically, wearable activity trackers lead people to walk more — 1,800 steps or 40 minutes of extra walking per day — and to lose some weight (1kg) on average. There is also evidence, albeit weaker evidence, that fitness trackers lead people to burn more calories, improve blood sugar and cholesterol, improve wellbeing, reduce disability, and lower levels of pain, anxiety and depression. Emotional wellbeing improves and resting heart rate falls.

Some of these apparent benefits are small or uncertain but, broadly speaking, the picture is what you’d hope: people who were given fitness trackers in a randomised trial were more active than those who, at random, were not. That extra physical activity led to all the benefits we might expect.
None of these studies was designed to answer the question, “If I want to get fitter, should I buy a fitness watch?” Instead, they answer the stranger question, “If I was given a fitness watch as part of an academic study, would I get fitter?”

Consider the parallel pair of questions: “If I want to take up running, should I buy some running shoes?” and, “If I was given some running shoes as part of an academic study, would I run more?” For most purposes, the answer to the first question is obvious and the answer to the second is irrelevant.

Perhaps that’s how I should view my fitness watch. It’s like a gym membership or an exercise bike: great if you use it, pointless if you don’t.

«

I can also recommend a dog if you want to increase the number of steps per day.
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Editor’s Note: What’s Next for WIRED • WIRED

Katie Drummond:

»

I won’t sugarcoat it: The outcome of last week’s US presidential election wasn’t the one WIRED wanted. As I wrote last week, several of the core values that underpin our publication and inform our journalism—unwavering respect for democratic institutions, a commitment to human rights and bodily autonomy, recognition that climate change is a dire emergency—are at odds with those of Donald Trump and the incoming GOP administration.

Our values aren’t changing, and our commitment to rigorous, independent reporting and investigative journalism across WIRED coverage areas remains steadfast, particularly as the US navigates this new and uncertain political chapter. But as I reminded our team last week, there’s one more value that we hold dear here at WIRED, and it’s one I want to share with all of you today: hope.

At WIRED we believe that technological progress and scientific discovery will, sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly—often turbulently, too often inequitably—improve human lives and introduce possibilities that were once unfathomable. We believe in the potency and creativity of the human mind, and we love nothing more than to introduce all of you to the ingenious ideas and inventions that emerge from brilliant people across so many fields of inquiry.

We believe that the internet can still, amid the AI slop and trolls of it all, be a place to find community, to connect across physical borders, to be informed, and to be entertained. We believe in being weird. We believe in fun. At WIRED we will always choose to believe that the world’s best days—maybe the galaxy’s best days, when we all live on Mars—are still to come. So yes. Yes, dammit. We believe in hope.

«

Perhaps it’s my distance from the event, but I find this announcement – which was prominently on the top left of the Wired home page, so I wasn’t cherrypicking it – strange. Why does Wired’s editor think we would think a different president is going to change its journalism, or approach to same? American journalists really are an odd bunch sometimes.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

We were warned that the US presidential election would be overrun with deepfakes – so what happened? CC-licensed photo by Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken 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. Verified. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

AI’s underwhelming impact on the 2024 elections • TIME

Andrew Chow:

»

fears of the election being derailed or defined by AI now appear to have been overblown. Political deepfakes have been shared across social media, but have been just a small part of larger misinformation campaigns. The U.S. Intelligence Community wrote in September that while foreign actors like Russia were using generative AI to “improve and accelerate” attempts to influence voters, the tools did not “revolutionize such operations.”

Tech insiders acknowledge 2024 was not a breakthrough year for generative AI in politics. “There are a lot of campaigns and organizations using AI in some way or another. But in my view, it did not reach the level of impact that people anticipated or feared,” says Betsy Hoover, the founder of Higher Ground Labs, a venture fund that invests in political technology.

At the same time, researchers warn that the impacts of generative AI on this election cycle have yet to be fully understood, especially because of their deployment on private messaging platforms. They also contend that even if the impact of AI on this campaign seems underwhelming, it is likely to balloon in coming elections as the technology improves and its usage grows among the general public and political operatives. “I’m sure in another year or two the AI models will get better,” says Sunny Gandhi, the vice president of political affairs at Encode Justice. “So I’m pretty worried about what it will look like in 2026 and definitely 2028.”

Generative AI has already had a clear impact on global politics. In countries across South Asia, candidates used artificial intelligence to flood the public with articles, images and video deepfakes. In February, an audio deepfake was disseminated that falsely purported to depict London Mayor Sadiq Khan making inflammatory comments before a major pro-Palestinian march. Khan says that the audio clip inflamed violent clashes between protestors and counter-protestors.

«

The BBC link for the Khan mention dates back to February, and relates to a deepfake audio clip that sounded like Khan which circulated in November 2023, encouraging a Palestinian march in London. But that march was going ahead, and there’s no evidence it was made worse by the clip.

I’m going to suggest that deepfakes – videos or audios – aren’t going to be effective in disrupting politics. There’s too much flow, so that any fake can be quickly checked and disavowed. The Washington Post agrees that AI didn’t change anything, though it might have deepened divides – except the number of swing voters suggests to me that isn’t true either.
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Why has the Internet of Things failed? • Pete Warden’s blog

Pete Warden:

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Setup: The biggest obstacle is the setup tax. All of our communication technologies, from WiFi to cellular, cost money to use, and so require authentication and billing accounts. This isn’t as big a problem with PCs and phones because we only replace them every few years, and they have screens and keyboards, so going through the setup process is comparatively straightforward. By comparison, your fridge or toaster probably doesn’t have a full-featured user interface, and so you’re expected to download a phone app, and then use that to indirectly set up your appliance.

This adds multiple extra steps, and anyone who’s ever worked on a customer funnel means that every additional stage means losing some people along the way. If you also factor in that a household might have dozens of different devices that all want you to go through the same process, with different applications, accounts, and quirks, it’s clear why people suffer from setup fatigue and often don’t even try.

Uselessness: Last year I talked to an engineer who had spent six months working on a smart dishwasher that could be connected to the internet. He confessed that none of the team had been able to figure out a compelling user benefit for the system. You could start the dishwasher remotely, but how did that help if you had to be there in person to load it? Knowing when it was done was mildly useful, but most people would know that from when they started it. With phones and PCs adding an internet connection unlocked immediately compelling use cases, thanks to all the human-readable content on web pages, and once the network was widely available more applications like Salesforce or Uber added to the appeal.

We’ve never seen anything like this for IoT in the consumer space. Getting an alert that your fridge door has been left open is nice, but isn’t much better than having an audible alarm go off. Amazon, Apple, and Google have tried to use voice interfaces as a selling point for devices to connect through their ecosystem, but almost nobody uses them for anything other than setting alarms and playing songs.

There’s also no inherent reason to send audio data to the cloud to have a voice interface, one of the reasons we founded Useful was to bring local speech interfaces to everyday objects. People need a motivation to connect their devices, especially with the time cost involved in setup, and nobody has given them one.

«

As he points out, less than 50% of internet-capable appliances actually get connected.
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TSMC will stop making 7 nm chips for Chinese customers • Financial Times via Ars Technica

Kathrin Hille and Ryan McMorrow:

»

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has notified Chinese chip design companies that it will suspend production of their most advanced artificial intelligence chips, as Washington continues to impede Beijing’s AI ambitions.

TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, told Chinese customers it would no longer manufacture AI chips at advanced process nodes of 7 nanometers or smaller as of this coming Monday, three people familiar with the matter said.

Two of the people said any future supplies of such semiconductors by TSMC to Chinese customers would be subject to an approval process likely to involve Washington.

TSMC’s tighter rules could reset the ambitions of Chinese technology giants such as Alibaba and Baidu, which have invested heavily in designing semiconductors for their AI clouds, as well as a growing number of AI chip design start-ups that have turned to the Taiwanese group for manufacturing.

The US has barred American companies like Nvidia from shipping cutting-edge processors to China and also created an extensive export control system to stop chipmakers worldwide that are using US technology from shipping advanced AI processors to China. There have been reports that a new US rule would ban foundries from making advanced AI chips designed by Chinese firms, according to analysts at investment bank Jefferies.

TSMC is rolling out its new policy as the US Commerce Department investigates how cutting-edge chips the group made for a Chinese customer ended up in a Huawei AI device. The Chinese national tech champion is subject to multiple US sanctions and export controls.

«

The Huawei restrictions, in case you’d forgotten, date back to Trump’s first term.
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How It Went • Daring Fireball

John Gruber:

»

My mom died at the end of June this year.

I know, and I’m sorry — that’s a hell of a way to open a piece ostensibly about a depressing, worrisome, frightening election result. But here’s the thing I want to emphasize right up front: my mom’s death was OK. It really was. She was 78, which isn’t that old, but her health had not been great. She was hospitalized for several days in May, just a month prior, after she had collapsed at home, too weak to stand, and for days it wasn’t clear what was wrong. Then some more test results came back and we had the answer. She had ovarian cancer, bad. It had already metastasized. The prognosis was grim: months to live, at best. And those months, toward the end, would inexorably grow ever more painful and profoundly sad.

Her mental acuity had begun to slip in recent years, too. Not a lot, but if you knew her you’d notice. But she faced this prognosis with remarkable dignity, courage, and clarity. She knew the score. It was what it was, and she’d make the best of the time she had left. She was tired but still felt pretty good most days. There were flashes of her younger self, the Mom I remember growing up with. It was wonderful to see those flashes. The bad times were coming, but they laid ahead. On the last Monday night in June she and my dad went out to eat at their favorite restaurant. They had a good meal and a good time. It was a great day. Tuesday morning she played Wordle and reported her score to our family group chat. Then around noon, she just fell over, dead. My dad found her unresponsive, called 911, and they arrived in minutes, but she was gone. No suffering.

«

This is only the opening of a long, beautiful, elegiac piece, which is your day’s must-read. It will uplift you. But you have to read through to the end. I think I’ve read everything Gruber has written on his site, which goes back 22 years, and this is without a doubt the best thing he has ever written.
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Apple Mac Mini M4 review: a tiny wonder • The Verge

Chris Welch:

»

As I said earlier, the $599 Mini is the best value around if you haven’t yet joined the Mac side of Apple’s ecosystem. Even the $799 configuration I tested, with 16GB of memory and a 512GB SSD, seems reasonable. But once you go beyond that in RAM or storage, Apple’s pricing smacks of greed and padding the company’s bottom line. That’s true across the line, but it’s felt more acutely on a machine that starts at only $599. Stepping up to 1TB of storage and 32GB of RAM brings the price to $1,399. Yikes.

For most, the Mini will be a stationary computer, and the presence of three Thunderbolt ports means you can attach a speedy external SSD without caving to Apple’s farcical rates. Given that, the other $799 config, with 24GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, could be more worthwhile. Neither can be upgraded later, so it’s important to get the specs right when buying.

You can use Apple’s display and accessories… or get as creative as you want with third-party options.
Every time I glance over at the new Mac Mini on my desk, it feels like the Mini’s ideal form. The redesigned enclosure makes the most of Apple Silicon’s small footprint, and with Apple’s M4 chip and an ample selection of ports, the 2024 Mini should remain a zippy, reliable computer for years to come. It’s never been more mighty. Well, except for the much pricier M4 Pro version. Stay tuned for more on that soon.

«

A calculation on the ATP podcast suggested that Apple’s RAM and SSD upgrades are priced at 6.5x above retail level. Given Apple would buy at wholesale, ie 40% of retail at most, that’s about 16x the wholesale price, or more. It’s insane, but Apple has been doing it for years. At least for SSDs you can plug in an external drive.
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Deleted tweets, missed warnings and calls for the ‘hangman’: the bitter political fallout from Spain’s floods • The Guardian

Sam Jones:

»

The sun still hadn’t risen on Tuesday 29 October when the mayor of Utiel, Ricardo Gabaldón, took another look at the warnings from Spain’s state meteorological office and ordered all the schools in the small Valencian town to close.

“The warning early that morning – at 5am or 6am – was orange,” he said. “That’s when I was weighing up whether to close the schools here. In the end, I ordered them to close at six or seven that morning. Soon after, the alert went red.”

Although the rain brought floods that have so far claimed at least 223 lives in Spain – six of them in Utiel – Gabaldón knows the death toll could have been far higher in his town had the schools been open. Children and their parents would have died on flooded roads during the drive in from surrounding villages, and students could have been drowned in their school corridors. “Thank goodness that the children weren’t here,” he said. “Otherwise we’d be talking about something else entirely.”

The foresight and initiative Gabaldón showed in the first moments of the worst natural disaster in Spain’s modern history were far from ubiquitous. The alerts that are pinged to people’s mobile phones in times of civil emergency were not sent out by the Valencian regional government until after 8pm on Tuesday. By then, a year’s worth of rain had fallen in some areas in a matter of hours and the flood waters in Utiel were three metres high.

Even as emergency teams search for the 78 people still listed as missing, questions are being asked about the authorities’ handling of the crisis, one that has brought out the very worst, and the very best, in people.

«

Climate change is going to affect governments around the Mediterranean because warmer water evaporates more easily and is dumped on the land. This sort of crisis will become more, not less, common.
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The media’s identity crisis • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel:

»

“You are the media now.” That’s the message that began to cohere among right-wing influencers shortly after Donald Trump won the election this week. Elon Musk first posted the phrase, and others followed. “The legacy media is dead. Hollywood is done. Truth telling is in. No more complaining about the media,” the right-wing activist James O’Keefe posted shortly after. “You are the media.”

It’s a particularly effective message for Musk, who spent $44 billion to purchase a communications platform that he has harnessed to undermine existing media institutions and directly support Trump’s campaign. QAnon devotees also know the phrase as a rallying cry, an invitation to participate in a particular kind of citizen “journalism” that involves just asking questions and making stuff up altogether.

“You are the media now” is also a good message because, well, it might be true.

A defining quality of this election cycle has been that few people seem to be able to agree on who constitutes “the media,” what their role ought to be, or even how much influence they have in 2024. Based on Trump and Kamala Harris’s appearances on various shows—and especially Trump and J. D. Vance’s late-race interviews with Joe Rogan, which culminated in the popular host’s endorsement—some have argued that this was the “podcast election.” But there’s broad confusion over what actually moves the needle.

Is the press the bulwark against fascism, or is it ignored by a meaningful percentage of the country? It is certainly beleaguered by a conservative effort to undermine media institutions, with Trump as its champion and the fracturing caused by algorithmic social media. It can feel existential at times competing for attention and reckoning with the truth that many Americans don’t read, trust, or really care all that much about what papers, magazines, or cable news have to say.

«

People have been “cable-cutting” – dropping their cable contracts – for years in favour of YouTube and the internet. Megyn Kelly was on the Today programme last week boasting about how CNN had had 4 million viewers on election night – and she had had 4 million on her YouTube stream at the same time. Plus the median age of these channels is zooming up: MTV’s median age is 50; for CNN, it’s 70. Those channels are not coming back from that cliff edge.
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Questionmarks of the Mysterians • New Cartographies

Nicholas Carr:

»

what if our faith in nature’s knowability is just an illusion, a trick of the overconfident human mind? That’s the working assumption behind a school of thought known as Mysterianism. Situated at the fruitful if sometimes fraught intersection of scientific and philosophic inquiry, the Mysterianist view has been promulgated, in different ways, by many prominent thinkers, from the philosopher Colin McGinn to the linguist Noam Chomsky to the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. The Mysterians propose that human intellect has boundaries and that many of the mysteries of the cosmos will forever lie beyond our comprehension.

Mysterianism is most closely associated with the so-called hard problem of consciousness: How can the inanimate matter of the brain produce subjective feelings? The Mysterians suggest that the human mind is incapable of understanding itself, that we will never know how consciousness works. But if Mysterianism applies to the workings of the mind, there’s no reason it shouldn’t also apply to the workings of nature in general. As McGinn has suggested, “It may be that nothing in nature is fully intelligible to us.”

The simplest and best argument for Mysterianism is founded on evolutionary evidence. When we examine any other living creature, we understand immediately that its intellect is limited. Even the brightest, most curious dog is not going to master arithmetic. Even the wisest of owls knows nothing of the physiology of the field mouse it devours. If all the minds that evolution has produced have bounded comprehension, then it’s only logical that our own minds, also products of evolution, would have limits as well. As Pinker has put it, “The brain is a product of evolution, and just as animal brains have their limitations, we have ours.” To assume that there are no limits to human understanding is to believe in a level of human exceptionalism that seems miraculous, if not mystical.

…What’s truly disconcerting about Mysterianism is that, if our intellect is bounded, we can never know how much of existence lies beyond our grasp. What we know or may in the future know may be trifling compared with the unknowable unknowns.

«

This has always seemed an obvious point to me: there must be aliens whose cognitive abilities are beyond ours, just as ours are beyond dogs. What happens if we meet them?
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The sinking of the Bayesian and the Mohawk • Churbuck

David Churbuck:

»

In the department of history-repeating-itself, here is a strange historical coincidence from the realm of current events, maritime history and 19th century American yachting: two superyachts capsize and sink at anchor, only a few hundred yards from shore, killing their wealthy owners, guests, and crew when a summer squall overwhelmed them. The story of the two catastrophes dominated the news for weeks.

This is the story of the Mohawk and the Bayesian: two superyacht tragedies that killed their wealthy owners a century and a half apart.

«

Bizarre how these things happen. Then happen again.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The price of Apple products seems likely to shoot up if Trump’s tariffs come into effect. CC-licensed photo by Brian Snelson 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 9 links for you. Uninflated. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Trump’s 60% tariffs could push China to hobble tech industry growth • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Now that the US presidential election has been called for Donald Trump, the sweeping tariffs regime that Trump promised on the campaign trail seems imminent. For the tech industry, already burdened by the impact of tariffs on their supply chains, it has likely become a matter of “when” not “if” companies will start spiking prices on popular tech.

During Trump’s last administration, he sparked a trade war with China by imposing a wide range of tariffs on China imports, and President Joe Biden has upheld and expanded them during his term. These tariffs are taxes that Americans pay on restricted Chinese goods, imposed by both presidents as a tactic to punish China for unfair trade practices, including technology theft, by hobbling US business with China.

As the tariffs expanded, China has often retaliated, imposing tariffs on US goods and increasingly limiting US access to rare earth materials critical to manufacturing a wide range of popular products. And any such retaliation from China only seems to spark threats of more tariffs in the US—setting off a cycle that seems unlikely to end with Trump imposing a proposed 60% tax on all China imports. Experts told Ars that the tech industry expects to be stuck in the middle of the blow-by-blow trade war, taking punches left and right.

Currently, there are more than $300bn in tariffs on Chinese imports, but notably, there are none yet on popular tech like smartphones, laptops, tablets, and game consoles. Back when Trump last held office, the tech industry successfully lobbied to get those exemptions, warning that the US economy would hugely suffer if tariffs were imposed on consumer tech. Prices on game consoles alone could spike by as much as 25% as tech companies coped with increasing costs from tariffs, the industry warned, since fully decoupling from China was then, and is still now, considered impossible.

Trump’s proposed 60% tariff would cost tech companies four times more than that previous round of tariffs that the industry dodged when Trump last held office. A recent Consumer Technology Association (CTA) study found that prices could jump even higher than previously feared if consumer tech is as heavily taxed as Trump intends. Laptop prices could nearly double, game console prices could rise by 40%, and smartphone prices by 26%.

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Bet Apple is absolutely delighted at this prospect.
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Tracking Harris and Trump’s ad spending on Facebook and Instagram • Bellingcat

Pooja Chaudhuri and Melissa Zhu:

»

By summing up the average spending for all ads by each presidential candidate’s campaigns, we found that Harris’ campaign has spent about US$113m  – more than a small country’s GDP – advertising on Facebook and Instagram between July 21 and Oct. 30, while Trump’s campaign spent about US$17m in total.

Both figures likely represent just the tip of the iceberg for the candidates’ total ad spending across television and digital advertising including on other online platforms such as Google. 

Almost all (99.8%) of the ads sponsored by Harris’ campaign ran on both Facebook and Instagram, whereas almost 26% of those supporting Trump were only shown on Facebook, and 7.5% targeted only Instagram. 

This is only a fraction of both campaigns’ and their supporters’ spending on ads. An NPR analysis published on November 1, found that over $10bn has been spent in the 2024 election cycle, beginning January 2023, on races from president, senate to county commissioner. This includes ads on TV, radio, satellite, cable and other digital ads.

To estimate how much each campaign spent advertising on Meta’s platforms, we multiplied the average spending for each ad with the the percentage of ad delivery for each region (the data previously extracted from the “delivery_by_region” column), assuming that the amount spent in each region was proportional to where audiences eventually saw the ad.

Based on our calculations, the Harris campaign directed more advertising dollars in swing states with the highest spending in Pennsylvania – reported as the toughest swing state by election strategists – than any other state.

Pennsylvania played a crucial role in the 2020 election with Biden winning by a narrow margin. The state backed Trump in the 2016 election. 

The seven swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – are regarded as holding the key to the White House in the 2024 election. The Trump campaign has also focused on the swing states, but Democrats have outspent Republicans in each of those states.

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My conclusion, based on that: 2016 is long gone. This was not the social media election.
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Foundation’s edge • Unbalancing Mechanism

Adam Bell:

»

[In the 1980s and 1990s] New nuclear power stations were considerably more expensive than building a new fleet of combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) power stations. These were able to achieve thermal efficiencies of 55-60% and make best use of cheap North Sea gas. We stopped building nuclear power stations because we had a cheaper alternative.

And this was not simply a matter of Government making the wrong investment decisions. At privatisation the new generation companies refused to take on the UK’s existing nuclear fleet, judging both its running costs and potential liabilities as being not worth the candle. The Government kept them in public hands and forced utilities to buy power from them through the Non-Fossil Fuels Obligation. If we had maintained the nuclear build-out under public control, we would have had higher electricity costs throughout the 90s and 00s. And, consequently, lower growth.

The second explanation the authors [of the essay Foundations] put forward is that the increased use of wind and solar in our power system is driving costs up. This is not because of how much it costs to build out these technologies, but rather the costs of integrating them into our electricity system – more transmission lines to where the wind actually is, increased costs of balancing to accommodate intermittency, and the need to pay for backup for periods of low wind and low sun.

The reason why we cancelled our nuclear build-out and the reason why industrial power prices are now high is the same: the price of gas. The CCGT fleet we built in the 90s is now driving prices higher. The bounty of the North Sea ran out in the 2000s and we now import the majority of our needs. As a result, our marginal gas supply is liquified natural gas traded on global markets over which we have little control. Even the minor expansion of North Sea extraction that new exploration would unlock would do very little to move the dial here.

«

And there are tons of pricing contracts for renewables which pay at least as much as the price of gas on the network. It’s strange how we get locked into our past actions; for all that we tell ourselves we can forecast the future, we get stuck with one foot in the solid concrete of what we did.
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Secrets of a ransomware negotiator • The Economist

»

Last autumn, somewhere in Europe, a security operations centre noticed something. This is the primary job of a security operations centre – to notice things. Its role is simple, protecting organisations by tracking the people using their computer networks. Its name is often abbreviated to a simple acronym, SOC (pronounced “sock”.) The people who work at a SOC are the cyber-security equivalent of night guards at the mall, sitting at a bank of television screens: watching, waiting, trying not to doze off.

In this case, what they noticed was someone trying to log in to a staff member’s account at one of the companies the SOC monitors, using a series of incorrect passwords. About a thousand times in one day. This seemed suspicious. Someone at the SOC sent someone at the company an email, letting them know about the failed logins.

The cyber-security industry exists to keep information secret and reputations intact. I am able to tell you this story only if I keep the company in question anonymous, though you might have heard of it. Picture a company that provides boring administrative services to thousands of organisations across the planet. The kind of company that your own employer subcontracts. A company everyone relies on but no one really bothers to think about.

Both the SOC and the company were certified as meeting “the world’s best-known standard for information security”. But when the SOC alerted the company’s staff to the failed logins, they did nothing. The SOC didn’t press the issue. No one noticed that the user was eventually able to log in. Or that the account belonged to an employee who no longer worked there. No one noticed that it was an administrator-level account, which provided access to the company’s entire network. No one noticed anything amiss – for about a month.

Then, one day, the company’s servers began malfunctioning. A series of alarming emails arrived. “We managed to obtain a lot of secret documents, internal documents classified as strictly confidential, personal data of current employees!” read one. There was a link to a private chat room, and a deadline for using it. The hackers wanted to talk.

Some hours later, a phone rang on the other side of the world. Nick Shah was asleep at his beach house on the tropical island of Mauritius, which is in the middle of the Indian Ocean. When he picked up, it was a colleague with bad news.

«

Shah is the ransomware negotiator (it’s a fast-growing trade) and this is an entertaining story.
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India’s lithium mining plans in Kashmir have stalled • Rest of World

Yashraj Sharma:

»

Sunil Thakur, a 24-year-old engineering graduate, once planned to build a career as a civil engineer. But jobs were scarce, and so Thakur spent his days frying samosas for his family’s snack shop in Salal — a picturesque mountain village of about 10,000 people in India’s northern state of Jammu and Kashmir.

Then, in February 2023, Thakur’s dreams of prosperity were suddenly revived.

India’s mining ministry informed the villagers that they were sitting on a fortune: 5.9 million metric tons of lithium, a silver-white metal that is a core component of the batteries necessary for India’s transition to clean energy.

The discovery — a first in India — would make the country the holder of the fifth-largest lithium reserve in the world, mining officials announced. Indian media outlets jubilantly reported that companies including Mitsubishi, Tesla, and Ola Electric were eyeing the reserve.

Thakur and his family started daydreaming about selling their land in exchange for “a duplex home in a big Indian city, and loads of cash,” he said. He imagined investing in the family business, first established by his grandfather nearly four decades ago.

Two years later, nothing has happened. The government tried to auction the lithium block twice in March, and failed both times, due to a lack of bidders. The extraction plans have been halted indefinitely.

«

“Did we say 5.9 million? We meant 0.02 million, and in clay deposits that make it hard to extract. Anyone?”
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Botched little animals • New Cartographies

Nicholas Carr:

»

In the course of writing Superbloom over the last few years, I found myself losing patience with the prevailing critique of social media and the internet, the one that portrays the technology as something imposed on us by an imperious external force (progress or capitalism or Big Tech or what-have-you) and that in turn depicts us as the hapless, helpless victims of that force’s exploitative and manipulative powers. The problem with this line of inquiry is not that it’s invalid — it’s valid, and it’s necessary — but that it’s incomplete. It skirts around our own complicity. It too easily separates our botched little animals from our botched little selves.

One of the central arguments of the book is that the commercial internet, and social media in particular, is a machine fine-tuned to sense our desires and fulfill them. If “the algorithm” manipulates us, it does so by giving us what we want. The machine’s manipulative power is secondary to, and dependent on, the pleasure it provides.

The moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre stressed the importance of distinguishing “between what we desire and the choiceworthy” and “between what pleases those others whom we desire to please and the choiceworthy.” Making such distinctions has always been difficult. Digital media, with its hyperactive solicitude and its automation of the act of choosing, makes them more difficult than ever — and more important than ever. Because technology is a repository of human desire, a full critique of any machine needs also to be a critique of human desire. We’re the machine’s makers before we’re its victims.

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Democrats join 2024’s graveyard of incumbents • Financial Times

John Burn-Murdoch:

»

the economic and geopolitical conditions of the past year or two have created arguably the most hostile environment in history for incumbent parties and politicians across the developed world.

From America’s Democrats to Britain’s Tories, Emmanuel’s Macron’s Ensemble coalition to Japan’s Liberal Democrats, even to Narendra Modi’s erstwhile dominant BJP, governing parties and leaders have undergone an unprecedented series of reversals this year.

The incumbents in every single one of the 10 major countries that have been tracked by the ParlGov global research project and held national elections in 2024 were given a kicking by voters. This is the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years of records.

Ultimately voters don’t distinguish between unpleasant things that their leaders and governments have direct control over, and those that are international phenomena resulting from supply-side disruptions caused by a global pandemic or the warmongering of an ageing autocrat halfway across the world.

Voters don’t like high prices, so they punished the Democrats for being in charge when inflation hit. The cost of living was also the top issue in Britain’s July general election and has been front of mind in dozens of other countries for most of the last two years.

That different politicians, different parties, different policies and different rhetoric deployed in different countries have all met similar fortunes suggests that a large part of Tuesday’s American result was locked in regardless of the messenger or the message. The wide variety of places and people who swung towards Trump also suggests an outcome that was more inevitable than contingent.

But it’s not just about inflation. An update of economist Arthur Okun’s “misery index” — the sum of the inflation and unemployment rates — for this era might swap out joblessness and replace it with immigration. On this basis, the past couple of years in the US, UK and dozens of other countries have been characterised by more economic and societal upheaval than they have seen in generations.

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Police freak out at iPhones mysteriously rebooting themselves, locking cops out • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

Law enforcement officers are warning other officials and forensic experts that iPhones which have been stored securely for forensic examination are somehow rebooting themselves, returning the devices to a state that makes them much harder to unlock, according to a law enforcement document obtained by 404 Media.

The exact reason for the reboots is unclear, but the document authors, who appear to be law enforcement officials in Detroit, Michigan, hypothesize that Apple may have introduced a new security feature in iOS 18 that tells nearby iPhones to reboot if they have been disconnected from a cellular network for some time. After being rebooted, iPhones are generally more secure against tools that aim to crack the password of and take data from the phone.

“The purpose of this notice is to spread awareness of a situation involving iPhones, which is causing iPhone devices to reboot in a short amount of time (observations are possibly within 24 hours) when removed from a cellular network,” the document reads. 

Apple did not provide a response on whether it introduced such an update in time for publication. Regardless, the reported iPhone reboots highlight the constant cat and mouse game between law enforcement officers and forensic experts on one side, and phone manufacturers Apple and Google on the other.

«

It would make sense as a safety feature for “Find my iPhone”, for example: the phone will turn on and let the world know where it is.
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Man spent $2m to find new largest prime number • Popular Science

Andrew Paul:

»

Formed in 1999, GIMPS [Greater Internet Mersenne Prime Search] relies on an international network of volunteers who download specialized software that harnesses their computers’ unused programming capabilities to search for exceptionally large Mersenne prime numbers. Named after Marin Mersenne, the 17th-century French friar who first studied them, Mersenne primes are defined as 2n-1, where “n” is any integer. While these begin relatively simply with the number 3 (22-1), they quickly climb to giant numbers that surpass any single human mind’s mathematical skills. They become so difficult to calculate, in fact, that the newest example, officially designated M136279841, is just the 52nd known Mersenne prime number.

Announced on Tuesday, GIMPS explained that M136279841 was first suspected on October 11 by a 36-year-old former NVIDIA employee named Luke Durant using what’s known as Fermat probable prime test. After Durant notified GIMPS of his possible breakthrough, several other computers around the world conducted multiple Lucas-Lehmer primality tests to ensure M136279841’s prime-ness, leading to its official confirmation 10 days later.

Durant’s achievement also marks a major moment in the hunt for Mersenne prime numbers—it’s the first of its kind to be found through the use of graphics processing units (GPUs) instead of traditional central processing units (CPUs). GPUs have come to prominence in recent years in conjunction with the rise of machine learning, large language models, and artificial intelligence, all of which often rely on massive GPU networks to function. For 28 years, GIMPS volunteers relied on CPU power to use the organization’s original software. In 2017, however, a developer named Mihai Preda designed an open-source program called GpuOwl to continue the Mersenne prime research through these muc-improved machines.

A single GPU isn’t likely to net a 41,024,320-digit number, however. Durant, for example, found M136279841 through a supercomputer cloud network he built using server GPUs throughout 24 datacenter regions in 17 countries. Such a large system isn’t cheap, either—The Washington Post reports the project cost Durant around $2m since he started looking for the 52nd Mersenne number in October 2023.

«

The discoverers of the Mersenne primes are a varied bunch. Previously, in 2018: Fedex employee discovers largest prime number.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The fastest mobile speeds you can get in London tend to be down in the Underground. CC-licensed photo by Mike Knell 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. Jammed? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Trump’s win is neither an oil gusher nor a green crusher • Bloomberg

Liam Denning:

»

as much as Trump calls the energy transition a scam, he entered office in 2017 amid sustained declines in the price of clean technologies. Developers’ decisions are certainly influenced by policy but few can resist the siren call of lower costs. For example: More US wind-power capacity was installed under the former president who speculates that the sound of spinning turbines can cause cancer than under Biden (Biden still wins big on solar and batteries).

Similarly, anyone expecting another round of energy dominance to spark a big jump in US oil and gas output should remember that the industry has in recent years grown rather fond of profitability. The same day Americans went to the polls, shale darling Diamondback Energy Inc. hosted an earnings call luxuriating in the company’s efficiency gains but warning against using that extra firepower to boost production: “I think that spreadsheet math is what’s gotten this industry in trouble in the past” — see: the Obama oil boom — as Chief Financial Officer Matthew Kaes Van’t Hof put it.

Trump will certainly reduce hurdles for producers; expect lower royalties and easier environmental rules on federal lands as well as more lease auctions. But federal lands account for a minority of oil and gas production and there are far bigger forces shaping the outlook for prices — and, therefore, the path of domestic production.

Chinese oil imports have slowed, exacerbating an excess of supply that has forced OPEC+ to delay bringing back production. If the group decides to pull the trigger in the first quarter — seasonally weak for oil demand — Trump’s inauguration could coincide with a slump in prices. That’s before we get to the negative impacts on oil and gas prices from a potential easing of sanctions on Russia or the chilling effect on global trade, and the opposite effect on US inflation, of his promised sweeping tariffs.

Similarly, Biden’s signature green policy, the Inflation Reduction Act, isn’t necessarily dead come January. The vast majority of announced cleantech manufacturing investment and associated jobs, underpinned by IRA subsidies, are in red [Republican] House districts.

«

This is an important point: Trump can’t buck the market, and the price of renewables is cratering. In 2016 he was full of talk about coal: its use plummeted. The fact that the Inflation Reduction Act is making so much impact in Republican areas makes it much, much harder to kill.
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How the Trump whale correctly called the election • WSJ

Alexander Osipovich:

»

The mystery trader known as the “Trump whale” is set to reap almost $50 million in profit after running the table on a series of bold bets tied to the presidential election.

Not only did he see Donald Trump winning the presidency, he wagered that Trump would win the popular vote—an outcome that many political observers saw as unlikely. “Théo,” as the trader called himself, also bet that Trump would win the “blue wall” swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Now, Théo is set for a huge payday. He made his wagers on Polymarket, a crypto-based betting platform, using four anonymous accounts. Although he has declined to share his identity, he has been communicating with a Wall Street Journal reporter since an article on Oct. 18 drew attention to his bets.

In dozens of emails, Théo said his wager was essentially a bet against the accuracy of polling data. Describing himself as a wealthy Frenchman who had previously worked as a trader for several banks, he told the Journal that he began applying his mathematical know-how to analyze US polls over the summer.

…Polls failed to account for the “shy Trump voter effect,” Théo said. Either Trump backers were reluctant to tell pollsters that they supported the former president, or they didn’t want to participate in polls, Théo wrote.

To solve this problem, Théo argued that pollsters should use what are known as “neighbour polls” that ask respondents which candidates they expect their neighbours to support. The idea is that people might not want to reveal their own preferences, but will indirectly reveal them when asked to guess who their neighbours plan to vote for.

Théo cited a handful of publicly released polls conducted in September using the neighbour method alongside the traditional method. These polls showed Harris’s support was several percentage points lower when respondents were asked who their neighbours would vote for, compared with the result that came from directly asking which candidate they supported.

To Théo, this was evidence that pollsters were—once again—underestimating Trump’s support. The data helped convince him to put on his long-shot bet that Trump would win the popular vote. At the time that Théo made those wagers, bettors on Polymarket were assessing the chances of a Trump popular-vote victory at less than 40%.

«

People who saw the size of the bets thought the “Whale” must be some sort of foreign influence operation. Half-right, at least. (How did they think a big bet would influence millions of voters?) I hadn’t heard of neighbour polls, but it seems like a clever method to discover revealed preference.
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Walking Phoenix • Chris Arnade Walks the World

Chris Arnade has been walking around all sorts of countries, seeing them from the ground, for years. In March this year he was in Phoenix, Arizona, seeing the American dream at ground zero:

»

The second morning began at the same McDonald’s, with the now familiar woman yelling at Susan — my own little Groundhog Day-like riff (“Okay, campers, rise and shine, and don’t forget your booties”) which I chuckled at.

By noon I wasn’t chuckling anymore. The walk, although in a different direction, was just as depressing. Long empty stretches on mile-long blocks, with just me and the distraught. It became another day-long lesson in the zoology of American dysfunction — the homeless addict, the mentally-ill homeless addict, the bored and aimless teens, the elderly with no family, the physically handicapped, the obese, the obese physically handicapped, the perc 30 addict, the angry mentally ill, and so on and so on.

After a lunch my body had no interest in, I realized I was in over my head, and needed to get out of the sun, needed water, so I called it quits, and found a bus route to get the six miles back to my motel. The first bus was running forty-five minutes late, and the stop had no shade, so instead of waiting, I walked to the second, which was an hour and fifteen late. I also walked that last bit.

When I finally got to my room, I realized I’d made a massive mistake2. I had zero appetite, despite having eaten little all day, and I badly needed hydration, so I went to the corner 24 7 Convenience Store to stock up on Gatorade, where all my cards were declined, then locked. I’ve used these cards in Senegal, Mongolia, and Ecuador without triggering so much as a security text, but the corner of 27th and Indian School Rd was too much for the algorithm. Given who was around me and the amount of plexiglass between me and the clerk, it was probably justified.

«

Do you want the remain candidate? Or the change candidate?
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The old man lost his horse • Flavia Ouyang

Flavia Ouyang:

»

There is a well-known parable in the book Master of Huainan that encapsulates Daoist’s idea of the relativity of luck in life. It’s known as “The old man lost his horse, how could he know if this is not fortuitous” (Original: 塞翁失馬，焉知非福).

Here’s the story:

Once Upon a time, a skilled equestrian lived near the border. For no reason, his horse ran off into the barbarian kingdoms. Everyone felt bad for him. But his father said, “Don’t be glum. Who’s to say this won’t take a turn for the better?”

Months passed. His horse came back with a herd of well-bred barbarian horses. People congratulated him. His father said, “Don’t be overjoyed. Who’s to say this won’t take a turn for the worse?”

Now with an abundance of horses, the son indulged in riding. One day, he fell and broke his leg. Again, people sympathized with him. Yet his father said, “My son, who’s to say this won’t take a turn for the better?”

A year later, the barbarian breached through the border. All able-bodied men were conscripted to fight. Nine out of ten were killed. Due to his injury, the father and son were spared.

Thus, misfortune can bring fortune, and fortune can lead to misfortune. This happens time and time again. The evolution of fortune is endless and unfathomable.

«

Ouyang’s comment: “Here’s to the horse we [in the US] lost last night.”
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Sweden scraps plans for 13 offshore windfarms over Russia security fears • The Guardian

Miranda Bryant:

»

Sweden has vetoed plans for 13 offshore windfarms in the Baltic Sea, citing unacceptable security risks.

The country’s defence minister, Pål Jonson, said on Monday that the government had rejected plans for all but one of 14 windfarms planned along the east coast.

The decision comes after the Swedish armed forces concluded last week that the projects would make it more difficult to defend Nato’s newest member.

“The government believes that it would lead to unacceptable consequences for Sweden’s defence to build the current projects in the Baltic Sea area,” Jonson said at a press conference.

The proposed windfarms would have been located between Åland, the autonomous Finnish region between Sweden and Finland, and the Sound, the strait between southern Sweden and Denmark. The Russian exclave of Kaliningrad is only about 310 miles (500km) from Stockholm.

Wind power could affect Sweden’s defence capabilities across sensors and radars and make it harder to detect submarines and possible attacks from the air if war broke out, Jonson said.

The only project to receive the green light to was Poseidon, which will include as many as 81 wind turbines to produce 5.5 terawatt hours a year off Stenungsund on Sweden’s west coast.

«

Quite a thing when you have to bear in mind that your renewable energy strategy might interfere with your defence strategy.
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Why is London’s phone signal so bad? • London Centric

Jim Waterson:

»

Astonishingly, tests carried out by London Centric found that in several high-profile areas of the capital the best place to find a fast 5G mobile data connection is now hundreds of feet under the capital in deep tube tunnels. This is thanks to new equipment – known as “leaky feeders” – installed in recent years under a contract with Transport for London.

In a damning indictment of the capital’s outdoor mobile infrastructure, if you want to tether your laptop to your phone and work remotely you might be better off tapping into the tube network and doing your work while riding around at 40km/hr underneath London. (Much of this article was written on the tube in this manner.)

On a packed rush hour Jubilee line train to Canary Wharf on Thursday morning it was possible to download data over EE’s network at 217mbps (megabits per second), as fast as many home broadband connections. But the moment you go above ground and are surrounded by the financial district’s skyscrapers the data download speed falls by more than three quarters to 49mbps.

Get back on the Jubilee line heading east from Canary Wharf and, thanks to the train emptying out, it was possible to hit a super-fast 371mbps on 5G in a tunnel deep under the Thames, enough to download an entire film in little over a minute. But on arrival at Stratford station there was no data connection on many platforms.

Jump on the Elizabeth Line to central London and the in-tunnel data speed returns to 203mbps – but outside Tottenham Court Road station, where you might be trying to meet a friend, it immediately falls to a barely-usable 2mbps. Even wandering around the corner to the middle of an empty Soho Square, free from obstructions, did little to improve download speeds.

The solution to all of this is to install more masts with greater capacity. Gareth Elliott works for lobby group Mobile UK, which represents the interests of mobile phone network providers. He said the biggest issue the operators face in London is the planning system, with local councillors across the capital politically incentivised to object to new masts at all costs – either on aesthetic grounds, or over dubiously-sourced fears about the supposed health impacts.

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Planning regulations really are a blight.
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Just have AI build an app for that • David Gomes

David Gomes:

»

I sometimes need to search for a website that will “convert a PNG to SVG”, or “remove page from PDF” or “resize svg”. And these apps are… okay. I don’t really trust most of them with my data, and also a lot of times they just don’t work or have too many ads.
So, I’ve been noticing a trend of people just using AI agents to create full blown apps for these simple use cases.

I decided to try it myself for a “resize SVG” app since I recently had to go through a bunch of websites to do this. So, I pulled up Replit Agent and even though I’ve used it before, it doesn’t cease to amaze me just how insanely good it is. The level of polish on this product is unlike any other AI agent out there right now.

It starts off by drawing up a plan and asking you for feedback on that plan. Then, it’ll just go to town and try to build the app. But what’s super clever about it is that the agent asks you for feedback along the way. Effectively, the Replit Agent guides you, not the other way around (as one might have expected).

«

This is going to be the next generation of apps. Total junk, but single-use.
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Fate of Google’s search empire could rest in Trump’s hands • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

A few weeks before the US presidential election, Donald Trump suggested that a breakup of Google’s search business may not be an appropriate remedy to destroy the tech giant’s search monopoly.

“Right now, China is afraid of Google,” Trump said at a Chicago event. If that threat were dismantled, Trump suggested, China could become a greater threat to the US, because the US needs to have “great companies” to compete.

Trump’s comments came about a week after the US Department of Justice proposed remedies in the Google monopoly trial, including mulling a breakup.

“I’m not a fan of Google,” Trump insisted. “They treat me badly. But are you going to destroy the company by doing that? If you do that, are you going to destroy the company? What you can do, without breaking it up, is make sure it’s more fair.”

Now that Trump is presumed to soon be taking office before the remedies phase of the DOJ’s litigation ends next year, it seems possible that Trump may sway the DOJ away from breaking up Google.

Experts told Reuters that a final ruling isn’t expected until August, giving Trump plenty of time to possibly influence the DOJ’s case. But Trump’s stance on Google has seemed to shift throughout his campaign, so there’s no predicting his position once he takes power.

«

Creates the perfect conditions to force Sundar Pichai to come and pay fealty in the hope of getting amelioration.
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Mozilla Foundation lays off 30% staff, drops advocacy division • TechCrunch

Zack Whittaker:

»

The Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the Firefox browser maker Mozilla, has laid off 30% of its employees as the organization says it faces a “relentless onslaught of change.”

When reached by TechCrunch, Mozilla Foundation’s communications chief Brandon Borrman confirmed the layoffs in an email.

“The Mozilla Foundation is reorganizing teams to increase agility and impact as we accelerate our work to ensure a more open and equitable technical future for us all. That unfortunately means ending some of the work we have historically pursued and eliminating associated roles to bring more focus going forward,” read the statement shared with TechCrunch.

According to its annual tax filings, the Mozilla Foundation reported having 60 employees during the 2022 tax year. The number of employees at the time of the layoffs was closer to 120 people, according to a person with knowledge. When asked by TechCrunch, Mozilla’s spokesperson did not dispute the figure.

This is the second layoff at Mozilla this year, the first affecting dozens of employees who work on the side of the organization that builds the popular Firefox browser.

«

I think the “onslaught of change” is actually an absence of money. Mozilla is getting walloped by the drying up of Google’s funding.
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What are you Haydn? The hoaxers who fooled the classical music world • The Guardian

Phil Hebblethwaite:

»

In 1993, completely out of the blue, the Austrian pianist Paul Badura-Skoda was sent a photocopy of a manuscript purporting to be six lost Haydn keyboard sonatas. It came with a letter from a little-known flautist from Münster, Germany called Winfried Michel, who told Badura-Skoda that he’d been given it by an elderly lady whose identity he could not reveal.

Badura-Skoda was suspicious, but once he played the music, he became sure that the works were real. He asked his wife Eva, a musicologist, to examine the manuscript. Although the music wasn’t in Haydn’s hand, she believed it to be an authentic copyist’s score dating from around 1805 and originating in Italy. They checked with the Haydn scholar, HC Robbins Landon, and he too was convinced. He penned an article for BBC Music Magazine, headlined Haydn Scoop of the Century, tipped off the Times, and called a press conference for 14 December 1993.

Within hours, the Joseph Haydn Institute in Cologne declared the manuscript to be a fake. An expert from Sotheby’s in London agreed. The Badura-Skodas had been hoaxed, or so it seemed. The following February, Eva gave a talk in California titled: The Haydn Sonatas: A Clever Forgery. Paul played a selection of the works – in a confused state of mind. Eva told the music scholar Michael Beckerman, reporting for the New York Times, “My husband still thinks they’re genuine,” raising difficult questions about truth and art. What did Paul believe he was playing? What was the audience hearing? And did it matter?

In his article, Beckerman wrote: “Knowing that a work is by Haydn or Mozart allows us to see ‘inevitable’ connections. Take away the certainty of authorship, and it’s devilishly difficult to read the musical images within.” He noted, too, that it was the inauthenticity of the manuscript that had exposed Michel and not the fidelity of the music. And so, Beckerman dared to ask: “If someone can write pieces that can be mistaken for Haydn, what is so special about Haydn?”

«

That is the question, isn’t it? I’m surprised, in passing, that AI music generators haven’t yet given us Beethoven’s Tenth, or Schubert’s Finished Symphony.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Bicycle theft is all too prevalent in London, but even when tracking devices show where they are, police won’t intervene. CC-licensed photo by Lisa Risager 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. Locked up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Coinbase’s big election bet is about to be tested • CNBC

MacKenzie Sigalos:

»

In the first few years after founding Coinbase, CEO Brian Armstrong shied away from Washington, DC. But as his ambitions for his crypto exchange scaled, so too did his need to curry favour on Capitol Hill.

“About five or six years ago, we realized that crypto was getting big enough that we needed to go really engage actively in a policy effort, so I started coming out to D.C.,” Armstrong, who started Coinbase in 2012, told CNBC in September, following a day of meetings with political leaders.

Now, it’s practically Armstrong’s full-time job, and Coinbase’s money is all over the nation’s capital. The company was one of the top corporate donors this election cycle, giving more than $75m to a group called Fairshake and its affiliate PACs, including a fresh pledge of $25m to support the pro-crypto super PAC in the 2026 midterms. Armstrong personally contributed more than $1.3m to a mix of candidates up and down the ballot.

The tech industry’s biggest names have dotted Washington for years to try and push their agendas as their market caps have expanded, but for Coinbase, the matter is potentially existential.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler sued the firm last year over claims that it sells unregistered securities. A judge has since ruled that the case should be heard by a jury. Coinbase has fought back vociferously, and has also said that it wants to work with regulators to come up with a proper set of laws governing the nascent industry.

«

Coinbase, you might recall, is the company where Armstrong himself declared in October 2020 that politics was definitely, absolutely, not going to be a thing any more for the workplace: the new corporate policy was “political neutrality”. O tempora, o mores, and if you don’t like these mores we have plenty more out the back.

Secretly, one has to hope that all that money turns out to be wasted and that none of the candidates they’ve backed succeed. Though of course there’s probably been plenty of each-way funding going on.
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China hack enabled vast spying on US officials, likely ensnaring thousands of contacts • WSJ

Dustin Volz, Aruna Viswanatha, Drew FitzGerald and Sarah Krouse:

»

as U.S. officials and security experts piece together what the hackers—part of a group nicknamed Salt Typhoon by investigators—were able to achieve, they have assembled clues that fuel concerns that China’s mastery of cyber-espionage is dangerously advanced.

The hackers appeared to have had the ability to access the phone data of virtually any American who is a customer of a compromised carrier—a group that includes AT&T and Verizon—but limited their targets to several dozen select, high-value political and national-security figures, some of the people familiar with the investigation said. 

The hackers also appear to have infiltrated communications providers outside the U.S., including at least one country that closely shares intelligence with the U.S., though it isn’t yet clear where or how extensively. Investigators expect more victims to be identified as the probe continues.

Investigators don’t yet know how China planned to use the information it allegedly stole. U.S. intelligence officials have warned for over a decade that Beijing has amassed an enormous trove of information on Americans in order to identify undercover spies, understand and anticipate decisions by political leaders, and potentially build dossiers on ordinary citizens for future use. 

Though political figures are among those spied upon, officials don’t suspect the Chinese are seeking to use the access to disrupt or otherwise interfere in the presidential election.

«

The US begins to look like a huge Swiss cheese at this point.
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EU plans to fine Apple for anticompetitive App Store practices • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

The European Commission plans to fine Apple for not adequately complying with Digital Markets Act (DMA) requirements for the App Store, reports Bloomberg. Regulators apparently believe that Apple did not implement changes that allowed developers to steer users to cheaper prices outside of the App Store .

Back in June, the EU said that Apple was in breach of the DMA due to its anti-steering rules. The European Commission said that developers should be able to inform their customers of alternative purchasing options, steer them to offers, and allow them to make purchases outside of the App Store .

In August, Apple again changed its App Store rules in Europe to satisfy regulators. Apple began allowing EU developers to communicate and promote offers that would direct customers outside of the App Store , and it marked a significant loosening of Apple’s prior rules. Developers are able to communicate discounts and deals without opting into Apple’s new developer terms or paying the Core Technology Fee, but Apple is requiring developers to report external purchase transactions and pay an initial acquisition fee and a store services fee.

It is not clear when the European Commission will announce the fine, but it could happen before current competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager leaves the position later this month. It could also be pushed back to later in the year, though.

Exactly how much Apple will have to pay is unknown at this time, but earlier this year, the EU fined Apple $2bn for anticompetitive behavior against third-party music services.

«

It has taken a very, very long time for Apple to reap what it has been sowing for all these years, but it looks like it’s finally going to happen.
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Why we should start worrying about bird flu • The Washington Post

Leanna Wen:

»

Forty-one people in the United States have been infected by the highly pathogenic H5N1 avian flu since April, the Centers for Disease Control confirmed last week. These include 17 cases from California and nine from Washington, both states that had no known human infections until last month.

The CDC reiterated that the risk to the public is low, citing that there has been no documented human-to-human transmission and that all cases thus far have been mild. But many public health experts are increasingly worried. Here are four reasons why:

The epidemiology of the virus has changed a lot in a short time. Caitlin M. Rivers, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and author of the book “Crisis Averted,” told me that it’s significant for a virus to evolve from circulating mostly among wild birds to causing outbreaks in mammals. In March, H5N1 began spreading among dairy cows.

“This was a new development that had not been seen before for avian influenza,” Rivers said, “And now we are finding more and more spillovers from those farm settings to humans.”

Other mammals have since been contracting bird flu. First, it was farm cats in Texas, then indoor cats in Colorado. Last week, it was found in a pig at a backyard farm in Oregon. The virus has even been detected in mice. Should spread in pest mice become prevalent, “that would be very troubling in terms of containment and the ease by which the virus could find other hosts,” Rivers said.

Many cases are probably undetected. An investigative reporter from KFF Health News obtained emails from state and local health departments and found that, despite their best efforts, surveillance was “marred by delays, inconsistencies, and blind spots.” Many farm owners did not want their employees tested and refused visits by health officials. Considering that avian flu outbreaks have been documented in 387 dairy herds in 14 states and 1,195 poultry operations in 48 states, infections among workers have almost certainly been missed.

«

And the other joyful news is “the virus might spread more easily that we’d thought.” Something to take your minds off the US election, eh? (Only a watching brief. Nothing more.)
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Is your air fryer spying on you? Concerns over ‘excessive’ surveillance in smart devices • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

»

Air fryers that gather your personal data and audio speakers “stuffed with trackers” are among examples of smart devices engaged in “excessive” surveillance, according to the consumer group Which?

The organisation tested three air fryers, increasingly a staple of British kitchens, each of which requested permission to record audio on the user’s phone through a connected app.

Smart air fryers allow cooks to schedule their meal to start cooking before they get home. Not all air fryers have such functionality but those that do often use an app installed on a smartphone.

Which? found the app provided by the company Xiaomi connected to trackers for Facebook and a TikTok ad network. The Xiaomi fryer and another by Aigostar sent people’s personal data to servers in China, although this was flagged in the privacy notice, the consumer testing body found.

Its tests also examined smartwatches that it said required “risky” phone permissions – in other words giving invasive access to the consumer’s phone through location tracking, audio recording and accessing stored files.

Which? found digital speakers that were preloaded with trackers for Facebook, Google and a digital marketing company called Urbanairship.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said the latest consumer tests “show that many products not only fail to meet our expectations for data protection but also consumer expectations”.

The ICO, the UK’s independent regulator for data protection and information rights law, is drawing up new guidance for manufacturers of smart products to be published in spring 2025. It is due to outline clear expectations for what they need to do to comply with data protection laws and protect people using smart products.

Harry Rose, the editor of Which? magazine, said smart tech manufacturers were collecting data with little or no transparency and called for the ICO’s code to “be backed by effective enforcement, including against companies that operate abroad”.

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Overspecified smart devices are the worst. I rejected some scales because they required an app.
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Is your smartphone being tracked? Here’s how to tell • The Guardian

Ariel Bogle:

»

We’re looking for apps I don’t remember downloading, and which platforms can access my smartphone’s camera or microphone; who else can see my calendar, my notes, my emails.

We also check the basics: whether my device is actually registered to my name and email address, and whether I have two-factor authentication turned on.

Rose MacDonald, cofounder of Nansen Digital Forensic Services, is walking me through the digital safety audit she provides to victim-survivors of family violence. I’m talking to the former police detective and digital forensics specialist so that I can better understand the experience of people who are subject to this kind of abuse – and how they can minimise the risks.

We examine who might be able to access my Google or iCloud accounts. What third-party platforms are connected to the account, and whether my emails are being forwarded to another address.

Sometimes when MacDonald does these audits she finds hi-tech surveillance tools – spyware, for example, which buries itself deep in your phone’s software. But this kind of technology costs money and much more often, she says, perpetrators take advantage of the opportunities for surveillance offered by everyday features: the shared accounts or location sharing tools that reveal more than we realise.

“What we find more typically is misconfiguration of normal settings … and breaches of the cloud environment. If they’ve got a username and password to something, you don’t really need a lot of technical knowledge,” she says.

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Notable that this is filed under “domestic violence”.
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How to catch a London bike thief • London Centric

Jim Waterson:

»

James Dunn, the founder of bicycle recovery service BackPedal, wasn’t expecting a call from me on a Friday evening. We’d spent weeks discussing how best to investigate the plague of bike theft in the capital for a London Centric article. I’d tried knocking on the doors of convicted bike thieves after they got out of prison but, strangely, the criminals didn’t want to share all their tactics with a journalist. I’d asked to accompany Dunn’s recovery agents as they track down and retrieve client’s bikes, using GPS trackers they hide on the frame, but we hadn’t yet scheduled in a date.

In desperation, I’d bought a cheap bicycle with the intention of using it as “bait bike”, a tactic used occasionally by the police to smash organised gangs. Dunn’s company was going to fit my new purchase with a specialist tracker, wait for it to get stolen, then we’d see where it ended up.

Instead, I’d accidentally jumped the gun.

Earlier that day I’d left my family’s electric cargo bike outside my home while dashing in for a Teams meeting with a group of London council communications directors. The battery-powered bike can carry two children across London faster than public transport and is far cheaper than owning a car. Every story in London Centric is reported from its saddle, as I cover hundreds of miles across the capital every week in search of news. It has transformed my life. But, as the thieves who must have been watching my house knew, it is not a cheap bit of a kit. And by the time I went back outside, it was gone.

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Absorbing story. Waterson is, bit by bit, making London Centric a must-read for Londoners. This one – given that he found the bike, but the police wouldn’t act – is going to run and run.
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Oil giant BP is killing 18 hydrogen projects, chilling the nascent industry • TechCrunch

Tim De Chant:

»

Tucked inside a 32-page earnings report, oil and gas giant BP revealed it was killing 18 early-stage hydrogen projects, a move that could have a chilling effect on the nascent hydrogen industry.

The decision, along with the sale of the company’s US onshore wind-power operations, will save BP $200m annually and help boost its bottom line. The hydrogen industry, which has relied on oil and gas companies both financially and through lobbying efforts, is preparing for a grimmer outcome.

BP has been a supporter of hydrogen. The company’s venture capital arm has invested in several green hydrogen startups, including Electric Hydrogen and Advanced Ionics. Earlier this year, BP said it would develop “more than 10” hydrogen projects in the U.S., Europe, and Australia. 

Now BP is scaling back those plans, saying it’ll develop between five and ten projects. The company is keeping quiet about which ones will receive the green light.

Hydrogen has the potential to reduce carbon pollution significantly in a range of industries, including petrochemical refining, steelmaking, and long-haul shipping. But infrastructure for hydrogen, especially green hydrogen, which is produced using renewable electricity, remains underbuilt. That’s in part because green hydrogen is the most expensive form of the gas to produce, and because transporting hydrogen is costly relative to fossil fuels.

«

Good old BP – why bother getting into renewables when you can just dump wind projects. Hydrogen projects have never seemed convincing: they get trialled and dumped, because it’s just too difficult in a world where microgeneration is booming and small nuclear seems like a plausible future.
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The law must respond when science changes • Scientific American

David Faigman and Jeff Kukucka:

»

Whereas the law seeks to provide fair process in a timely fashion, science seeks to discover truth over time. This means that what was once fair may become unfair; the justice of yesteryear may be unjust today. [Robert] Roberson [sentenced to for death for the murder of his two-year-old daughter in 2002] and the Menendez brothers [life without parole for killing their parents] are the victims of that very divide.

In both cases, scientific understanding changed years ago. Shaken baby syndrome was called into question in the early 2010s, and, years before that, psychologists identified the relationship between the trauma of childhood abuse and violence. Yet all three men have struggled to reopen their cases. An essential principle of science is that it might change as research accumulates. That is a principle that the law has largely failed to come to grips with. This failure threatens the constitutional guarantee of due process.

The Roberson and Menendez cases are not abnormal. The annals of the law are replete with examples of what we once thought was scientific truth, upon which judges and juries decided both civil and criminal cases, where we later understood the science to be wrong. In 2004 the state of Texas executed Cameron Todd Willingham for the 1992 arson murders of his family. At the time of his execution, the forensic science that linked him to the fire had been categorically invalidated.

In a 2015 press release, the FBI reported that in their ongoing review of non-DNA-based microscopic hair identification, 90% of cases had errors. Similarly, prosecutors’ use of a questionable theory known as comparative bullet-lead analysis was eventually abandoned after scientific reports debunked its statistical bases. Even today, courts continue to allow bite mark identification testimony, even though people who say they are bite mark experts can’t even agree on whether a bite mark is from a person—or a dog. And what we know about firearms identification and fingerprints are changing— there could be scores of convictions based on what is no longer true.

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The death penalty goes wrong? Who would have guessed? (Faigman is a professor of law, and Kukucka a professor of psychology.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Turns out there was a Wordle on Tuesday morning, so perhaps the NYTimes has laid in a store against the possibility of its tech workers striking. Brief Drama Given Spare Space.

A strike at the New York Times means there won’t be a Wordle today, November 5. Drama! CC-licensed photo by Ken Mayer 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. Freed! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Generative AI has a massive e-waste problem • IEEE Spectrum

Katherine Bourzac:

»

Private investment in generative AI has grown from about US $3bn in 2022 to $25bn in 2023, and about 80% of private companies expect AI to drive their business in the next three years, according to Deloitte. Keeping up with the latest advancements means upgrading GPUs, CPUs, and other electronic equipment in data centers as newer, more advanced chips become available. And that, researchers project, will lead to an explosion in the production of electronic waste.

A study published last week in the journal Nature Computational Science estimates that aggressive adoption of large language models (LLMs) alone will generate 2.5m tonnes of e-waste per year by 2030.

“AI doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it relies on substantial hardware resources that have tangible environmental footprints,” says study coauthor Asaf Tzachor, a sustainability and climate researcher at Reichman University, in Israel. “Awareness of the e-waste issue is crucial for developing strategies that mitigate negative environmental impacts while allowing us to reap the benefits of AI advancements,” he says.

Most research on AI sustainability has focused on these models’ energy and water use and their concomitant carbon emissions. Tzachor worked with Peng Wang and Wei-Qiang Chen, both professors at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, to calculate the potential increase in e-waste associated with generative AI. The study is intended to provide an estimate of the potential scale of the problem, and the researchers hope it will spur companies to adopt more sustainable practices.

«

In its way, classic human behaviour: do it now, worry about the effect later.
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Scientists may have solved the mystery of sky-high methane emissions • The Washington Post

Shannon Osaka:

»

Almost two decades ago, the atmosphere’s levels of methane — a dangerous greenhouse gas that is over 80 times as potent as carbon dioxide in the short term — started to climb. And climb.

Methane concentrations, which had been stable for years, soared by 5 or 6 parts per billion every year from 2007 onward. Then, in 2020, the growth rate nearly doubled.

Scientists were baffled — and concerned. Methane is the big question mark hanging over the world’s climate estimates; although it breaks down in the atmosphere much faster than carbon dioxide, it is so powerful that higher-than-expected methane levels could shift the world toward much higher temperatures.

But now, a study sheds light on what’s driving record methane emissions. The culprits, scientists believe, are microbes — the tiny organisms that live in cows’ stomachs, agricultural fields and wetlands. And that could mean a dangerous feedback loop — in which these emissions cause warming that releases even more greenhouse gases — is already underway.

“The changes that we saw in the last couple of years — and even since 2007 — are microbial,” said Sylvia Michel, lead author of the paper published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Wetlands, if they are getting warmer and wetter, maybe they’re producing more methane than they used to.”

«

Figured out by isotopic examination of the methane’s carbon atoms. If it’s microbes, this is bad.
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Why did so many die in Spain? Because Europe still hasn’t accepted the realities of extreme weather • The Guardian

Friederike Otto:

»

I founded World Weather Attribution in 2014 to shift the conversation. Our attribution studies are carried out quickly, over days or weeks, in the immediate aftermath of weather disasters to inform people in real time about the role of the climate crisis.

A quick analysis following the floods in Spain found that the climate emergency made the extreme rainfall about 12% more intense and twice as likely. Despite this, in Paiporta, where at least 62 people have died, the mayor said floods were not common and “people are not afraid”. But the changing climate is making once-rare events more common.

Record-breaking events such as these complicate preparedness – how do you communicate the extreme danger of something someone has never experienced before?

We saw this play out recently after Hurricane Helene made landfall. More than 200 people died in floods in the inland southern Appalachians region of the US. Despite warnings of “catastrophic and life-threatening” flooding ahead of the disaster, people were still caught out when disaster struck, and many could not appreciate how extreme the downpours were going to be.

However, in Spain, people were only warned as it was happening. Warnings were not sent until many people were already trapped in flooded houses or in underground car parks, trying to move their cars to higher ground.

The same happened – or rather didn’t happen – in Germany in 2021. No information was given on how to act and, crucially, no support was given to those who could not help themselves: in the German town of Sinzig, 12 residents of a home for disabled people drowned. Back in Spain, the deaths of the inhabitants of one care home have already been reported and I fear more disturbing stories such as this will emerge in the weeks to come.

World Weather Attribution has studied 30 devastating floods, and in almost all cases, including in developing countries, we’ve found that the rainfall was well forecast. But as we’ve seen in Spain, forecasting is not enough. The warnings, when they finally came, did not include vital information on where to evacuate to and how.

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404 Media is partnering with Wired • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg, Samantha Cole, Jason Koebler and Joseph Coxk:

»

Today we are happy to announce WIRED is going to co-publish two of our articles a month on its website. We are really excited to get our stories in front of a wider audience and grow 404 Media. We also hope to occasionally collaborate with our friends and colleagues at WIRED on stories we can do better together. 

To be absolutely clear, 404 Media remains a 100% independent, journalist-owned company managed by the four of us. Our collaboration with WIRED is similar to our collaboration with Court Watch and Capitol Forum, and involves us co-publishing stories on like-minded publications that we think their audience will like and widening our reach beyond what we’re able to do by ourselves. If you’re a paying subscriber reading this, there’s not really anything for you to do or to know—you’ll continue to get ad-free access to all of our articles, including those we co-publish with WIRED. And if you’re reading any of those co-published articles on our site, you will need to be a paying 404 Media subscriber.

Like most people who follow technology, we’ve been fans of WIRED since before we became journalists ourselves, and we’re especially happy to partner with the legendary title now that it is home to many of our talented former co-workers at VICE.

«

Hopeful that this means 404 Media is getting money for this.
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Gender is a big factor in what a TikTok user sees about politics and the election • The Washington Post

Jeremy B. Merrill, Cristiano Lima-Strong and Caitlin Gilbert:

»

A significant gender gap has emerged in this year’s presidential campaign, with women voters breaking for Vice President Kamala Harris and men for former president Donald Trump. For participants in a unique Washington Post experiment, that gap has also shown up in their TikTok feeds.

This fall, more than 800 American adults shared their TikTok viewing histories with The Post, opening a rare window on how the increasingly popular app presents political news. The Post found that female users received roughly 11% more content about Harris than men did, while men — even liberal ones — were more likely to be shown videos about Trump than women were.

The 800 users who responded to The Post overwhelmingly identified as liberal. But the gender gap also showed up in a Post analysis of 300 TikTok users whose histories were collected in a parallel effort by researchers at Cybersecurity for Democracy, a nonpartisan multi-university project that studies algorithms. In that dataset — where liberals, conservatives and moderates were evenly divided — men were 12.5% more likely than women to see videos about Trump.

The Post found a similar gender imbalance for videos posted directly by the campaigns. In the Cybersecurity for Democracy sample, women of all political persuasions saw Harris campaign videos 40% more often than men did. And men saw Trump campaign videos more than twice as often as women did.

The findings shed light on how TikTok is shaping the way American adults, especially younger ones, get their news — and what they see about politics. The app claims 170 million U.S. users, and 4 in 10 US adults under 30 say they regularly turn to TikTok for news. Both campaigns have said they see the app as a key messaging tool to reach Gen Z and millennial voters.

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Doesn’t this rather give the lie to the suggestion that TikTok is an Evil Chinese App Trying To Control America’s Politics? Never mind – the forced sale is still scheduled for (Sunday) January 19 next year, the day before the presidential inauguration.
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Meta’s Threads has 275 million users. It sure doesn’t feel that way • Business Insider

Peter Kafka:

»

Meta says Threads is growing very, very fast and has been adding a million sign-ups a day. Back in April, Meta said Threads had 150 million monthly users. Which means it has grown 83% in half a year.

But all of that is hard to square with my experience on Threads. I’m there quite a bit, posting and reading for fun and for work. And it doesn’t seem like the place has nearly doubled recently.

This isn’t a metrics-based argument — I’m not tracking the engagement for my posts in any serious way. Just a vibes thing. When Threads launched in July 2023, it definitely felt empty, especially compared to what was then still called Twitter. It’s picked up since then.

But it certainly doesn’t seem anything close to what Twitter was like back in 2019, back when lots of people were calling it a hellsite and also checking it every day.

For giggles, I did the classic lazy reporter gambit and asked people on Threads if it felt like the place has gotten a lot more full recently. The results seem split. Special shout out to sami3456567, whose bio says he’s no fan of “incels, present & future cat ladies, anything remotely French.” You’ll always have a place in social media, sami.

One reason I may not be noticing that Threads seems more crowded is that some of that growth is coming from people who are unlikely to be posting in English: Meta says a bunch of its recent users have been coming from Japan and Taiwan.

But the most obvious reason Threads can grow so fast is that Meta surfaces Threads posts in Instagram, which does have gazillions of users. Some of them click on Threads posts they see there, and become Threads users that way.

And you can definitely see, or at least feel, the presence of Instagram users who are logging into Threads. They’re the people who seem to have wandered into the bar not completely knowing why they’re there or what they’re supposed to do, and they are prime targets for my colleague Katie Notopoulos.

«

Notopoulos is notoriously good at the empty ragebait posts which Threads amplifies. But it’s not a news network, and for that reason journalists just don’t like it. (I find it too random.)
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The end of independent publishing and Giant Freakin Robot • GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT

Joshua Tyler:

»

After relaunching GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT in 2019, the site grew to a readership of more than 20 million a month, through 2021 and 2022. Then Google decided they didn’t want independent publishers around anymore. Most entertainment keywords have now been given to one big company, whose numerous sites own the top slots for nearly every entertainment-related query of any substance.

No one can find our site to read it so that 20 million unique visitors is now a few thousand a month. Nearly every independently owned entertainment news publisher is in the same situation, in one way or another.

Last week I was one of 20 independent publishers invited to an event at Google in Mountain View, California. I didn’t know why I was going, I didn’t know what would happen, and Google didn’t cover all my expenses. But I went, I went because it was the only chance I had to save the jobs of the few employees GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT has left.

Unfortunately, if you’ve read my account of that catastrophe, you know that instead of finding solutions I received a clear signal from Google that they have no intention of allowing anyone to see GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT’s work. 

Google’s engineers were adamant that there is no problem with our website or our content. In fact, some of the geeky Googlers there regularly read our articles and seem to genuinely like us. However, my take away was that we don’t fit in with the search monopoly’s new business model, and so we won’t be shown to anyone.

That business model seems to largely revolve around pleasing big brands. During the course of our conversation with Google, an Independent site owner asked why a “Best Shoes To Buy” (not the actual keyword analyzed, just an example) list from a big retailer like Nike always seems to outrank a “Best Shoes To Buy” list from an actual, unbiased reviewer. Google’s response was to ask, “Well if we don’t rank those big brands first, won’t they be mad?”

Unable to help myself I blurted out, “Who cares? Reviewing things isn’t their business. Selling shoes is.” The Googler in charge ignored my answer.

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His solution: move to YouTube. Somehow I feel this is not going to solve the problem.
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Vote-counting machines are too dumb to pose a hacking risk • Bloomberg

Austin Carr:

»

As the US presidential election fast approaches, Elon Musk keeps claiming, with scant evidence [correction: ZERO evidence, AS YOUR STORY GOES ON TO SHOW – exasperated Overspill Ed.], that internet-connected voting machines are vulnerable to hacking and that the country must switch back to paper ballots for better security.

Having spent much of my time lately learning what it’d actually take to hack these devices — speaking with election officials and machine makers and visiting a vendor’s factory — I can assure you Musk’s claims are quite unfounded.

It’s not that election computers are advanced to a level of impenetrability; rather, what makes them so ironically safe at scale is that their functions are intentionally limited and dependent on an absurd degree of bureaucratic logistics and analog-world redundancies.

Keep in mind that most voters (98%!) tomorrow will cast their votes on paper, the majority using pens and Sharpies to mark their choice on slips of paper. The precinct tabulators scanning those sheets are offline (often lacking even the hardware for Wi-Fi, Ethernet or Bluetooth) and undergo pre-election logic and accuracy testing. And all ballots are preserved for backup so authorities can confirm the digital and physical counts match. These votes are usually separately recounted at central county offices, anyway.

Since throwing his weight behind Donald Trump, Musk has made voter fraud a key point of his stumping in swing states like Pennsylvania. Unfounded ideas about rigged voting systems are not new among Trump supporters, but Musk’s Tesla Inc. and SpaceX tech background makes him a uniquely effective and highly misleading messenger of these conspiracy theories. “I’m normally someone who favors technology — I’m a super 21st-century technology boy right here,” Musk said at an October campaign stop in Pittsburgh. “And I’m saying: no machines for voting.”

Even if you managed magically to slip by workers and surveillance cameras at a poll site to insert some undetectable, malware-laced thumb drive into a machine to manipulate votes, you’d still have to figure out how to fake loads of corresponding physical ballots while destroying the real ones. And then, so what? You’ve only broken into one machine.

You’d next have to replicate that in-person hack on thousands of additional voting machines. “It’s bull!” said Jerry Feaser, the recently retired elections director of Dauphin County, PA, where Musk has also campaigned, when I asked him about the X Corp. owner’s claims. “There would have to be so much collusion among so many different people and levels.”

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That an editor at Bloomberg felt compelled to put (or leave) “scant evidence” in that first sentence is beyond annoying. “Musk keeps claiming Earth is flat, with scant evidence.” Would you pass that?
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Thousands of hacked TP-Link routers used in yearslong account takeover attacks • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

Hackers working on behalf of the Chinese government are using a botnet of thousands of routers, cameras, and other Internet-connected devices to perform highly evasive password spray attacks against users of Microsoft’s Azure cloud service, the company warned last week.

The malicious network, made up almost entirely of TP-Link routers, was first documented in October 2023 by a researcher who named it Botnet-7777. The geographically dispersed collection of more than 16,000 compromised devices at its peak got its name because it exposes its malicious malware on port 7777.

In July and again in August of this year, security researchers from Sekoia.io and Team Cymru reported the botnet was still operational. All three reports said that Botnet-7777 was being used to skillfully perform password spraying, a form of attack that sends large numbers of login attempts from many different IP addresses. Because each individual device limits the login attempts, the carefully coordinated account-takeover campaign is hard to detect by the targeted service.

Last Thursday, Microsoft reported that CovertNetwork-1658—the name Microsoft uses to track the botnet—is being used by multiple Chinese threat actors in an attempt to compromise targeted Azure accounts. The company said the attacks are “highly evasive” because the botnet—now estimated at about 8,000 strong on average—takes pains to conceal the malicious activity.

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At first I thought “cameras?” but then realised it meant CCTV. TP-Link and its ilk are a mess that will require cleanup for years and years to come.
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New York Times’ tech staff threatens strike during Election Day crunch • Semafor

Max Tani:

»

Management says that the Guild has bogged down negotiations with what the paper sees as outlandish, even illegal, proposals. As Semafor previously reported, the Guild proposed a ban on scented products in break rooms, unlimited break time, and accommodations for pet bereavement, as well as mandatory trigger warnings in company meetings discussing events in the news.

Times management has been frustrated by proposals that would provide more money for nonwhite staff and others from underrepresented communities to attend conferences, and language that would prioritize non-citizens in the US on visas in the case of layoffs — both of which the paper pointed out couldn’t be fulfilled because they likely violate employment laws.

While the union has withdrawn or reached agreements with the paper on some of these issues, the paper has been alarmed that the union has continued to push for a provision on journalistic integrity that would allow the non-editorial union to have a say in editorial decisions, including the right to request letters to the editor not be published.

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Unlimited break time? A say in editorial decisions? Couldn’t they just become journalists if that’s what they want? (Lots of journalists presently find themselves on unlimited breaks, but not through choice.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The advent of cheap, far-reaching and powerful drones has made the Red Sea far less safe for even big navies. CC-licensed photo by U.S. Naval Forces Central Command\/U.S. Fifth Fleet 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. Still afloat. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

OpenAI research finds that even its best models give wrong answers a wild proportion of the time • Futurism

Victor Tangermann:

»

OpenAI has released a new benchmark, dubbed “SimpleQA,” that’s designed to measure the accuracy of the output of its own and competing artificial intelligence models.

In doing so, the AI company has revealed just how bad its latest models are at providing correct answers. In its own tests, its cutting edge o1-preview model, which was released last month, scored an abysmal 42.7% success rate on the new benchmark.

In other words, even the cream of the crop of recently announced large language models (LLMs) is far more likely to provide an outright incorrect answer than a right one — a concerning indictment, especially as the tech is starting to pervade many aspects of our everyday lives.

Competing models, like Anthropic’s, scored even lower on OpenAI’s SimpleQA benchmark, with its recently released Claude-3.5-sonnet model getting only 28.9% of questions right. However, the model was far more inclined to reveal its own uncertainty and decline to answer — which, given the damning results, is probably for the best.

Worse yet, OpenAI found that its own AI models tend to vastly overestimate their own abilities, a characteristic that can lead to them being highly confident in the falsehoods they concoct.

LLMs have long suffered from “hallucinations,” an elegant term AI companies have come up with to denote their models’ well-documented tendency to produce answers that are complete BS.

Despite the very high chance of ending up with complete fabrications, the world has embraced the tech with open arms, from students generating homework assignments to developers employed by tech giants generating huge swathes of code.

And the cracks are starting the show. Case in point, an AI model used by hospitals and built on OpenAI tech was caught this week introducing frequent hallucinations and inaccuracies while transcribing patient interactions.

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Nothing to see here, move along, it’s all fine.

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Generative AI made all my decisions for a week. Here’s what happened • The New York Times

Kashmir Hill:

»

Generative AI took over my life.

For one week, it told me what to eat, what to wear and what to do with my kids. It chose my haircut and what colour to paint my office. It told my husband that it was OK to go golfing, in a lovey-dovey text that he immediately knew I had not written.

Generative AI, which can spin up research reports, draft emails and converse like a human being based on patterns learned from enormous data sets, is being widely adopted by industries from medicine to business consulting as a timesaving tool. It’s popping up in widely used consumer apps, including Siri and Alexa. I conducted this admittedly ridiculous experiment to see how its spread might affect the largest work force of them all: harried parents.

One expert called the stunt a “decision holiday.” Another compared it to hiring a butler to handle household logistics. But these AI butlers cost just $20 per month and report everything you say to them back to a tech company.

In all, I used two dozen generative AI tools for daily tasks and nearly 100 decisions over the course of the week. Chief among my helpers were the chatbots that every big tech company released in the wake of ChatGPT. My automated advisers saved me time and alleviated the burden of constantly making choices, but they seemed to have an agenda: turn me into a Basic B.

We’ve been worried about a future where robots take our jobs or decide that humans are earth’s biggest problem and eliminate us, but an underrated risk may be that they flatten us out, erasing individuality in favour of a bland statistical average, like the paint colour AI initially recommended for my office: taupe.

I told the chatbots that I was a journalist conducting an experiment and that I had a family, but not much more. AI’s first task was to plan our meals and generate a shopping list for the week, and within seconds, it was done. (Unfortunately, generative AI couldn’t go pick up the groceries.)

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What sort of useless robot future is this, where the robot doesn’t do the hard work? Also, taupe? These things have no taste. (Great idea for an article, though.)
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Rise of the middle-class shoplifters: Americans are stealing from stores • Business Insider

Emily Stewart:

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A lot of people steal, from small-stakes stuff at the drugstore to larger items worth hundreds of dollars at hardware chains. Their motivations are generally not the direct result of economic need, but instead, people make a moral (or amoral) judgment about what goods are unjustly expensive, especially as they deal with the recent bout of inflation. They view it as a way to get back at The Man — many have concocted a code of conduct that amounted to pilfering only from big, evil retailers (and, in one case, overpriced corporate ski resorts).

Case in point: a lot of the one-off shoplifters I talked to steal from Whole Foods with a very clean conscience. “No, I don’t feel bad about stealing from Jeff Bezos,” one 20-something occasional shoplifter in Washington, DC, told me. Her loot of choice is passion fruit, which she rings up as a cheaper item — bananas. She’s even memorized the code: 4011.

Another shoplifter, a 30-something man in New York who asked to be referred to as the “Parmesan cheese bandit,” echoed the anti-Bezos sentiment. The only people who know about his habit of stuffing a block of Whole Foods cheese into his sweatpants pocket after hitting the gym (which he developed after seeing some TikTok videos about Parmesan’s high protein content) are his brother — and, he said, “maybe the fucking surveillance people, I don’t know.”

The National Association of Shoplifting Prevention estimates that about one in 11 people has shoplifted during their lifetime and that men and women are equally likely to be the culprit. Some surveys suggest that number could be higher, like one in five. Survey data, however, often doesn’t account for the difference between someone who shoplifted a candy bar one time as a kid and someone who does it with regularity.

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“Stealing from Bezos isn’t stealing” is an unsurprising response.
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Exposure to sugar rationing in the first thousand days of life protected against chronic disease • Science

Tadeja Gracner, Claire Boone and Paul Gertler:

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We examined the impact of sugar exposure within 1000 days since conception on diabetes and hypertension, leveraging quasi-experimental variation from the end of the United Kingdom’s sugar rationing in September 1953.

Rationing restricted sugar intake to levels within current dietary guidelines, yet consumption nearly doubled immediately post-rationing. Using an event study design with UK Biobank data comparing adults conceived just before or after rationing ended, we found that early-life rationing reduced diabetes and hypertension risk by about 35% and 20%, respectively, and delayed disease onset by 4 and 2 years.

Protection was evident with in-utero exposure and increased with postnatal sugar restriction, especially after six months when solid foods likely began. In-utero sugar rationing alone accounted for about one third of the risk reduction.

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War is good for you, part 12 (at least for those looking back fondly on rationing). People who lived through rationing also tended to live longer. This study provides an argument for less added sugar in food – there’s certainly too much in it. One can guess though that this is probably going to be used, at least in some areas, to insist that pregnant women mustn’t eat various sweet things.
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The Red Sea is now so dangerous even NATO warships are avoiding it • GCaptain

John Konrad:

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The Red Sea, one of the world’s busiest and most strategically vital waterways, has become so hazardous that even the German Navy is steering clear. Defense Minister Boris Pistorius’s decision to redirect the frigate Baden-Württemberg and support vessel Frankfurt am Main around the Cape of Good Hope on their return from an Indo-Pacific deployment speaks volumes.

The Red Sea is now deemed too perilous, underscoring just how ineffective current US and EU naval protections are in this region.

For months, the U.S. and EU have stationed forces to secure the Red Sea’s shipping lanes. Yet, Houthi rebels, equipped and backed by Iran, continue to harass and attack vessels under the guise of “solidarity” with Palestinian forces in Gaza. Reports reveal Houthi attacks extending into the Indian Ocean and even the Mediterranean, a spread that demonstrates their increased capability and adaptability.

The EU’s mission Aspides commander warned of escalating danger but lacked the ships and resources needed to respond adequately. The United States Navy continues to send warships through the Red Sea, but its mission to protect merchant ships—Operation Prosperity Guardian—is considered a failure by several naval experts we interviewed and has significantly diminished in scope and size. As a result, even many US-flagged commercial vessels – which the US Navy is obligated by law to protect – are opting to divert their routes around Africa.

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The advent of drone warfare – low-cost, high-impact, hard to deflect – has changed the entire face of naval and land-based warfare.
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A Russian disinfo campaign is using comment sections to seed pro-Trump conspiracy theories • WIRED

David Gilbert:

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“Video has come out from Bucks County, Pennsylvania showing a ballot counter destroying ballots for Donald Trump and keeping Kamala Harris’s ballots for counting,” an account called “Dan from Ohio” wrote in the comment section of the far-right website Gateway Pundit. “Why hasn’t this man been arrested?”

But Dan is not from Ohio, and the video he mentioned is fake. He is in fact one of hundreds of inauthentic accounts posting in the unmoderated spaces of right-wing news site comment sections as part of a Russian disinformation campaign. These accounts were discovered by researchers at media watchdog NewsGuard, who shared their findings with WIRED.

“NewsGuard identified 194 users that all target the same articles, push the same pro-Russian talking points and disinformation narratives, while masquerading as disgruntled Western citizens,” the report states. The researchers found these fake accounts posting comments in four pro-Trump US publications: the Gateway Pundit, the New York Post, Breitbart, and Fox News. They were also posting similar comments in the Daily Mail, a UK tabloid, and French website Le Figaro.

“FOX News Digital’s comment sections are monitored continuously in real time by the outside company OpenWeb which services multiple media organizations,” a spokesperson for the company tells WIRED. “Comments made by fake personas and professional trolls are removed as soon as issues are brought to our attention by both OpenWeb and the additional internal oversight mechanisms we have in place.”

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It is exhausting, in its way. Will it all stop, or at least slow down substantially, after Tuesday? Here’s hoping.
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Can the Daily Beast claw its way back to relevance? • The New York Times

Katie Robertson:

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[New co-editor at the Daily Beast, Joanna] Coles has a specific vision for what The Beast can do: shorter and sharper articles that focus on people, power, politics and pop culture, with a dose of satire to lighten the mood during a perilous time. She says she is fascinated by the extremes of wealth and power and behavior, and pointed to articles about A-list celebrities who gave Sean Combs cover and the troubles of Will Lewis, the chief executive of The Washington Post, as recent highlights.

“I wanted something that curated a lot of news out there that wasn’t about the end of democracy all the time,” she said. Ms. Coles said she felt that The Beast had “some very good editors” over the years, but that its place in the media landscape had been diminished.

“I certainly wasn’t reading it on a regular basis,” she said. “Another editor said to me when we came here, he said: ‘It’s the boring avatar of the resistance.’ I thought he summed it up in one.”

She is trying to spark ideas and reinvigorate the newsroom’s culture, which she said had been affected when the pandemic caused more people to work remotely. Beast employees are now required to work in the office four days a week. “We have some really good people here who were here all along who are excited by the mission and re-energized,” Ms. Coles said.

There are others she was not as fond of. Ms. Coles recounted that a political reporter did not call in to the newsroom on the Sunday that President Biden announced he would drop out of the presidential race, or the previous weekend, after the assassination attempt of Mr. Trump. in Butler, Pa.

Ms. Coles was at her house in the Hamptons on the day of the assassination attempt, hosting her friend Emma Tucker, the editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal and a fellow Briton, and the pair “turned my dining room table into an ad hoc newsroom.”

“I was incredulous that a political reporter would not call in because it was the weekend,” she said. “To me it was madness that we would have political correspondents who didn’t want to cover that story immediately.” That political reporter, Jake Lahut, who has since left The Daily Beast, referred The New York Times to the three articles he filed the day that Mr. Biden dropped out, and said that he was out of the country on leave the previous weekend but had contacted the Beast’s weekend desk. “The most important lesson I’ve learned from this is how not to run a newsroom,” Mr. Lahut said. He added: “I think my track record speaks for itself.”

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I think Coles is fighting an uphill battle with the Daily Beast staff there. It isn’t going to end well.
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Apple is ‘seriously considering’ Vision device that offloads compute to your iPhone • 9to5Mac

Michael Burkhardt:

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According to Mark Gurman from Bloomberg, Apple is ‘seriously considering’ developing a cheaper Apple Vision device that offloads all of the computing power to your iPhone, essentially developing a headset with primarily displays and battery.

Gurman has mentioned this idea in the past, but it was just one of the many ideas Apple was toying with for future products in the Apple Vision family, however it sounds like the idea might have more merit now.

This product would be similar to other products on the market like the Xreal glasses, which show content from your iPhone through the displays of the glasses.

Earlier this morning, Ming Chi-Kuo reported that Apple’s cheaper Vision headset has been delayed beyond 2027, so it’s highly possible that this “Vision as an iPhone accessory” product could come in place of it. Gurman says this product “would reinforce the iPhone as the center of [Apple’s] product ecosystem.”

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Pretty hard to avoid the iPhone – after all, everyone has a smartphone. The Vision Pro already looks like a dead duck, because there simply isn’t enough content for it. Despite Apple’s wish for it to be a “spatial computing” device that people use to do work, that isn’t how people think of these devices; they think of them as consumption devices.
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‘Infinite monkey theorem’ challenged by Australian mathematicians • BBC News

Hannah Ritchie:

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Two Australian mathematicians have called into question an old adage, that if given an infinite amount of time, a monkey pressing keys on a typewriter would eventually write the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Known as the “infinite monkey theorem”, the thought-experiment has long been used to explain the principles of probability and randomness.

However, a new peer-reviewed study led by Sydney-based researchers Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta has found that the time it would take for a typing monkey to replicate Shakespeare’s plays, sonnets and poems would be longer than the lifespan of our universe.

Which means that while mathematically true, the theorem is “misleading”, they say.

As well as looking at the abilities of a single monkey, the study also did a series of calculations based on the current global population of chimpanzees, which is roughly 200,000.

The results indicated that even if every chimp in the world was enlisted and able to type at a pace of one key per second until the end of the universe, they wouldn’t even come close to typing out the Bard’s works.

There would be a 5% chance that a single chimp would successfully type the word “bananas” in its own lifetime. And the probability of one chimp constructing a random sentence – such as “I chimp, therefore I am” – comes in at one in 10 million billion billion, the research indicates.

“It is not plausible that, even with improved typing speeds or an increase in chimpanzee populations, monkey labour will ever be a viable tool for developing non-trivial written works,” the study says.

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“While mathematically true, the theorem is misleading”? This is just abject nonsense. Nobody is suggesting monkey labour for anything. This is purely a thought experiement about the nature of infinity, and our incapability of understanding it.

Bob Newhart would be proud. “If they ever tried this, they would have to hire guys to check whether the monkeys were turning out anything worthwhile…”
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified