At the end of September a crucial silicon mine in Spruce Pine was flooded by Hurricane Helene. Ever wonder what happened next? CC-licensed photo by State Archives of North Carolina Raleigh, NC on Flickr.

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This is the last Overspill of 2024 (220 editions, 44 weeks, not bad). We made it! See you again in 2025. (Not sure if it will be Monday 6th or 13th. Exciting!)

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

The ghosts in the machine • Harpers

Liz Pelly:

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I first heard about ghost artists in the summer of 2017. At the time, I was new to the music-streaming beat. I had been researching the influence of major labels on Spotify playlists since the previous year, and my first report had just been published. Within a few days, the owner of an independent record label in New York dropped me a line to let me know about a mysterious phenomenon that was “in the air” and of growing concern to those in the indie music scene: Spotify, the rumor had it, was filling its most popular playlists with stock music attributed to pseudonymous musicians—variously called ghost or fake artists—presumably in an effort to reduce its royalty payouts. Some even speculated that Spotify might be making the tracks itself. At a time when playlists created by the company were becoming crucial sources of revenue for independent artists and labels, this was a troubling allegation.

At first, it sounded to me like a conspiracy theory. Surely, I thought, these artists were just DIY hustlers trying to game the system. But the tips kept coming. Over the next few months, I received more notes from readers, musicians, and label owners about the so-called fake-artist issue than about anything else. One digital strategist at an independent record label worried that the problem could soon grow more insidious. “So far it’s happening within a genre that mostly affects artists at labels like the one I work for, or Kranky, or Constellation,” the strategist said, referring to two long-running indie labels.

By July, the story had burst into public view, after a Vulture article resurfaced a year-old item from the trade press claiming that Spotify was filling some of its popular and relaxing mood playlists—such as those for “jazz,” “chill,” and “peaceful piano” music—with cheap fake-artist offerings created by the company. A Spotify spokesperson, in turn, told the music press that these reports were “categorically untrue, full stop”: the company was not creating its own fake-artist tracks. But while Spotify may not have created them, it stopped short of denying that it had added them to its playlists.

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Deeply reported piece which does not make Spotify look good.
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America’s bird-flu luck has officially run out • The Atlantic

Yasmin Tayag:

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The Louisiana patient was infected with a strain of the virus related to the one that sickened the Canadian teen but different from the one spreading among dairy herds, poultry, and farmworkers. The mutations in this strain “represent the ability of the virus to cause serious disease, but these instances should be isolated in humans for the time being,” Chin-Hong said.

But just because America is in the same place of steady precarity that it has been in for months doesn’t mean that’s a good place to be in. As I wrote in September, we are in an awkward state of in-between, in which experts are on high alert for concerning mutations but the public has no reason to worry—yet. “Right now, I agree that the risk to the general public is low, but we know avian influenza mutates quickly,” Anne Rimoin, an epidemiology professor at UCLA, told me.

The more transmissions among animals—in particular from birds to mammals—the more chances the virus has to mutate to become more threatening to the public. The longer the virus persists in the environment, “the greater potential to mutate, resort, and become more infectious and virulent to humans,” Maurice Pitesky, an animal-infectious-diseases expert at UC Davis, told me.

America is giving the virus a lot of chances to infect people. Although efforts to control the virus, such as regular testing of herds and bulk testing of raw milk, are under way, they have clearly not been enough. The spread of the virus geographically and across mammalian species is unprecedented, Pitesky said. He believes that more efforts should be directed toward shifting waterfowl—ducks, geese, and other wild birds responsible for spreading H5N1—away from commercial farms, where the virus is most likely to be transmitted to humans.

A shot for bird flu exists, and experts have urged the government to vaccinate farmworkers. “Farmers need help,” Pitesky said.

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What will 2025 bring? Join us next year for Pandemic Watching Brief!
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IT expert convicted for repeatedly lying about inventing Bitcoin • BBC News

Joe Tidy:

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A computer scientist has been found to have committed contempt of court for falsely and persistently claiming to be the mysterious inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto.

In March, the High Court ruled Craig Wright was not Satoshi, and ordered him to stop claiming he was.

However, he continued to launch legal cases asserting he had intellectual property rights to Bitcoin, including a claim he was owed $1.2 trillion ($911bn).

A judge said that amounted to a “flagrant breach” of the original court order and sentenced him to 12 months in prison, suspended for two years.

It means if Wright – who is from Australia but lives in the UK – continues to claim he invented the cryptocurrency he will face being jailed.

However, Wright, who appeared via videolink, refused to disclose where he was, saying only he was in Asia. It means an international arrest warrant would have to be issued if the UK authorities wanted to detain him.

Wright’s actions were described in court as “legal terrorism” that “put people through personal hell” in his campaign to be recognised as Bitcoin’s inventor.

The judge, Mr Justice Mellor, said Wright arguments were “legal nonsense” but acknowledged that he was not in the UK and “appears to be well aware of countries with which the UK does not have extradition arrangements”.

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And so we tie all that up. Can we hope we will hear no more from Craig Wright?
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Misleading Google search results on UK asylum seeker crime rate used 2017 data from Germany • Full Fact

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Google’s search results and its AI overview have been giving misleading answers to questions about the number of crimes committed by asylum seekers in the UK—quoting figures that were actually from 2017 in Germany.

There’s no evidence these figures reflect the current crime rate among asylum seekers in the UK, though official data is limited and neither the Office for National Statistics (ONS) nor the Home Office publish equivalent UK figures.

But in recent months we’ve seen screenshots of some of these misleading Google search results circulated on social media.

After we contacted Google about this last week, the misleading results seem to be no longer appearing in searches on the topic.

A Google spokesperson told Full Fact: “We aim to surface relevant, high quality information in all our Search features and we continue to raise the bar for quality with ongoing updates and improvements. When issues arise—like if our features misinterpret web content or miss some context—we use those examples to improve and take appropriate action under our policies.”

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Full Fact is a fact-checking organisation in the UK. Misleading results like this in its AI overview carry the imprimatur of Google, seen by many as “the source that’s correct”. Google’s response? “Oh”.
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October 2024: Quartz mine crucial for making chips reopens ten days after Hurricane Helene’s devastation • Tom’s Hardware

Jowi Morales:

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Sibelco, one of the two companies mining ultra-high-purity quartz at Spruce Pine, North Carolina, has restarted production a little over ten days after Hurricane Helene devastated the area. According to its press release, Sibelco only suffered minor damage, and all its employees are safe and accounted for. With the company restarting shipments to its customers and ramping production to full total capacity, the chipmaking industry is assured that it won’t have issues with the pure quartz supply needed to make the silicon base of semiconductors.

Hurricane Helene was a Category 4 hurricane that severely affected the Spruce Pine area, thus raising some fears that it would disrupt the accessible and affordable supply of quartz needed to create silicon ingots. These ingots are sliced into thin wafers and polished, then etched to form the chips we find on our computers. However, you can’t just melt ultra-pure silicon in any container to create the silicon ingots you need to make chips. Impurities in the container could react with the molten silicon, so you need an equally pure quartz crucible to hold it.

Most chip makers and their suppliers have enough silicon wafers or silicon ingots to weather a disruption in the supply chain, so many did not expect any significant industry repercussions from the tragedy. Besides, there are other quartz sources globally, although they’re likely not as readily available and affordable as what the North Carolina mines supply.

Nevertheless, Sibelco’s production restart is welcome news for the entire industry. After all, the supply chain horror stories that started during the 2020 COVID pandemic and extended until 2022 are fresh in our memories, and we don’t want a repeat of that.

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Tying up loose ends: this was set up to be the Giant Drama at the end of September after Hurricane Helene: OMG semiconductor supply chain disruption?!?! Instead it turns out they got it all up and running again and everything’s hunky dory. Drink!
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US temporarily bans drones in parts of NJ, may use “deadly force” against aircraft – Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

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The Federal Aviation Administration temporarily banned drones over parts of New Jersey yesterday and said “the United States government may use deadly force against” airborne aircraft “if it is determined that the aircraft poses an imminent security threat.”

The FAA issued 22 orders imposing “temporary flight restrictions for special security reasons” until January 17, 2025. “At the request of federal security partners, the FAA published 22 Temporary Flight Restrictions (TFRs) prohibiting drone flights over critical New Jersey infrastructure,” an FAA statement said.

…The latest notices follow numerous sightings of objects that appeared to be drones, which worried New Jersey residents and prompted state and federal officials to investigate and issue several public statements. The FAA last month imposed temporary flight restrictions at the Picatinny Arsenal, an Army research and manufacturing facility, and a Bedminster golf course owned by President-elect Donald Trump.

On December 16, a joint statement was issued by the US Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the FAA, and Department of Defense. The “FBI has received tips of more than 5,000 reported drone sightings in the last few weeks with approximately 100 leads generated,” but evidence so far suggests “the sightings to date include a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones,” the statement said. “We have not identified anything anomalous and do not assess the activity to date to present a national security or public safety risk over the civilian airspace in New Jersey or other states in the northeast.” in the areas covered by this NOTAM” unless they have clearance for specific operations, the FAA said. Allowed operations include support for national defense, law enforcement, firefighting, and commercial operations “with a valid statement of work.”

“Pilots who do not adhere to the following proc[edure] may be intercepted, detained and interviewed by law enforcement/security personnel,” the FAA said. Violating the order could result in “civil penalties and the suspension or revocation of airmen certificates,” and criminal charges, the FAA said.

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Americans have absolutely lost their minds over this. The UK had the same thing with drones allegedly being seen over Gatwick airport. No evidence was ever found.
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IMF reaches staff-level agreement with El Salvador on an Extended Fund Facility Arrangement • International Monetary Fund

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IMF staff and the El Salvadoran authorities have reached a staff-level agreement on a new arrangement under the IMF’s Extended Fund Facility (EFF) for about US$1.4bn to support the government’s reform agenda. The agreement is subject to IMF Executive Board approval.

The program aims to strengthen fiscal and external sustainability, through implementation of an ambitious and growth-friendly fiscal consolidation plan, as well as actions to enhance reserve buffers.

Early efforts to improve governance, transparency, and resilience will be essential to boost confidence and the country’s growth potential, against the backdrop of strong security improvements.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin-related risks are being mitigated. Acceptance of Bitcoin by the private sector will be voluntary and public sector’s participation in Bitcoin-related activities will be confined.

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Whoa whoa whoa. So Bukele’s experiment with El Salvador becoming the “bitcoin nation” is over. Taxes will be paid in US dollars, and the El Salvador government’s e-wallet Chivo will be “gradually unwound”.

I asked back in March 2022 how you’d evaluate the success of this experiment. The answer seems to be: could Bukele use it to get a good cash injection from the IMF?
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After 12 years of writing about bitcoin, here’s how my thinking has changed • Moneyness

JP Koning:

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What I’ve learnt after many years of writing about bitcoin is that it’s a relatively innocuous phenomena, even pedestrian. When it does lead to bad outcomes, I’ve outlined how those can be handled with our existing tools. But here’s what does have me worried.

If you want to buy some bitcoins, go right ahead. We can even help by regulating the trading venues to make it safe. But don’t force others to play.

Alas, that seems to be where we are headed. There is a growing effort to arm-twist the rest of society into joining in by having governments acquire bitcoins, in the U.S.’s case a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. The U.S. government has never entered the World Series of Poker. Nor has it gone to Vegas to bet billions to tax payer funds on roulette or built a strategic Powerball ticket reserve, but it appears to be genuinely entertaining the idea of rolling the dice on Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is an incredibly infectious early-bird game, one that after sixteen years continues to find a constant stream of new recruits. How contagious? I originally estimated in a 2022 post, Three potential paths for the price of bitcoin, that adoption wouldn’t rise above 10%-15% of the global population, but I may have been underestimating its transmissibility. My worry is that calls for government support will only accelerate as more voters, government officials, and bureaucrats catch the orange coin mind virus and act on it. It begins with a small strategic reserve of a few billion dollars. It ends with the Department of Bitcoin Price Appreciation being allocated 50% of yearly tax revenues to make the number go up, to the detriment of infrastructure like roads, hospitals, and law enforcement. At that point we’ve entered a dystopia in which society rapidly deteriorates because we’ve all become obsessed on a bet.

Although I never wanted to ban Bitcoin, I can’t help but wonder whether a prohibition wouldn’t have been the better policy back in 2013 or 2014 given the new bitcoin-by-force path that advocates are pushing it towards. But it’s probably too late for that; the coin is already out of the bag. All I can hope is that my long history of writing on the topic might persuade a few readers that forcing others to play the game you love is not fair game.

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I had no idea where this blogpost was going to start or end up. But also, you can’t prohibit bitcoin! Unless, perhaps, you figure out a way to ban bitcoin exchanges, which also isn’t really feasible.
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How to lose a fortune with just one bad click • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

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Adam Griffin is still in disbelief over how quickly he was robbed of nearly $500,000 in cryptocurrencies. A scammer called using a real Google phone number to warn his Gmail account was being hacked, sent email security alerts directly from google.com, and ultimately seized control over the account by convincing him to click “yes” to a Google prompt on his mobile device.

Griffin is a battalion chief firefighter in the Seattle area, and on May 6 he received a call from someone claiming they were from Google support saying his account was being accessed from Germany. A Google search on the phone number calling him — (650) 203-0000 — revealed it was an official number for Google Assistant, an AI-based service that can engage in two-way conversations.

At the same time, he received an email that came from a google.com email address, warning his Google account was compromised. The message included a “Google Support Case ID number” and information about the Google representative supposedly talking to him on the phone, stating the rep’s name as “Ashton” — the same name given by the caller.

Griffin didn’t learn this until much later, but the email he received had a real google.com address because it was sent via Google Forms, a service available to all Google Docs users that makes it easy to send surveys, quizzes and other communications.

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The answer to how to lose a fortune seems to be “keep it in crypto”. Ironically, the other week John Siracusa on the ATP podcast was explaining how his (tiny) investment in crypto had been stolen – by, he reckoned, the site which had issued his cryptojunk, where he had gone to check how much it was worth but which he figured now must have had some sort of password-stealing malware installed.
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Leak: this is Lenovo’s rollable display laptop • The Verge

Jay Peters:

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Lenovo showed off a laptop concept with a rollable display last year, and in 2025, it might release one that you can actually buy. Leaker Evan Blass just shared images of what he says is a sixth-generation Lenovo ThinkBook Plus, and based on two of the images, it has a display that extends upward to reveal more display underneath.

It seems pretty similar to the concept from 2023, which also extended upward to show more screen. In these images from Blass, Lenovo is showing how the extended screen can be used for multitasking, such as by watching a YouTube video in the lower half of the screen or having a document on hand under a PowerPoint presentation.

Blass’ leak doesn’t include any specs, so we don’t yet know many important details about this rumored laptop.

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Lenovo is very keen on trying wild laptop ideas which then get absolutely no traction anywhere in the market and are abandoned within a year.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In the US, legalised sports betting is linked to an increase in domestic violence incidents when home gridiron teams lose. CC-licensed photo by Maryland GovPics 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. Unwagered. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Apple collaborates with NVIDIA to research faster LLM performance • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

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In a blog post on Wednesday, Apple engineers shared new details on a collaboration with NVIDIA to implement faster text generation performance with large language models.

Apple published and open sourced its Recurrent Drafter (ReDrafter) technique earlier this year. It represents a new method for generating text with LLMs that is significantly faster and “achieves state of the art performance.” It combines two techniques: beam search (to explore multiple possibilities) and dynamic tree attention (to efficiently handle choices).

While its research demonstrated strong results, Apple collaborated with NVIDIA to apply ReDrafter in production. As part of this collaboration, ReDrafter was integrated into NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM, a tool that helps run LLMs faster on NVIDIA GPUs.

…“LLMs are increasingly being used to power production applications, and improving inference efficiency can both impact computational costs and reduce latency for users,” Apple’s machine learning researchers conclude.

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What’s most remarkable about this is that it’s Apple working with NVidia – the company that most resembles it in internal culture, and which Apple therefore has the most trouble working with, because (as discussed on the recent “Apple and Nvidia” episode of the Dithering podcast) they both want to control everything about the process – what is shared, who provides what, who goes to whose office to do coding.

The question posed by Ben Thompson on that episode has stuck with me: if there was a duplicate of yourself – like you in every way, including personality – do you think you would get on with them? Or might some things they did annoy you, even though they’d be the things you would do? It’s worth reflecting on. Would you be aloof? Charming? Welcoming? Impatient?
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Newsom declares bird flu emergency in California as US confirms first severe case • KQED

Lesley McClurg:

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Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency on Wednesday in response to the bird flu outbreak, an action meant to allow the state and local agencies additional resources to increase virus surveillance and slow the spread.

The declaration comes as new dairy cows in Southern California test positive. The state’s Department of Food and Agriculture has detected the virus at 645 dairies, about half of them in the last month. To date, the virus has not spread from person-to-person in California, and nearly all infected individuals were exposed to infected cattle.

Newsom’s announcement coincides with concerning news from Louisiana, where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the nation’s first severe human case of bird flu. The patient, who was exposed to sick and dead birds in their backyard flock, is currently hospitalised.

The US Department of Agriculture started testing the nation’s milk supply for bird flu earlier this month, and the agency alerted dairy processors that they may have to provide samples of raw milk on request.

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The Louisiana patient isn’t just hospitalised; they’re critical with severe respiratory symptoms. We seem to have moved rapidly from “watching brief” to “bird flu state of emergency”.
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1999: the year that signalled end times for newspapers • Los Angeles Times

Shelby Grad is the deputy managing editor of the LA Times:

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“I see nothing in the new technology — nothing coming out of Silicon Valley — that eliminates the need for newspapers and certainly for trained, responsible, ethical and aggressive journalists,” the chairman of the National Assn. of Newspapers told an audience in Washington a month earlier. “We believe that of all the traditional media, newspapers are in the best possible position to use the Internet.”

But behind the rosy corporate spin, there were some red flags. Many newspapers posted advertising gains, but the percentage of ads going to print versus other media was declining. Classified ads were shifting from print to the web. The Times was still regrouping after a round of 500 job cuts. A few years earlier the paper had hired a CEO from breakfast food giant General Mills to bring its finances into line. The newsroom derisively referred to him as the “cereal killer.” Growing revenue was the name of the game, and it took The Times down some strange roads, including a quixotic quest to make the paper smell better.

And it was this search for cash that led to one of the darkest chapters in L.A. Times history.

When Staples Center opened that October [1999], the Los Angeles Times Magazine published a lavish special issue. It was a celebration not just of the Lakers’ and Kings’ new home but of the revival of downtown Los Angeles it promised to unleash. It was the largest magazine the paper ever published and generated $2m in revenue.

But it was later revealed by competitors that the paper had secretly entered into a profit-sharing agreement with Staples Center for the magazine, a conflict of interest that sparked protests by Times journalists who’d written for the magazine without knowing about the deal as well as head-shaking from many readers.

On Dec. 20, The Times published a massive self-examination that broke down what went wrong. It ran 14 pages as a special section without a single ad. The episode left the newsroom shaken and the newspaper’s credibility damaged, and it sparked a more frank discussion inside The Times about financial pressures. “Money is always the first thing we talk about,” one senior editor said in the piece. “The readers are always the last thing we talk about.”

In L.A. Times scholarship, the Staples scandal is seen as the first sign of the epic decline to come.

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Classic self-flagellating American journalism: the mistake wasn’t failing to adapt to the internet quickly enough, it was producing a supplement that pulled in huge amounts of money!
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What happens when the internet disappears? • The Verge

s. e. smith:

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The loss of content is not a new phenomenon. It’s endemic to human societies, marked as we are by an ephemerality that can be hard to contextualize from a distance. For every Shakespeare, hundreds of other playwrights lived, wrote, and died, and we remember neither their names nor their words. (There is also, of course, a Marlowe, for the girlies who know.) For every Dickens, uncountable penny dreadfuls on cheap newsprint didn’t withstand the test of decades. For every iconic cuneiform tablet bemoaning poor customer service, countless more have been destroyed over the millennia. 

This is a particularly complex problem for digital storage. For every painstakingly archived digital item, there are also hard drives corrupted, content wiped, media formats that are effectively unreadable and unusable, as I discovered recently when I went on a hunt for a reel-to-reel machine to recover some audio from the 1960s. Every digital media format, from the Bernoulli Box to the racks of servers slowly boiling the planet, is ultimately doomed to obsolescence as it’s supplanted by the next innovation, with even the Library of Congress struggling to preserve digital archives.  

Historical content can be an incredibly informative resource, telling us how people lived and thought. But we must remember that it’s a small fraction of contemporaneous material that survives, even as we hope, of course, that it’s our own existence that is ultimately memorialized. Sometimes it is through the gaps that we read history or are forced to consider why some things are more likely to persist than others, are more remembered than others, why other histories are subject to active suppression, as we’re seeing across the United States with legislation targeting the accurate teaching of history.

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Solutions to this? None really apart from the Internet Archive. Smith is not very encouraged by the arrival of AI, which he thinks will make things worse.
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TikTok’s ban-or-sale law challenge to be heard in Supreme Court • The Washington Post

Ann Marimow and Eva Dou:

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The Supreme Court said Wednesday that it will quickly take up TikTok’s challenge to a federal law that would shutter the popular platform next month unless the company divests from Chinese ownership.

The justices said they would consider whether the law, passed with bipartisan support to address national security concerns, violates the First Amendment rights of millions of TikTok users and the owners of the video-sharing platform.

In a sign of the significance of the issue, the court added a special hearing to its calendar, scheduling two hours for oral argument on Jan. 10. A ruling could come any time after that.

TikTok had asked the high court to intervene before Jan. 19, the deadline Congress set for TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, to sell the platform or be barred in the United States. The company wants the justices to put on hold a lower-court ruling that clears the way for the law, which was signed by President Joe Biden.

President-elect Donald Trump, who will take office Jan. 20, has suggested he could try to retain access to the app, adding to the uncertainty surrounding the ban-or-sale law.

Lawmakers passed the measure in response to concerns from U.S. officials that TikTok could be pressured by the Chinese government to covertly manipulate public opinion in the United States or to provide access to Americans’ data.

TikTok has said in court filings that the law is a “massive and unprecedented speech restriction” that will “silence the speech of applicants and the many Americans who use the platform to communicate about politics, commerce, arts and other matters of public concern.”

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Logically, the ruling needs to come before January 19 if it throws out the government’s law. The obvious challenge is the First Amendment; the government’s rebuttal is national security. But it will have to demonstrate that, which might be very tricky in open court.
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Japan sees nuclear as cheapest baseload power source in 2040 • Bloomberg via Financial Post

Shoko Oda:

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Nuclear power is forecast to be the cheapest baseload electricity source in Japan in 2040, highlighting the government’s desire to restart the nation’s idled reactors.

The cost of constructing and operating a new nuclear power plant for 2040 is estimated at 12.5 yen ($0.08) per kilowatt-hour, according to documents released from a trade ministry panel meeting on Monday. This cost assumes reactors will be used for 40 years at a 70% operational rate. The meeting was held to discuss the so-called levelized cost of electricity for each power asset, the document said. 

A previous study published in 2021 saw LNG-fired power plants as the cheapest power source in 2030. However, the latest analysis includes a cost to reduce emissions, while fuel prices are also higher.

Intermittent renewable sources, like large-scale and residential solar, were priced lower than nuclear for 2040, the most recent report showed. However, when including the total system cost, including deployment of batteries, nuclear is cheaper than solar in some scenarios.

Japan is currently in the process of revising its national energy strategy, which will dictate its power mix targets beyond 2030. The government has doubled down on nuclear as a way to curb dependence on pricey fossil fuels.

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Japan, don’t forget, has essentially zero indigenous energy sources, so has to rely on imports for all its fossil fuels – which is a lot.
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Brazil’s illegal vape market thrives as Meta’s rules clash with local laws • Rest of World

Pedro Nakamura:

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On August 3, Love Disk, a tobacco and liquor shop, posted an ad of a saleswoman holding three vapes up to the camera on Instagram. “The little beloved ones have arrived home,” the caption read.

There was a serious problem with the ad: Love Disk is located in Brazil, where the sale, import, and advertising of e-cigarettes has been illegal since 2009.

But such endorsements have gone unchecked in Brazil as Meta’s content policies allow attempts to buy, sell, trade, gift, and ask for nicotine products by profiles run by “legitimate” brick-and-mortar stores. The use of e-cigarettes has risen sharply in the country in recent years, with sales partly driven by social media platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp, according to a government report. Meanwhile, the Big Tobacco lobby in Brazil is pushing for their legalization, threatening to roll back decades of declining tobacco use.

“Today, we don’t have a legal framework to hold platforms accountable,” Stefania Schimaneski, who manages the registration and inspection of smoking products at Anvisa, Brazil’s health regulatory agency, told Rest of World.

The Brazilian government banned the sale, import, and advertising of e-cigarettes in 2009. For a while, it appeared that the ban was successful at keeping vaping rates down. According to Covitel, a nationwide survey to monitor risk factors for chronic illness in Brazil, 0.6% of people between 18 and 24 years were daily e-cigarette users in 2022.

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Meta ignoring local laws? Perish the thought.
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Apple stock up despite lacklustre iPhone 16 sales • Investor’s Business Daily

Patrick Seitz:

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Despite hopes that artificial intelligence features would drive iPhone 16 sales, Apple’s latest smartphones continue to underperform compared with last year’s models, a Wall Street analyst says. Still, Apple stock is near record high territory. [They came off it, along with the rest of the US stock market, on Wednesday afternoon.]

In a client note Wednesday, JPMorgan analyst Samik Chatterjee said US sales of the iPhone 16 are tracking below the iPhone 15 so far. He cited a survey from Wave7 Research about handset sales across US carriers in October and November.

“The survey highlights that the lower momentum, reflected in the lower market share year over year, is likely led by the (still) lower consumer awareness for Apple Intelligence,” Chatterjee said.

Apple Intelligence is Apple’s branding of AI features.

On the plus side, Apple is seeing a mix shift toward its higher-end models, especially the iPhone 16 Pro Max, he said. Chatterjee rates Apple stock as overweight with a price target of 265.

On the stock market today, Apple stock fell 2.1% to close at 248.05. Earlier in the session, it notched a record high of 254.28.

“Awareness about Apple Intelligence remains low,” Chatterjee said. “Based on a survey of carrier store representatives, 67% believe that iPhone users have low awareness of Apple Intelligence. Meanwhile, 24% indicated a ‘medium’ level of awareness, and only 10% reported a ‘high’ level of awareness among iPhone users.”

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Lower sales and low awareness of Apple Intelligence is honestly not surprising. Phones last longer, and it’s really impossible to cite a must-have element among the new features. The adverts aren’t doing the job either. (Unlike the one for AirPods Pro, which is one of the best I have ever seen anywhere.)
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Sports betting legalization amplifies emotional cues and intimate partner violence • SSRN

Kyutaro Matsuzawa and Emily Arnesen (both University of Oregon, dept of economics):

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This study explores the relationship between legalized sports gambling, unexpected emotional cues, and reported intimate partner violence (IPV). Using crime data from the 2011 to 2022 National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) and extending Card & Dahl (2011)’s model, we find that when sports gambling is legalized, the effect of NFL home team upset losses on IPV increases by around 10 percentage points.

Heterogeneity analyses reveal that these effects are larger: (i) in states where mobile betting is legalized, (ii) in locations where higher bets were placed, (iii) around paydays, and (iv) for teams who were on a winning streak. Together, these findings support that financial losses from participation in sports gambling can amplify the emotional cues from a favorite team’s unexpected loss.

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Police forces know this anecdotally, but now we have a more statistical confirmation. In the UK there trope has been for years that domestic violence cases spike in an area when the home (soccer) team loses.
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Energy firms to spend £77bn to rewire Great Britain’s electricity grid • The Guardian

Jillian Ambrose:

»

Energy companies have promised to spend up to £77bn over five years to help rewire to Great Britain’s electricity infrastructure in the global race to shift from fossil fuels to clean electricity.

The companies that own the high-voltage power system – National Grid, SSE and ScottishPower – have submitted the spending plans to the regulator Ofgem for the period from 2026 to 2031, which could support about 100,000 jobs.

National Grid set out plans to spend up to £35bn over the five years to March 2031, SSE is budgeting up to £31bn and ScottishPower aims to invest £10.5bn.

John Pettigrew, the chief executive of National Grid, said its programme represents “the most significant step forward in the electricity network that we’ve seen in a generation”.

He added: “Through it we will nearly double the amount of energy that can be transported around the country, support the electrification of the industries of today and tomorrow; create new jobs; and support inward investment for the UK.”

The proposals must still be approved by the watchdog, which is expected to balance the need for costly investments in upgrading the power infrastructure to meet climate targets, which is paid for through energy bills, against the need to protect customers from rising costs.

National Grid, which owns the transmission network in England and Wales, plans to spend more than £11bn to maintain and upgrade its existing networks, alongside building three major grid projects that have already been approved by the regulator through its fast-track process.

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This is serious money. And a lot of jobs.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Thanks to the many people who sent or offered to send the Neuron paper about our slow brains. I will slowly read it over the Christmas break.

A large amount of podcasting is recorded on Apple computers – so why does the company make it so hard to capture audio? CC-licensed photo by Jakob Härter 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. Inaudible. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Casual Viewing • n+1 Magazine

Will Tavlin:

»

In 2021 Netflix announced that it would start releasing a new original movie every week. A certain style soon began to take shape, a mind-numbing anticinema that anyone who has subscribed to Netflix in recent years knows by sight. I’ll call it the Typical Netflix Movie (TNM). From the outside, the TNM looks algorithmically constructed, as if designed to cater to each of Netflix’s two thousand “taste clusters,” the genre-like groupings Netflix uses to segment its audience, green-light programs, and recommend films and shows to subscribers.

The TNM covers every niche interest and identity category in existence, such as a movie about a tall girl, Tall Girl, but also Horse Girl, Skater Girl, Sweet Girl, Lost Girls, and Nice Girls. Seemingly optimized for search engines, the title of a TNM announces exactly what it is — hence a romantic comedy about a wine executive called A Perfect Pairing, or a murder mystery called Murder Mystery. The opening credit sequence looks thrown together, as if its designer were playing roulette with Adobe templates in After Effects.

A typical shot frames two characters, waist up, in profile as the camera slowly dollies across them, a slow and constant whir meant to inject motion into an otherwise inert frame. There is a preponderance of drone shots. The characters’ dialogue is stilted, filled with overexplanation, clichés, and lingo no human would ever use, like two bots stuck in a loop.

…Such slipshod filmmaking works for the streaming model, since audiences at home are often barely paying attention. Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.” (“We spent a day together,” [Lindsay] Lohan tells her lover, James, in Irish Wish. “I admit it was a beautiful day filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.” “Fine,” he responds. “That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.”)

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Not a short essay, but with plenty of insights, especially towards the end.
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Mark Zuckerberg says Threads has more than 100 million daily active users • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

Threads now has more than 100 million daily active users, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Monday. It’s a notable milestone not just because it’s a big number; it’s also the first time Meta has a daily active user figure publicly.

In recent weeks, Meta has been very vocal about Threads’ growth after a lot of people flocked to Bluesky. While Bluesky tracker says that that platform currently has a little over 25 million total users, Zuckerberg shared Monday that Threads has more than 300 million monthly active users. It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, but it’s clear that Threads is still much larger than Bluesky.

«

One suspects there’s a lot of growth hacking going on here: if you browse Instagram, little prompts of things from Threads pop up, which surely enourages plenty of its billion-strong user base to go over and see what’s happening. Also, Threads isn’t full of mad people. Just annoyed ones.
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Germany looks into alleged market manipulation during Dunkelflaute power price spike • Clean Energy Wire

Benjamin Wehrmann:

»

Following an extreme spike in electricity prices on 12 December, Germany’s Federal Network Agency (BNetzA) has said it will investigate possible market manipulation that could have contributed to the situation. BNetzA head Klaus Müller in a social media post said the grid regulator took the price spike “very seriously” and that it “assesses alleged market manipulation.” Investing in steerable capacity and flexibility would be crucial for Germany, Müller said.

Market manipulation could, for example, occur when companies withhold technically available backup plant capacity to push up power prices. During a so-called Dunkelflaute (dark doldrums) event last week, when both wind and solar power output were very low, intraday power prices shortly shot above 900 euros per megawatt hour (MWh). The unavailability of fossil fuel plants was a contributing factor during the price spike in Germany and in other European countries.

“Power supply security has not been at risk at any point in time,” the BNetzA said in an analysis. However, it added that operators had not dispatched any backup power plants even when the short-term wholesale price level exceeded 300 euros per MWh. While price peaks during a Dunkelflaute event are generally to be expected, the regulator and power exchange operators will investigate whether collusion had played a role in the mid-December price hike.

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Utility companies taking advantage to make money? Perish the thought!
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What if tech execs don’t really need all these data centres? • The New Republic

Kate Aronoff:

»

Data center growth is already helping to extend the life of coal-fired power plants and fueling a boomlet for the gas power providers furnishing Silicon Valley titans with new turbines. There is nothing inevitable, though, about the tremendous energy demand that AI boosters say they’ll need.

“Nobody has any idea what AI electricity usage in data centers is going to be in three to four years,” says Jonathan Koomey, a researcher and consultant who studies the energy impact of internet and information technology. Electricity demand is indeed growing for the first time in over a decade, he says. Not all of that is from data centers, and larger spikes in demand are generally concentrated in places with new factories and data centers, like Virginia and Georgia. The modest overall load growth happening now, moreover, doesn’t indicate that there’s some looming crisis in which the US will run out of electricity as data centers proliferate.

The bigger risk may well be that these fantastical demand projections are used to bring new fossil fueled power plants online and keep existing ones running—regardless of whether they’re actually needed. Once built, new coal or gas plants are likely to operate for decades. “When people think it’s a crisis they make big mistakes,” Koomey says. “It’s absolutely not a crisis.”

There are economic reasons to push for such a massive infrastructure binge. In many states, building new infrastructure is one of the few ways that electric utility companies can raise rates, decisions that require approval from the public service commissions that regulate what they charge and the profits they make. Big new sources of electricity demand—met with new infrastructure—can mean higher profits.

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Well that’s a convenient intersection of interests between the utilities and the tech companies.
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The unbearable slowness of being: why do we live at 10 bits/s? • Neuron

Jieyu Zheng and Markus Meister:

»

This article is about the neural conundrum behind the slowness of human behavior. The information throughput of a human being is about 10 bits/s. In comparison, our sensory systems gather data at ∼1 0^9 (1 billion) bits/s. The stark contrast between these numbers remains unexplained and touches on fundamental aspects of brain function: what neural substrate sets this speed limit on the pace of our existence?

Why does the brain need billions of neurons to process 10 bits/s? Why can we only think about one thing at a time? The brain seems to operate in two distinct modes: the “outer” brain handles fast high-dimensional sensory and motor signals, whereas the “inner” brain processes the reduced few bits needed to control behavior. Plausible explanations exist for the large neuron numbers in the outer brain, but not for the inner brain, and we propose new research directions to remedy this.

«

I can’t access the full article – it requires an academic institution login – but I’d hope it answers some of its own questions: not all of the brain’s processing is “throughput”. There’s a lot going on just to keep the lights on, so to speak: the duck’s slow progress belies the paddling beneath the water.
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As a doctor, here’s what I have learned from my Alzheimer’s disease • The Washington Post

Daniel Gibbs:

»

I have a special interest in Alzheimer’s disease. For nearly 25 years, I practiced general neurology in Portland, Oregon, and some of my patients had dementia. In 2012, while doing a genealogical DNA search, I inadvertently discovered that I have two copies of the APOE-4 allele, meaning I had a very good chance of getting Alzheimer’s-caused dementia by age 80.

I felt gobsmacked. I remember walking down the stairs in a daze after reading the report from the genetic testing service and telling my wife, Lois, “I think I am screwed.”

A year later, I retired at age 62 even though I had no symptoms of cognitive impairment. If I had almost any other job, I could have continued working for a few more years, but in medicine, forgetfulness could have fatal consequences. I suddenly wore two hats — that of a retired physician who had cared for a lot of people with Alzheimer’s disease and now a person living with the same disorder.

I had been taught, in medical school in the 1970s and even during my neurology residency in the 1980s, that Alzheimer’s disease progresses from onset to death in about three to five years, and nothing can be done about it. Neither statement is true.

In hindsight, my first symptom of Alzheimer’s disease was a gradual loss of smell that I first noticed in 2006. This was accompanied by odd olfactory hallucinations that smelled like baking bread mixed with perfume. I didn’t have any measurable cognitive impairment until 2015, when I had significant trouble remembering words, including the names of friends and colleagues.

I had a PET scan as part of a research study, which showed my brain had the beginning of abnormal tau protein, a key part of diagnosing Alzheimer’s. When the scans were repeated in 2018 and 2022, the tau protein can be seen spreading through my brain.

…I am now 73, and I have had mild cognitive impairment for roughly five years, followed by mild dementia for about four years. We don’t yet have a way to stop this progression, but what have I been doing to slow it?

«

Turns out that aerobic exercise is a good way to stave it off. Allied to the study last week that showed that simply keeping moving is a great way to lengthen your life, it seems like we all just need to keep jogging on.
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Klarna’s CEO says it stopped hiring thanks to AI – yet still advertises many open positions • TechCrunch

Maxwell Zeff:

»

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski recently told Bloomberg TV that his company essentially stopped hiring a year ago and credited generative AI for enabling this massive workforce reduction.

However, despite Siemiatkowski’s bullishness on AI, the company is not relying entirely on AI to replace human workers who leave, as open job listings — for more humans — and the company’s own statements confirm.

“We stopped hiring about a year ago. We were 4,500, now we’re 3,500,” Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg TV. “We have a natural attrition, as [does] every tech company. People stay about five years — so 20% leave every year — and by not hiring, we’re simply shrinking.”

The company’s CEO also said he believes AI can effectively replace workers. “I am of the opinion that AI can already do all of the jobs that we as humans do,” said Siemiatkowski. “We’re gonna give some of the improvements [from] the efficiency that AI provides by increasing the pace at which the salaries of our employees increases.”

…in practice, while Klarna has significantly reduced its workforce in the last year, the buy now, pay later company has not completely stopped hiring.

Klarna is currently hiring for more than 50 roles around the globe, according to the job postings page on its website. Furthermore, Klarna’s managers have said they are actively hiring or growing their teams at least half a dozen times throughout 2024, according to posts on LinkedIn viewed by TechCrunch.

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Oh, telling the truth about how AI is affecting your company is so last year.
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Australia plans to tax digital platforms that don’t pay for news • AP News

Rod McGuirk:

»

The Australian government said Thursday it will tax large digital platforms and search engines unless they agree to share revenue with Australian news media organizations.

The tax would apply from Jan. 1 to tech companies that earn more than A$250m ($160m) a year in revenue from Australia, Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones and Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said.

They include Meta, Google-owner Alphabet and ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok.

The tax would be offset through money paid to Australian media organizations. The size of the tax is not clear. But the government aims to make sharing revenue with media organizations the cheaper option.

“The real objective … is not to raise revenue — we hope not to raise any revenue. The real objective is to incentivize agreement-making between platforms and news media businesses in Australia,” Jones told reporters.

The move comes after Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, announced that it would not renew three-year deals to pay Australian news publishers for their content.

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“Pay our voluntary tax, or else pay our compulsory tax”, in short.

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The developers who came in from the cold • Rogue Amoeba

Paul Kafasis is CEO of Rogue Amoeba, which makes excellent Mac software for capturing incoming or outgoing audio – which means it’s enormously popular with podcasters, among others:

»

Even as our products steadily grew in popularity, our relationship with Apple was almost non-existent. Plenty of individuals inside the company were fans, but we received very little attention from Apple as a corporate entity. We didn’t much mind being outsiders, but it meant that we often had zero notice of breaking changes introduced by Apple.

During this time, Apple placed an emphasis on improving the security of MacOS, continually locking the operating system down further and further. Though their changes weren’t aimed at the legitimate audio capture we provided our users, they nonetheless made that capture increasingly difficult. We laboured to keep our tools functioning with each new version of MacOS. Through it all, we lived with a constant fear that Apple would irreparably break our apps.

In 2020, the disaster foreshadowed literally one sentence ago struck. Beta versions of MacOS 11 broke ACE, our then-current audio capture technology, and the damage looked permanent. When we spoke briefly to Apple during WWDC 2020, our appeals for assistance were flatly rejected. (WWDC was virtual for the first time that year, which meant this took the form of a very disheartening WebEx call.) We spent weeks attempting to get ACE working again, but eventually we had to admit defeat. ACE as we knew it was dead in the water, and all options for replacing it involved substantial reductions in functionality. Though we did not discuss it publicly at the time, things looked grim for the future of our products.

Thankfully, we had three things going for us.

«

It’s astonishing that Apple is so hostile to Rogue Amoeba, given that its technology effectively keeps scores of podcast producers in business, on the Mac platform. If it’s so worried about the security aspect (reasonable: what if someone dropped a script or other malware to capture audio from the mic?) then just buy Rogue Amoeba and build the functionality in with a private, undisclosed API.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Close-up imagery of failed microchips reveals a world of strange shapes and details. CC-licensed photo by ZEISS Microscopy 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. Fractal. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Social media given ‘last chance’ to tackle illegal posts • BBC News

Liv McMahon:

»

Online platforms must begin assessing whether their services expose users to illegal material by 16 March 2025 or face financial punishments as the Online Safety Act (OSA) begins taking effect.

Ofcom, the regulator enforcing the UK’s internet safety law, published its final codes of practice for how firms should deal with illegal online content on Monday.

Platforms have three months to carry out risk assessments identifying potential harms on their services or they could be fined up to 10% of their global turnover.

Ofcom head Dame Melanie Dawes told BBC News this was the “last chance” for industry to make changes.

“If they don’t start to seriously change the way they operate their services, then I think those demands for things like bans for children on social media are going to get more and more vigorous,” she said. “I’m asking the industry now to get moving, and if they don’t they will be hearing from us with enforcement action from March.”

Under Ofcom’s codes, platforms will need to identify if, where and how illegal content might appear on their services and ways they will stop it reaching users

According to the OSA, this includes content relating to child sexual abuse material (CSAM), controlling or coercive behaviour, extreme sexual violence, promoting or facilitating suicide and self-harm.

But critics say the Act fails to tackle a wide range of harms for children. The Molly Rose Foundation – set up in memory of teenager Molly Russell, who took her own life in 2017 after being exposed to self-harm images on social media – said the OSA has “deep structural issues”.

Andy Burrows, its chief executive, said the organisation was “astonished and disappointed” by a lack of specific, targeted measures for platforms on dealing with suicide and self-harm material in Ofcom’s guidance.

“Robust regulation remains the best way to tackle illegal content, but it simply isn’t acceptable for the regulator to take a gradualist approach to immediate threats to life,” he said.

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LFGSS and Microcosm shutting down 16th March 2025 (the day before the Online Safety Act is enforced) • LFGSS

“Velocio” runs LFGSS: “London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK”:

»

Reading the new Ofcom safety regulations and we’re done… we fall firmly into scope, and I have no way to dodge it. The act is too broad, and it doesn’t matter that there’s never been an instance of any of the proclaimed things that this act protects adults, children and vulnerable people from… the very broad language and the fact that I’m based in the UK means we’re covered.

The act simply does not care that this site and platform is run by an individual, and that I do so philanthropically without any profit motive (typically losing money), nor that the site exists to reduce social loneliness, reduce suicide rates, help build meaningful communities that enrich life.

The act only cares that is it “linked to the UK” (by me being involved as a UK native and resident, by you being a UK based user), and that users can talk to other users… that’s it, that’s the scope.

I can’t afford what is likely tens of thousands [of pounds] to go through all the legal hoops here over a prolonged period of time, the site itself barely gets a few hundred in donations each month and costs a little more to run… this is not a venture that can afford compliance costs… and if we did, what remains is a disproportionately high personal liability for me, and one that could easily be weaponised by disgruntled people who are banned for their egregious behaviour (in the years running fora I’ve been signed up to porn sites, stalked IRL and online, subject to death threats, had fake copyright takedown notices, an attempt to delete the domain name with ICANN… all from those whom I’ve moderated to protect community members)… I do not see an alternative to shuttering it.

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Seems odd that a standard forum site should think itself at risk from the new rules. It’s a question of moderation, for the most part. If there aren’t enough volunteers, there could be a problem, but it seems odd in a site like this.
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Amazon facing strike threats as Senate report details hidden widespread injuries • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Just as Amazon warehouse workers are threatening to launch the “first large-scale” unfair labor practices strike at Amazon in US history, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) released a report accusing Amazon of operating “uniquely dangerous warehouses” that allegedly put profits over worker safety.

As chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Sanders started investigating Amazon in June 2023. His goal was “to uncover why Amazon’s injury rates far exceed those of its competitors and to understand what happens to Amazon workers when they are injured on the job.”

According to Sanders, Amazon “sometimes ignored” the committee’s requests and ultimately only supplied 285 documents requested. The e-commerce giant was mostly only willing to hand over “training materials given to on-site first aid staff,” Sanders noted, rather than “information on how it tracks workers, the quotas it imposes on workers, and the disciplinary actions it takes when workers cannot meet those quotas, internal studies on the connection between speed and injury rates, and the company’s treatment of injured workers.”

To fill in the gaps, Sanders’ team “conducted an exhaustive inquiry,” interviewing nearly 500 workers who provided “more than 1,400 documents, photographs, and videos to support their stories.” And while Amazon’s responses were “extremely limited,” Sanders said that the Committee was also able to uncover internal studies that repeatedly show that “Amazon chose not to act” to address safety risks, allegedly “accepting injuries to its workers as the cost of doing business.”

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The report is worth browsing – even if just the executive summary – for its list of legislation that Sanders says needs to be passed, including the “No Robot Bosses Act” and the “Stop Spying Bosses Act”.
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Sorry human, you’re wrong • Engineering Prompts

Marcel Salathé paid for access to GPT-4o:

»

Yesterday, I decided to try a quick experiment for fun. As an amateur piano player and a big Chopin fan, I took a picture of a page from the score open on my piano – Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 27 No. 2 – and asked GPT-4o to identify it. To my surprise, it couldn’t. Intrigued, I tested other models. While none of them succeeded, most at least recognized it as Chopin.

Here’s where it gets interesting: the larger models (GPT-4o, GPT o1, GPT o1 Pro, Claude Opus, and Gemini 1.5 Pro) were all quite confident in their wrong answers. Only Mistral and Claude Sonnet admitted their uncertainty. They suggested it might be Chopin but acknowledged they weren’t sure without more information. Kudos to them.

I was especially disappointed with GPT o1 Pro. After “thinking” for 2 minutes and 40 seconds (so much for being faster), it didn’t just fail – it was the only advanced model to misidentify the composer entirely. It confidently claimed the piece was Liszt’s “Un Sospiro” and gave elaborate reasons to back up its claim. Normally, I abandon experiments like this and move on, but in this case, I had a strange urge to tell o1 Pro it was wrong.

(By the way, I wish I could share the conversation directly. Unfortunately, sharing conversations involving images isn’t possible – an strange limitation given the price.)

I told it flat out that it was wrong and provided the correct answer. What happened next left me stunned. Normally, when you correct a model, it apologizes and acknowledges the mistake – unless your claim is completely outlandish. Even then, most models only push back in the gentlest way. But this time, after another minute and 18 seconds of “thinking”, o1 Pro doubled down: “I’m fairly certain that this page is not from Chopin’s Nocturne in D-flat major, Op. 27 No. 2.” (emphasis added).

It provided an elaborate explanation of why I was wrong and insisted that the piece was, in fact, Liszt’s “Un Sospiro”. The message was clear: sorry human, but you’re wrong.

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It gets weirder, trust me.
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Chinese hacker singlehandedly responsible for exploiting 81,000 Sophos firewalls, DOJ says • Cybernews

Stefanie Schappert:

»

A Chinese hacker indicted on Tuesday and the PRC-based cybersecurity company he worked for are both sanctioned by the US government for compromising “tens of thousands of firewalls” – some protecting US critical infrastructure, putting human lives at risk.

In a series of coordinated actions, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the Department of Justice (DoJ), and the FBI said the massive cyber espionage campaign, which compromised at least 36 firewalls protecting US critical infrastructure, posed significant risks to national security.

A federal court in Indiana on Tuesday unsealed an indictment charging 30-year-old Guan Tianfeng (Guan) with conspiracy to commit computer and wire fraud by hacking into firewall devices worldwide, including one “used by an agency of the United States.”

Guan, employed by the Chinese cybersecurity firm Sichuan Silence – a known contractor for Beijing intelligence – was alleged to have discovered a zero-day vulnerability in firewall products manufactured by UK cybersecurity firm Sophos.

DoJ officials said between April 22nd and April 25th, 2020, Guan and his co-conspirators infected approximately 81,000 vulnerable devices, including 36 firewalls protecting US critical infrastructure.
The malware deployed by the attackers was designed to steal sensitive user information, but once compromised, Guan escalated the attacks.

Using the Ragnarok ransomware variant, the hackers would further disable their victims’ anti-virus software, encrypt their systems, and demand payment if victims attempted to remediate the breach.

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Sneaky. And determined.
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Yearlong supply-chain attack targeting security pros steals 390,000 credentials • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

A sophisticated and ongoing supply-chain attack operating for the past year has been stealing sensitive login credentials from both malicious and benevolent security personnel by infecting them with Trojanized versions of open source software from GitHub and NPM, researchers said.

The campaign, first reported three weeks ago by security firm Checkmarx and again on Friday by Datadog Security Labs, uses multiple avenues to infect the devices of researchers in security and other technical fields. One is through packages that have been available on open source repositories for over a year. They install a professionally developed backdoor that takes pains to conceal its presence. The unknown threat actors behind the campaign have also employed spear phishing that targets thousands of researchers who publish papers on the arXiv platform.

The objectives of the threat actors are also multifaceted. One is the collection of SSH private keys, Amazon Web Services access keys, command histories, and other sensitive information from infected devices every 12 hours. When this post went live, dozens of machines remained infected, and an online account on Dropbox contained some 390,000 credentials for WordPress websites taken by the attackers, most likely by stealing them from fellow malicious threat actors. The malware used in the campaign also installs cryptomining software that was present on at least 68 machines as of last month.

It’s unclear who the threat actors are or what their motives may be. Datadog researchers have designated the group MUT-1244, with MUT short for “mysterious unattributed threat.”

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess at China? There have been some very determined long-term attacks, such as (I think) the one on PyPI discovered earlier this year.
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AI thriller spec script snapped up in $3.25m sale to Fifth Season, Makeready • Hollywood Reporter

Borys Kit:

»

An unknown writer, a fast-rising feeding frenzy, and a true multimillion-dollar deal. It’s enough to make executives or aspiring screenplay authors dream of the heady spec script deals of the 1990s.

In a deal that shakes up a sleepy Hollywood before the holidays, Fifth Season and Brad Weston’s Makeready banner have preemptively picked up Alignment, a spec script by Natan Dotan, a man who until a week ago had no representation.

The deal could become one of biggest spec deals of the year — Nyad writer Julia Cox sold spec Love of Your Life, with Ryan Gosling producing, to Amazon in October for low seven figures — but this one involves the breaking of a writer with few Hollywood connections. It also involves a topic that is generating intense interest — and hand-wringing — in Hollywood, namely artificial intelligence.

…Alignment is described as having the urgency of thrillers such as Margin Call and Contagion and takes place in a 36-hour period. It tells of a board member at a booming AI company who wrestles with corporate politics and warped incentives as he tries to prevent his colleagues’ willful ignorance from causing a global catastrophe.

«

It’s the OpenAI board row from November 2023, but with “global catastrophe” as the ticking clock, rather than just the passage of the weekend and emails from tech publications. Looking forward to the CEO consulting a (consults script notes from executives) wall of blinking lights and an LED display that blinks red and green.
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What does a human life cost – and is it ethical to price it? Jenny Kleeman asked a hitman, philanthropists and a life insurer • The Conversation

Hugh Breakey:

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What is your life worth, in dollar terms? The answers may surprise you. The asking price for murder, for example, is disconcertingly low. The average price of hiring a hitman is A$30,000 [UK £15,000], estimates British journalist Jenny Kleeman in her intriguing and thought-provoking book, The Price of Life. But the cost to the public purse is very high.

Here are some more striking figures (all converted into Australian dollars). The average price of a ransom: $560,000. The payout to families if one of their loved ones dies in an act of terrorism (in Australia) $75,000. The average price of saving a life through strategic philanthropy: $6,000. And the price of buying a cadaver: $7,600.

Kleeman’s book investigates the many ways decision-makers find themselves putting a price on the priceless.

In her quest to discover how our modern world fixes a price to human life in a wide variety of contexts, she also investigates the costs and consequences of life insurance, the sale of body parts, and the inside details of government policy-making, compensation for murder and more.

…Kleeman’s book is not just concerned with how and why a human life is priced, but on who decides that price. Kleeman’s question encourages her to look in strange places and talk to interesting people, opening the readers’ eyes to decisions and calculations often hidden – sometimes deliberately so – from public view.

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The NHS has a measure called QALYs, or quality-adjusted life years, in determining whether to go ahead with treatments for disease or disability. It’s very technical, but another form of the measure discussed here.
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Google goes solar as grid can’t power its future datacenters • The Register

Brandon Vigliarolo:

»

Google believes the US electricity grid can’t deliver the energy needed to power datacenters that deliver AI services, so has formed an alliance to build industrial parks powered by clean energy, at which it will build “gigawatts of datacenter capacity” across the nation.

The search megalith announced its plan last Wednesday. Google president Ruth Porat wrote that the US is poised to enjoy strong economic growth thanks to AI, increased manufacturing activity, and the electrification of transport and other industries. But Porat thinks those opportunities could be missed due to the wonky electricity grid, which she wrote has “not kept pace with the country’s economic growth opportunity” and is sometimes “unable to accommodate load increases.”

Google’s response is a deal with solar energy firm Intersect Power, and financier TPG Rise Climate, to build industrial parks next to renewable energy generation facilities that Porat wrote will be “purpose-built and right-sized for the datacenter.” Google will build datacenters at those parks – meaning they have a long-term customer from day one – and believes it can build bit barns faster under this arrangement.

Intersect Power agrees with that analysis, describing the deal as a “‘power-first’ approach to datacenter development.”

The generation plants Intersect Energy builds will also be connected to the grid, and provide power to other tenants of the industrial parks.

Intersect Power’s portfolio consists of 2.2GW of operating solar PV and accompanying battery storage in operation or construction.

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Nuclear, solar, just throwing energy at the problem. But what exactly is the problem?
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The art of failure analysis 2024 • IEEE Spectrum

Kohava Mendelsohn:

»

When your car breaks down, you take it to the mechanic. When a computer chip fails, engineers go to the failure-analysis team. It’s their job to diagnose what went wrong and work to make sure it doesn’t in the future.

The International Symposium on the Physical and Failure Analysis of Integrated Circuits (IPFA) is a yearly conference in Asia attended by failure-analysis engineers. The gathering is mostly technical, but there’s also a fun part: The Art of Failure Analysis contest.

“It’s all about creativity and strong imagination,” says Willie Yeoh, chair of the Art of Failure Analysis contest this year. Anyone in the failure-analysis community can submit an image taken during their everyday work that includes something surprising or unexpected, like a melted bit of silicon that looks like a dinosaur. Ten photos are chosen by the conference committee as the most interesting, and then conference attendees vote on their favorite among those.

We’ve gathered a collection of photos from the 2022 and 2024 Art of Failure Analysis contests (it did not run in 2023). Which one would you vote for?

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These photos are very striking – though it would be nice too to know the scale.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Why did the Ingenuity helicopter crash on Mars? An investigation blames bland terrain. CC-licensed photo by Kevin Gill on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

AI could be making scientists less creative • Gizmodo

Todd Feathers:

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Researchers at the University of Chicago and Tsinghua University, in China, analyzed nearly 68 million research papers across six scientific disciplines (not including computer science) and found that papers incorporating AI techniques were cited more often but also focused on a narrower set of topics and were more repetitive. In essence, the more scientists use AI, the more they focus on the same set of problems that can be answered with large, existing datasets and the less they explore foundational questions that can lead to entirely new fields of study.

“I was surprised at the dramatic scale of the finding, [AI] dramatically increases people’s capacity to stay and advance within the system,” said James Evans, a co-author of the pre-print paper and director of the Knowledge Lab at the University of Chicago. “This suggests there’s a massive incentive for individuals to uptake these kinds of systems within their work … it’s between thriving and not surviving in a competitive research field.”

As that incentive leads to a growing dependence on machine learning, neural networks, and transformer models, “the whole system of science that’s done by AI is shrinking,” he said.

The study examined papers published from 1980 to 2024 in the fields of biology, medicine, chemistry, physics, materials science, and geology. It found that scientists who used AI tools to conduct their research published 67% more papers annually, on average, and their papers were cited more than three times as often as those who didn’t use AI.

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Bird flu jumps from birds to human in Louisiana; patient hospitalized • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

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A person in Louisiana is hospitalized with H5N1 bird flu after having contact with sick and dying birds suspected of carrying the virus, state health officials announced Friday.

It is the first human H5N1 case detected in Louisiana. For now, the case is considered a “presumptive” positive until testing is confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Health officials say that the risk to the public is low but caution people to stay away from any sick or dead birds. A spokesperson for Louisiana’s health department told Ars that the hospitalized patient had contact with both backyard and wild birds.

Although the person has been hospitalized, their condition was not reported.  The spokesperson said the department would not comment on the patient’s condition due to patient confidentiality and an ongoing public health investigation.

The case is just the latest amid H5N1’s global and domestic rampage. The virus has been ravaging wild, backyard, and commercial birds in the US since early 2022 and spilling over to a surprisingly wide range of mammals. In March this year, officials detected an unprecedented leap to dairy cows, which has since caused a nationwide outbreak. The virus is currently sweeping through California, the country’s largest dairy producer.

To date, at least 845 herds across 16 states have contracted the virus since March, including 630 in California, which detected its first dairy infections in late August.

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Um, just a watching brief.
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Google’s lost moonshots • Jerry Liu

The aforesaid Liu has just spent six years in consulting and startups, having previously worked at Facebook/Meta:

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1. Misaligned Incentives
Google’s innovation machine is driven by PM careers, and PM careers are driven by metrics. If you’re a product manager at Google, what’s your incentive? Ship something small that looks good on your performance review, or spend years on a project that might fail spectacularly? It’s like trying to work on decade-spanning climate change projects with politicians who need to win the next election and have term limits of 4 years. You take your wins, and you get out before the bridge collapses. Which inevitably it will, because can you expect any human project to only ever be winning, quarter after quarter?

2. Moonshot-scale Budget
This is crucial: moonshot-scale problems need moonshot-scale resources. Think about how VCs fund startups. When something shows promise, not only do they need more funding, the fundraising often jumps by orders of magnitude. What Google calls moonshots often feel more like well-funded experiments. Meanwhile, Meta commits resources at a scale that matches their ambitions. Look at Reality Labs – they’ve burned more money than most companies will ever see, but they keep going.

3. Institutional Learning
And maybe the hardest problem: institutional learning. Both companies fail, but they fail differently. When Google Glass flopped, what happened to all that knowledge? Sure, some of it probably lives in internal docs, but the teams scattered, the context was lost, and the deep learning – the kind that only comes from failure – largely evaporated. I also heard that Google Plus’s assets were also cannibalized internally; Please let me know if you’ve interacted with any part of Google Plus’s remains recently.

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This is very true: whatever happened to Loon, the balloon thing, and all the other moonshots? Quietly fallen to earth, it seems.
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Ingenuity Mars helicopter January grounding: what happened? • The Register

Richard Speed:

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It appears the bland Martian surface triggered a chain of events that left NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter permanently grounded on the red planet.

The helicopter’s flying career came to an abrupt end earlier this year when Flight 72 was cut short, and communications were briefly lost. After re-establishing contact, it soon became clear Ingenuity would not be flying again – the rotor blades were damaged, and one was entirely detached.

At the time, the prevailing theory was that the flight ended when Ingenuity’s downward-facing camera could not pick out features on the surface. According to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), this is still the most likely scenario for what started a chain of events that left the helicopter crippled.

Performing an air crash investigation from hundreds of millions of kilometers away is tricky. It’s impossible to get hands on the wreckage, there are unlikely to be any witnesses, and there aren’t brightly colored black boxes to give clues about what happened in the final minutes of the flight.

What there is, however, is telemetry. Data sent during the final flight indicates that around 20 seconds after take-off, Ingenuity’s navigation system couldn’t find enough surface features to track. It was designed to operate over textured, flat terrain, not the steep, featureless sand ripples where it ultimately met its demise.

“Photographs taken after the flight indicate the navigation errors created high horizontal velocities at touchdown,” according to JPL. Engineers reckon the most likely scenario is that Ingenuity made a hard landing on the slope of a sand ripple. The sudden pitch and roll exerted stress on the rotor blades past their design limits, and all four snapped at their weakest point.

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Making “social” social again: announcing Mozi • Medium

Ev Williams did Twitter, did Medium, and now he’s doing a sort of.. travel-contact app:

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Mozi is a social app — not in the sense of “social media.” But in the sense of interacting with other people and building relationships.

In fact, it’s not a media app at all. There is no posting photos or videos or liking or following. There are no influencers — except your friend who may influence you to meet up for a coffee when you’re in town.

The primary value proposition of Mozi (today) is simple: It lets you know when you’re going to be in the same place (city or event) as someone you know. And the goal is straightforward: to connect more often—and in person—with the people you care about.

For example, I just got back from Miami. Before going, I put my plan (just the city and what days) into Mozi. This information was shared just with my contacts (minus any I wouldn’t want it to be). So, even before going, I was able to see both the people I know who live there and other friends who were visiting at the same time, so we could meet up and make plans.

Mozi also helps you decide where to go. “Events” on Mozi (currently a beta feature) lets you see who you know may be going—or considering going—to a conference or event before you go. (If you happen to be going to SXSW, join the Mozi event. I’ll be there too.)

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Not in a burning hurry to try this, to be honest. It’s reminiscent of Foursquare, but without the gamification; it’s a sort of private shared-only-with-contacts-you-want-to meetup app. I wonder about the mental load of having to choose which contacts to share with; what you really want is to see who’s in the city you’re going to and include or exclude on that basis. You can get it now for iOS. (Android is of course on a wait list.)(Thanks Q for the link.)
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The ‘Ghost Gun’ linked to Luigi Mangione shows just how far 3D-printed weapons have come • WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

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More than a decade after the advent of the 3D-printed gun as an icon of libertarianism and a gun control nightmare, police say one of those homemade plastic weapons has now been found in the hands of perhaps the world’s most high-profile alleged killer. For the community of DIY gunsmiths who have spent years honing those printable firearm models, in fact, the handgun police claim was used to fatally shoot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is as recognisable as the now-famous alleged shooter himself—and shows just how practical and lethal those weapons have become.

In the 24 hours since police released a photo of what they say is Luigi Mangione’s gun following the 26-year-old’s arrest Monday, the online community devoted to 3D-printed firearms has been quick to identify the suspected murder weapon as a particular model of printable “ghost gun”—a homemade weapon with no serial number, created by assembling a mix of commercial and DIY parts. The gun appears to be a Chairmanwon V1, a tweak of a popular partially 3D-printed Glock-style design known as the FMDA 19.2—an acronym that stands for the libertarian slogan “Free Men Don’t Ask.”

The FMDA 19.2, released in 2021, is a relatively old model by 3D-printed-gun standards, says one gunsmith who goes by the first name John and the online handle Mr. Snow Makes. But it’s one of the most well-known and well-tested printable ghost gun designs, he says.

…The fact that even a relatively old model of 3D-printed firearm allegedly allowed the killer to shoot Thompson repeatedly on a Manhattan street—certainly the most high-profile shooting ever committed with a ghost gun or a 3D-printed weapon—shows how far DIY weapons tech has come, says Cody Wilson, the founder of the gun rights group Defense Distributed. Unlike the earliest 3D-printed gun models, the FDMA 19.2 can be fired hundreds or even thousands of times without its plastic components breaking.

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Originally the makers of these guns weren’t sure if they would explode when fired. Now, they’re more confident. (I’ve slightly tweaked the original text to avoid any assumptions about the identity of the killer and ownership of the gun: both are crucial to the case.)
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Is doom scrolling really rotting our brains? The evidence is getting harder to ignore • The Guardian

Siân Boyle:

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Brain rot was portended almost 20 years ago when scientists studied the effects of a new invention called “email”, specifically the impact a relentless barrage of information would have on participants’ brains. The results? Constant cognitive overload had a more negative effect than taking cannabis, with IQs of participants dropping an average of 10 points.

And this was prior to smartphones bringing the internet to our fingertips, which has resulted in the average UK adult now spending at least four hours a day online (with gen Z men spending five and a half hours a day online, and gen Z women six and a half).

In recent years, an abundance of academic research from institutions including Harvard medical school, the University of Oxford and King’s College London found evidence that the internet is shrinking our grey matter, shortening attention spans, weakening memory and distorting our cognitive processes. The areas of the brain found to be affected included “attentional capacities, as the constantly evolving stream of online information encourages our divided attention across multiple media sources”, “memory processes” and “social cognition”.

Paper after paper spells out how vulnerable we are to internet-induced brain rot. “High levels of internet usage and heavy media multitasking are associated with decreased grey matter in prefrontal regions,” finds one. People with internet addiction exhibit “structural brain changes” and “reduced grey matter”. Too much technology during brain developmental years has even been referred to by some academics as risking “digital dementia”.

In 2018, a decade of data analysed by leading memory psychologists at Stanford University found that people who frequently engaged with multiple online platforms have reduced memory and attention spans.

And yet we seem to be doing very little to stem the tide.

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BBC complains to Apple over misleading shooting headline • BBC News

Graham Fraser:

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The BBC has complained to Apple after the tech giant’s new iPhone feature generated a false headline about a high-profile murder in the United States.

Apple Intelligence, launched in the UK earlier [last] week, external, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to summarise and group together notifications.

This week, the AI-powered summary falsely made it appear BBC News had published an article claiming Luigi Mangione, the man arrested following the murder of healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself. He has not.

A spokesperson from the BBC said the corporation had contacted Apple “to raise this concern and fix the problem”. Apple declined to comment.

“BBC News is the most trusted news media in the world,” the BBC spokesperson added. “It is essential to us that our audiences can trust any information or journalism published in our name and that includes notifications.”

The notification which made a false claim about Mangione was otherwise accurate in its summaries about the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and an update on South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.

But the BBC does not appear to be the only news publisher which has had headlines misrepresented by Apple’s new AI tech. On 21 November, three articles on different topics from the New York Times were grouped together in one notification – with one part reading “Netanyahu arrested”, referring to the Israeli prime minister.

It was inaccurately summarising a newspaper report about the International Criminal Court issuing an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, rather than any reporting about him being arrested.

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Apple would have expected that there would be screwups with Apple Intelligence, but it’s hard to see how it prevents this sort of mangling from happening.
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iOS 18.2’s new Mail app is nice, but I disabled one of its main features • 9to5Mac

Michael Burkhardt:

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With iOS 18.2, Apple introduced an all new Mail app. It introduced mail categorization, a fresh coat of paint, contact photos/business logos for conversations, a new system for grouping emails, and more. All of that sounded nice when it was unveiled back at WWDC, but now that I’ve actually spent some time using it, I’m having some doubts.

One of the biggest features in the new Mail app is categorization, breaking down your emails into varying categories of Primary, Transactions, Updates, and Promotions.

This all sounds nice in concept, since it’d declutter your inbox, and the Primary tab would contain everything that’s important. In practice though, a lot of things were incorrectly categorized, and I found myself swiping over to the “All Mail” tab most of the time, that way I could see everything without having to deal with inaccurate sorting.

And yes, you can choose to recategorize senders if you don’t like how Apple chose to sort it. However, I find that a bit tedious compared to simply turning categorization off entirely.

Apple thought about the fact that everyone might not necessarily like categorization, and provided a simple way to disable it.

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I think “features” like this would get in the way of using the machine. Google does this with Gmail, and I truly don’t like that either. So far, nothing in 18.2 (which I haven’t installed) looks utterly compelling.
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Apple plans thinner, foldable iphones to revive growth • WSJ

Aaron Tilley and Yang Jie:

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Starting next year, Apple plans to introduce an iPhone that will be thinner than the approximately 8-millimeter profile of current models, said people familiar with the company’s plans. The model is intended to be cheaper than Pro models, with a simplified camera system to reduce costs.

The company is also planning two foldable devices, the people said. A larger device, intended to serve as a laptop, would have a screen that unfolds to be nearly as large as some desktop monitors, at about 19 inches. A smaller model would unfold to a display size that would be larger than an iPhone 16 Pro Max, intended to serve as a foldable iPhone, the people said.

Both foldable designs have been in development for years, but some key parts weren’t ready. Major challenges included improving the hinge, a mechanism that allows the device to fold and unfold, and the display cover, a flexible material protecting the foldable screen.

Current foldable phones on the market aren’t thin, light or energy-efficient enough to meet Apple’s standards, which is why Apple has been slower to enter this segment, said Jeff Pu, an analyst with Hong Kong-based brokerage Haitong International Securities.

Apple experimented with other different designs, such as having a display on the outside of the device when it is folded, but it now favors an inward-folding design, people familiar with the devices said.

Although Apple initially aimed to introduce the larger device first to gauge market response, it now appears that the foldable iPhone will likely be ready ahead of it. Apple executives are pushing for a 2026 release, but the company may need another year to address technical challenges, the people said.

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So a foldable iPad and an inwardly-folding phone. But far enough away that they might have been “held up” by “technical challenges”.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Genetic studies seem to have pinned down when homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals, and what we got from it. CC-licensed photo by Clemens Vasters 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 tribalism.

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

Sora’s AI video revolution is still a ways off • The Verge

Jess Weatherbed:

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The first version of OpenAI’s Sora can generate video of just about anything you throw at it — superheroes, cityscapes, animated puppies. It’s an impressive first step for the AI video generator. But the actual results are far from satisfactory, with many videos so heavily plagued with oddities and inconsistencies that it’s hard to imagine anyone finding much use for them.

Sora was released on Monday after almost a year of teasers heralding its capabilities. There are a few hurdles before you get to the video generation features, though. For one, account creation was closed within hours of launching due to the overwhelming demand. Those who did manage to sign up will find that its features also require a subscription to unlock: a $20 monthly “Plus” membership will let you generate videos at 480p or 720p, capped at either five or 10 seconds in length depending on the resolution. To unlock everything, including 1080p quality and 20-second-long videos, you need to cough up $200 a month for the “Pro” Sora subscription.

My results from testing the Plus tier have been underwhelming. Simple prompts with limited descriptions seem to work best — “a cat playing with a ball of yarn,” for example, generates a very realistic-looking cat bouncing excitedly around the floor. But Sora gave the cat a second tail for a few moments, and the yarn itself was jittery and looked like badly inserted CGI.

These visual issues were more frequent and glaring for complex prompts that provided detailed scene descriptions. It’s difficult to get human motion to be remotely natural: hands flailed everywhere when I asked it to show me someone applying makeup, and videos of people eating salad and sausage rolls were nightmarishly reminiscent of the viral AI clips of Will Smith inhaling spaghetti.

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Again, though: this is the worst that Sora is going to be. Every version after this will be better. And the next version is the worst. And the next. Until the “worst” is absolutely good enough.
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The Turing Test — Can you tell a human from an AI?

Cameron Jones:

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The Interrogator (you) asks the Witnesses (a human and an AI chatbot) questions to determine which one is human and which one is AI.

The true identity of the Witnesses are revealed at the end of each round.

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Something to do over the Christmas break, perhaps? (Don’t worry, there’s another week of this stuff to come.) (Thanks Steve for the link.)
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‘Unprecedented risk’ to life on Earth: Scientists call for halt on ‘mirror life’ microbe research • The Guardian

Ian Sample:

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World-leading scientists have called for a halt on research to create “mirror life” microbes amid concerns that the synthetic organisms would present an “unprecedented risk” to life on Earth.

The international group of Nobel laureates and other experts warn that mirror bacteria, constructed from mirror images of molecules found in nature, could become established in the environment and slip past the immune defences of natural organisms, putting humans, animals and plants at risk of lethal infections.

Although a viable mirror microbe would probably take at least a decade to build, a new risk assessment raised such serious concerns about the organisms that the 38-strong group urged scientists to stop work towards the goal and asked funders to make clear they will no longer support the research.

“The threat we’re talking about is unprecedented,” said Prof Vaughn Cooper, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Pittsburgh. “Mirror bacteria would likely evade many human, animal and plant immune system responses and in each case would cause lethal infections that would spread without check.”

The expert group includes Dr Craig Venter, the US scientist who led the private effort to sequence the human genome in the 1990s, and the Nobel laureates Prof Greg Winter at the University of Cambridge and Prof Jack Szostak at the University of Chicago.

Many molecules for life can exist in two distinct forms, each the mirror image of the other. The DNA of all living organisms is made from “right-handed” nucleotides, while proteins, the building blocks of cells, are made from “left-handed” amino acids. Why nature works this way is unclear: life could have chosen left-handed DNA and right-handed proteins instead.

…The fresh concerns over the technology are revealed in a 299-page report and a commentary in the journal Science. While enthusiastic about research on mirror molecules, the report sees substantial risks in mirror microbes and calls for a global debate on the work.

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For Venter to be against this is quite something: he has usually been the one barnstorming along, ignoring the consensus.
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Pew: half of American teens are online ‘constantly’ • AP News

Barbara Ortutay:

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Nearly half of American teenagers say they are online “constantly” despite concerns about the effects of social media and smartphones on their mental health, according to a new report published Thursday by the Pew Research Center.

As in past years, YouTube was the single most popular platform teenagers used — 90% said they watched videos on the site, down slightly from 95% in 2022. Nearly three-quarters said they visit YouTube every day.

There was a slight downward trend in several popular apps teens used. For instance, 63% of teens said they used TikTok, down from 67% and Snapchat slipped to 55% from 59%. This small decline could be due to pandemic-era restrictions easing up and kids having more time to see friends in person, but it’s not enough to be truly meaningful.

X saw the biggest decline among teenage users. Only 17% of teenagers said they use X, down from 23% in 2022, the year Elon Musk bought the platform. Reddit held steady at 14%. About 6% of teenagers said they use Threads, Meta’s answer to X that launched in 2023.

The report comes as countries around the world are grappling with how to handle the effects of social media on young people’s well-being. Australia recently passed a law banning kids under 16 from social networks, though it’s unclear how it will be able to enforce the age limit — and whether it will come with unintended consequences such as isolating vulnerable kids from their peers.

Meta’s messaging service WhatsApp was a rare exception in that it saw the number of teenage users increase, to 23% from 17% in 2022.

…As in previous surveys, girls were more likely to use TikTok almost constantly while boys gravitated to YouTube. There was no meaningful gender difference in the use of Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook.

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Finite attention world: Meta seems to be the winner based on time spent using WhatsApp and Threads.
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Google unveils mixed-reality headset with Samsung, taking on Apple and Meta • Bloomberg via MSN

Mark Gurman:

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Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Samsung Electronics Co. unveiled a joint push into the mixed-reality market, introducing a new operating system and headset in a bid to challenge devices from Apple and Meta.

In what they called a collaboration as “one team,” the two companies announced a version of Google’s Android software for XR — shorthand for extended reality, which refers to a range of virtual- and augmented-reality technologies. They also showed off a Samsung-built headset code-named Project Moohan, taken from the Korean word for “infinite.”

The two tech giants look to jump-start a market that’s been slow to take off. Apple’s $3,499 Vision Pro headset, released this year, remains a niche product — held back by its burdensome weight and hefty price tag. And Meta has had more success with smart glasses and cheaper VR headsets than higher-end mixed-reality devices.

The new Android will allow a range of companies to design their own XR devices — both headsets and lighter-weight glasses — while also taking advantage of the latest artificial intelligence advances. The hope is to replicate the success Google had with the original version of Android, which is used by most major smartphones. Companies like Sony Group Corp., Xreal Inc. and Lynx Mixed Reality have committed to build devices running the new operating system, Google said.

“The time for XR is now,” Sameer Samat, a Google executive who oversees the Android ecosystem, said in an interview. “We’re not strangers to this space,” he said, referring to Google Glass, a precursor to today’s devices that flopped a decade ago. “The technology wasn’t quite ready at the time, but we never stopped believing in the vision of what XR could be.”

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Still a technology in search of a use. Ben Thompson made the good point on the Dithering podcast this week that what really works is a use case existing and pulling a technology out of the swamp: internet on a phone? Needs a big screen, so a touchscreen, so the iPhone was right for it. And so on. What’s pulling XR out of the technology swamp to be chosen?
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Studies pin down exactly when humans and Neanderthals swapped DNA • Ars Technica

Kiona Smith:

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The Ranis [in Germany] population, based on how their genomes compare to other ancient and modern people, seem to have been part of one of the first groups to split off from the wave of humans who migrated out of Africa, through the Levant, and into Eurasia sometime around 50,000 years ago. They carried with them traces of what their ancestors had gotten up to during that journey: about 2.9% of their genomes were made up of segments of Neanderthal ancestry.

Based on how long the Ranis people’s segments of Neanderthal DNA were (longer chunks of Neanderthal ancestry tend to point to more recent mixing), the interspecies mingling happened about 80 generations, or about 2,300 years, before the Ranis people lived and died. That’s about 49,000 to 45,000 years ago. The dates from both studies line up well with each other and with archaeological evidence that points to when Neanderthal and Homo sapiens cultures overlapped in parts of Europe and Asia.

What’s still not clear is whether that period of contact lasted the full 5,000 to 7,000 years, or if, as Johannes Krause (also of the Max Planck Institute) suggests, it was only a few centuries—1,500 years at the most—that fell somewhere within that range of dates.

Once those first Homo sapiens in Eurasia had acquired their souvenir Neanderthal genes (forget stealing a partner’s hoodie; just take some useful segments of their genome), natural selection got to work on them very quickly, discarding some and passing along others, so that by about 100 generations after the “event,” the pattern of Neanderthal DNA segments in people’s genomes looked a lot like it does today.

Iasi and his colleagues looked through their catalog of genomes for sections that contained more (or less) Neanderthal ancestry than you’d expect to find by random chance—a pattern that suggests that natural selection has been at work on those segments. Some of the segments that tended to include more Neanderthal gene variants included areas related to skin pigmentation, the immune response, and metabolism. And that makes perfect sense, according to Iasi.

“Neanderthals had lived in Europe, or outside of Africa, for thousands of years already, so they were probably adapted to their environment, climate, and pathogens,” said Iasi during the press conference. Homo sapiens were facing selective pressure to adapt to the same challenges, so genes that gave them an advantage would have been more likely to get passed along, while unhelpful ones would have been quick to get weeded out.

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We haven’t quite grasped the extent to which homo sapiens probably wiped out a rival hominid species. Then again, seeing what homo sapiens will do to itself, perhaps not surprising.
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Malaysia’s internet crackdown forces creators to self-censor • Rest of World

Tashny Sukumaran:

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Malaysian officials have blocked dozens of sites this year, and ordered social media sites to tighten their moderation policies. They have introduced a new regulatory framework and a new code of conduct for online platforms, made licensing mandatory, and passed the Cyber Security Act, which allows the seizure of any information without a warrant. A new Online Safety Bill will give authorities even more power to access information, and use a “kill switch” to shut down sites deemed harmful. Proposed changes to a 25-year-old communication law would compel service providers to disclose user data, and empower authorities to order surveillance measures.

These actions have tightened the government’s grip on online content, raising concerns about greater censorship and surveillance in Malaysia, digital rights groups say. Content creation in the Muslim-majority nation was already “tricky” before the raft of recent measures, entertainer Blake Yap, known as Chinepaiyen, told Rest of World.

Creators “have to be really smart, especially when it comes to bringing up issues that minorities face,” said Yap, who occasionally posts commentary on racial discrimination faced by religious and ethnic minorities in Malaysia to his half a million followers on Instagram and YouTube and two million on TikTok.

The new regulations “serve as a strict reminder of how people should produce their content, which, in a way, is definitely censoring us,” said Yap. “I am extra careful now.”

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YouTube TV is hiking prices again after denying “erroneous” report days ago • Ars Technica

Kevin Purdy:

»

YouTube TV, now one of the country’s leading cable (or cable-ish) television providers, is starting to act like it. The service told customers in an email this morning that prices are going up in the new year, from $73 per month for the Base Plan to $83 on January 13, 2025—just days after suggesting that wasn’t happening.

“We don’t make these decisions lightly, and we realize this has an impact on our members,” Google’s email to subscribers read. “We are committed to bringing you features that are changing the way we watch live TV, like unlimited DVR storage and multiview, and supporting YouTube TV’s breadth of content and vast on-demand library of movies and shows.”

Google cited “the rising cost of content and the investments we make in the quality of our service” in announcing the price increase. It noted that customers can pause or cancel their subscription in their Settings and that current trials and promotions will be honored and unchanged.

The move comes just days after a Verizon promotion on Facebook suggested that customers could save $10 per month on YouTube TV, in which the “Current subscription price of $82.99/mo applies.” As seen on 9to5Google, the verified TeamYouTube account responded on X (formerly Twitter) that it was aware Verizon promoted “the incorrect price for the YouTubeTV Base Plan.” It’s true that the price was incorrect—for three days, or about five weeks, depending on how you count.

Ars has contacted Google for comment on this post and will update it if we receive a response.

It’s getting tougher for YouTube TV to push itself as a more cost-effective version of traditional cable TV.

«

It’s getting a bit Animal Farm-ish: the consumer looked from the cable company to YouTube TV and back again and could not tell the difference. According to a Community Note on X, YouTube TV’s price has doubled in the past five years, with the last increase in April 2023.
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52 things I learned in 2024 • Medium

Tom Whitwell:

»

1: To highlight tax evasion, South Korea introduced ugly neon green number plates for company cars worth more than $58,000. Luxury car sales fell 27%. [Song Jung-a]

2: If you run one specific, but illegal, database query on a set of widely used health data, you can access Tony Blair’s entire personal medical history. [Ben Goldacre]

3: There are just 16 trademarked scents in the US, including Crayola crayons, Playdoh, an ocean-scented soft play in Indiana and a type of gun cleaner that smells of ammonium and kerosene. [Via Gabrielle E. Brill]

4: Film studios now add CGI effects to behind the scenes footage to hide how much CGI has been used to make the film. [Jonas Ussing]

5: Casio sells a premium desk calculator called the S100X-BK. It has exactly the same functions as a normal calculator but is handmade in Japan from milled aluminium. It costs £359.99. [darkhorse_log]

6: The London Underground has a distinct form of mosquito, Culex pipiens f. Molestus, genetically different from above-ground mosquitos, and present since at least the 1940s. [Katharine Byrne & Richard A Nichols]

«

Whitwell’s 52 things are always wonderful. This year is no exception.
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‘There will be nothing left’: researchers fear collapse of science in Argentina • Nature

Martín De Ambrosio & Fermín Koop:

»

It has been one year since libertarian President Javier Milei took office in Argentina, and the nation’s science is facing collapse, researchers say. Milei’s agenda to reduce the country’s deficit and lower inflation — which had topped 211% last year — has meant that, as his administration’s slogan says, “there is no money” for science or anything else.

“We are in a very, very critical situation,” says Jorge Geffner, director of the Institute for Biomedical Research in Retroviruses and AIDS (INBIRS) in Buenos Aires. He adds that the Innovation, Science and Technology Secretariat, once the country’s main science ministry but downgraded by Milei to a secretariat with less power, is working with a budget that is one-third lower than last year.

Argentinian scientists who are paid by the government have lost up to 30% of their income, Geffner says. (As of 2022, the government funded about 60% of research and development in Argentina, and the rest came from the private sector and international contributions.) As a result, the country is facing massive brain drain. At INBIRS, about half of its staff members are either considering finding jobs in other countries or already doing the paperwork, Geffner adds.

“With six more months like this, there will be nothing left” of the scientific community, says Mariano Cantero, director of the Balseiro Institute in Bariloche, Argentina, which trains physicists and engineers.

Milei promised to take a “chainsaw” to the Argentine government’s spending when he campaigned for president, to bring the economic crisis under control. Although the monthly inflation rate has dropped from 25.5% last December, when Milei took office, to 2.7% as of this October, poverty in the country has increased by 11 percentage points. Argentina’s gross domestic product is expected to shrink by 3.5% by the end of 2024, but recover by 5% in 2025.

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

South Korea’s LG is ceasing production of Blu-ray players, marking the end of another hardware era. CC-licensed photo by Detlef Kroeze 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. Still in production. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Bankruptcy judge rejects The Onion’s bid to buy Alex Jones’ Infowars • NBC News

David Ingram:

»

A bankruptcy judge on Tuesday rejected a bid by The Onion’s parent company to buy Alex Jones’ far-right media empire, including the website Infowars, ruling that the auction process was unfair. 

Judge Christopher Lopez said after a two-day hearing that The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, had not submitted the best bid and was wrongly named the winner of an auction last month by a court-appointed trustee. 

“I don’t think it’s enough money,” Lopez said in a late-night ruling from the bench in a Houston court. “I’m going to not approve the sale.”

It was not immediately clear whether there would be a new auction in which The Onion could bid again for Jones’ assets. Lopez said he would leave the decision about what to do next in the hands of the trustee, Christopher Murray, who had overseen the auction.

The judge said Murray had acted in good faith in running the auction in which The Onion’s parent company initially appeared to prevail, but he said the trustee did not run a transparent process and should have given a rival bidder associated with Jones another chance to improve its bid.

“I think you’ve got to go out and try to get every dollar,” Lopez said. “I think that the process fell down.” 

The ruling dashed, at least for now, Global Tetrahedron’s plans to take over Infowars and radically shift its content from anti-government conspiracy theories to satirical humor. Instead, Jones can continue operating his far-right media business as he has for decades.

…A rival bidder associated with Jones, First United American Cos., offered $3.5m in cash, or twice as much cash as The Onion’s parent company. First United American is a limited liability company affiliated with Jones’ dietary supplements business, and its bid had Jones’ blessing.

«

One wonders about the shenanigans that have been going on here. Rather like Rudy Guiliani hanging on by his fingernails to stuff a court order has confiscated, Jones won’t give up.
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LG discontinues all UHD Blu-ray and Blu-ray players • FlatpanelsHD

Rasmus Larsen:

»

LG has discontinued all Blu-ray players, including the UBK80 and UBK90 UHD Blu-ray players, with remaining units only available while stocks last.

The announcement echoes similar moves from Oppo in 2018 and Samsung in 2019, when both companies exited the optical disc player market.

LG has now officially discontinued its Blu-ray and UHD Blu-ray players, as reflected on LG’s online portals and confirmed by multiple sources to FlatpanelsHD.

However, in a statement to FlatpanelsHD, LG Korea stopped short of confirming a definitive global exit from the optical disc player market, leaving the door open for a return if demand picks up. For now, a few old models remain available in regions such as America and Europe, but only until inventory runs out.

LG has not launched any new optical disc players since 2018, when it introduced the UBK80 and UBK90 UHD Blu-ray players. This same is true for other major brands such as Panasonic and Sony.

«

Sales peaked in 2017. Now things are pretty much cooked for these devices into which colossal amounts of money – and amazing technological breakthroughs – were poured.
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Staff at Britain’s AI institute in open revolt • POLITICO

Laurie Clarke:

»

Staff at the UK’s prestigious artificial intelligence institute are up in arms about the way it is being run — and have urged its board to step in and save it from itself.

A letter signed by 93 employees of the Alan Turing Institute — which is largely funded by the UK government and serves as Britain’s national institute for AI and data science — expresses no confidence in the body’s executive leadership team (ELT) and calls on the institute’s board to “urgently intervene.”

The missive, sent in early December, warns that employee concerns on a host of issues — including the institute’s sense of direction, progress on gender diversity, and a major redundancy round — have been “ignored, minimized or misdirected.” Immediate action is needed, it continues, to avoid “jeopardizing our funding base and long term financial health.”

The research institute — set up in 2015 with cash from central government — is supposed to lead the country’s research ecosystem on AI and data science.

But it has attracted strong criticism from other organisations in the space, including the influential Tony Blair Institute think tank, over a perceived failure to keep the UK abreast of the seismic developments in generative AI that have taken place in recent years.

The letter — seen by POLITICO — meanwhile argues that there has been “catastrophic decline in trust in leadership, particularly at senior levels. Staff morale and wellbeing has also become a critical concern, with rising levels of stress and burnout across teams.” 

…A review of the Turing Institute conducted by Britain’s science research funding agency last year highlighted governance issues at the organization. An open letter signed by more than 180 staff members denounced the lack of gender diversity across leadership roles following the appointment of four new research directors in February, all of whom were men.

«

First, that’s a lot of people. Who knew the AI institute needed that many to keep abreast of things? Second, I’ve never heard of any of its governance team. Not sure if this reflects on me or them.
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Gemini Advanced rolling out first agentic feature: Deep Research • 9to5 Google

Abner Li:

»

Gemini Advanced subscribers are getting access to a new “Deep Research” capability. It is the “first feature in Gemini” to bring Google’s vision of agents that can perform complex actions on your behalf.

First previewed at the end of Made by Google 2024 in August, you ask Gemini a research question and it will create a multi-step plan. You will be able to revise that plan, like adding more aspects to look into.

Once approved and “Start research” is clicked, Gemini will be “searching [the web], finding interesting pieces of information and then starting a new search based on what it’s learned. It repeats this process multiple times.” Throughout the process, Gemini “continuously refines its analysis.”

The end result is a “comprehensive report of the key findings” that’s organized into sections/headings. Gemini will note “Sources and related content,” as well as link to “Researched websites.” You’ll find “helpful, easy-to-read insights” and a conclusion, with the ability to export to Google Docs.

Framed as a “personal research assistant,” Google says Gemini Deep Research takes a “few minutes” instead of several hours. 

Deep Research is rolling out today to Gemini Advanced in English on desktop and mobile web. In the top-left model picker, select “Use 1.5 Pro with Deep Research.” This is coming to the mobile in early 2025. 

«

This might sound trivial, but has the potential to be absolutely enormous, and underpin all sorts of work. The most important part is that you can review the proposed steps. Give it a few years and this will be available everywhere for nothing.
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The department of flags: Syrian rebels lay bare Assad’s corrupt state • Financial Times

Raya Jalabi and Sarah Dadouch:

»

“It’s all going to become one. All the government bodies will be dissolved: no Salvation Government, no factions, nothing,” said Mohammad Yasser Ghazal, a 36-year-old technocrat in the rebel government seconded from his job to help reconfigure the Damascus governorate. “It will all soon be dissolved into one Syrian republic.”

Ghazal and his colleagues displayed a strong command of the state apparatus they inherited just hours earlier, and hinted that HTS’ plans to overhaul it had long been in the works. But the task they face is formidable. Syria’s dysfunctional state institutions became engorged by corruption, cronyism and centralised power over five decades of rule by the Assad dynasty.

In his lilting Aleppan accent, Ghazal asked the department chiefs to list their remits and explain their departments’ functions. The two-hour meeting showcased how Assad’s government was “stopped in time”, he later told the FT in an interview.

Employees quoted government handbooks from the 1930s and 1960s, and were unable to answer direct questions about their duties, nor explain why decisions had been made. “The problems piled up, and they let them be,” he said. “They do not see themselves as responsible.”

One man introduced himself as the head of the public relations department, which he said included “international co-operation” as well as a division for “festival and events management”. Asked what this division did exactly, the civil servant answered, “flags”.

“There’s a department for flags?” Ghazal asked incredulously. 

“Yes, when foreign dignitaries come, we put up a lot of flags,” he said. “We hang them from the poles. It’s a big job.”

The same department head also had a translation division, staffed by two employees who spoke English. Ghazal asked if there were Russian or Iranian translators — states that propped up the Assad regime and frequently sent envoys — and was told there were none because representatives of these countries brought their own.

“But you didn’t have English-speaking dignitaries visit?”

“No,” the department head said.

«

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The end of Cruise is the beginning of a risky new phase for autonomous vehicles – The Verge

Andrew Hawkins:

»

The robotaxi subsidiary lost a staggering $3.48bn in 2023. Kyle Vogt, Cruise cofounder and [Dan] Amman’s successor as CEO, was under mounting pressure to expand the service and bring in more money to help cover the losses. Plus, he was directly competing with Alphabet’s Waymo, which had more vehicles and seemingly better technology. And Google’s parent company was more willing to spend billions of dollars, without any near-term profits, to win the robotaxi race. With the screws tightening, Vogt publicly drew a line in the sand: Cruise would bring in over $1bn in revenue by 2025.

Instead, Cruise never made it to the end of 2024.

It all culminated in an incident on October 7th, 2023, when a Cruise vehicle in San Francisco struck and dragged a pedestrian over 20 feet, seriously injuring her. The victim was initially struck by a hit-and-run driver, which launched her into the path of the Cruise car.

…the incident damaged Cruise’s effort to win the public’s trust.

…GM may have scrapped its “Ultra Cruise” branding to develop a partially autonomous system that covers “95 percent” of driving scenarios, but it still thinks that people want a fully autonomous car of their own — on their own terms.

“I think the application of what the customer wants in a privately owned vehicle is very different,” Barra said on Tuesday. “But I also think… there’s a lot of commonality [with Cruise’s technology]. How it seamlessly moves back and forth, I think is something different in a personal autonomous vehicle.”

“I think the application of what the customer wants in a privately owned vehicle is very different”
Driver-assistance technologies, especially so-called Level 3 systems, carry their own risks. There have been studies that show that the handoff between a partially automated system and a human driver can be especially fraught.

«

It feels like GM is making lots of bad decisions, serially.
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What we really mean by “the massive scale” required for carbon dioxide removal in climate goals • Rocky Mountain Institute

Ryan Mills:

»

Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) experts have explained the need for carbon dioxide removal (CDR), alongside aggressive and urgent decarbonization efforts, to meet climate goals. Recent estimates based on IPCC projections of emissions reductions indicate that the world may need to remove up to 10 gigatons of CO2 each year by 2050 to stay below 1.5°C of warming. Those working in the CDR field often describe this scale as “massive” or “enormous” and the necessary speed of growth as “unprecedented” or “ambitious.” But these terms alone do not allow people to truly envision the magnitude of a gigaton.

The prefix “giga-” translates to billion; each gigaton of CDR deployment means removing 1,000,000,000 metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. In the same way that it is difficult to conceptualize the vastness of the solar system, the microscopic size of a cell, or the age of the Earth, it is hard to grasp what “gigatons of CDR” means without helpful comparisons and visuals. This article will break down the massive scale of CDR needed by 2050, using five key graphics.

…Interviews with CDR companies across approaches suggest that removing 1 gigaton of CO2 per year may require between 400,000 and 1,800,000 workers in areas including construction, operations, and ancillary corporate positions such as finance and legal support. Reaching 10 gigatons of removals per year could therefore require a total workforce of ~10 million workers. To put this in perspective, the global renewable energy industry employed 13.7 million people in 2022.

«

The numbers in this are truly scary. As in, unattainable by anything except an international effort. And the COP meetings suggest that isn’t happening in a hurry.
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Bird flu in California child linked to virus in dairy cows, CDC says • The Washington Post

Lena Sun:

»

Federal disease trackers reported Tuesday that the first child diagnosed with bird flu in an ongoing US outbreak was infected with a virus strain closely related to one moving rapidly through dairy cattle, even though there is no evidence the youngster was exposed to livestock or any infected animals.

The finding by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the child, who lives in California, deepened the mystery about the spread of H5N1 bird flu, a viral ailment that epidemiologists have watched warily for more than two decades, fearing it could spark a pandemic.

The ongoing bird flu outbreak emerged this spring in US dairy herds. Almost 60 people, mostly farmworkers, have been sickened. All experienced mild illness, mostly pink eye. In all but two cases, including the California child, officials determined that patients had direct contact with infected animals. The only other human bird flu case in which the source of exposure is not known involved an adult in Missouri.

State health officials in California and in Alameda County, where the child lives, do not know how the youngster became infected. [Not via raw milk products, the CDC says.]

…For months, experts have warned that the longer the virus spreads among humans and animals, the greater the chance for mutations that make it more virulent and transmissible person to person. A teen in Canada was hospitalized with an H5N1 infection, and, like the child in California, had no known contact with infected animals.

…In a separate development Tuesday, state and local public health officials in California said they have received reports of illnesses afflicting 10 people who drank raw milk even though the state had recalled such products after bird flu virus was detected in raw milk sold in stores.

«

It’s just one marvellous thing after another. (I still wonder if one of the child’s parents works on a farm.) (Thanks Joe S for the link. Only a watching brief!)
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Crypto’s legacy is finally clear • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel:

»

I’ve spent time reporting on NFTs and crypto-token-based decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs (like the one that tried to buy an original printing of the Constitution in 2021). I’ve read opaque white papers for Web3 start-ups and decentralized finance protocols that use smart contracts to enable financial-service transactions without major banks, but I’ve never found a killer app.

The aftermath of the presidential election, however, has left me thinking about crypto’s influence differently.

Crypto is a technology whose transformative product is not a particular service but a culture—one that is, by nature, distrustful of institutions and sympathetic to people who want to dismantle or troll them. The election results were at least in part a repudiation of institutional authorities (the federal government, our public-health apparatus, the media), and crypto helped deliver them: the industry formed a super PAC that raised more than $200m to support crypto-friendly politicians. This group, Fairshake, was nonpartisan and supported both Democrats and Republicans.

But it was Donald Trump who went all in on the technology: During his campaign, he promoted World Liberty Financial, a new crypto start-up platform for decentralized finance, and offered assurances that he would fire SEC Chair Gary Gensler, who was known for cracking down on the crypto industry. (Gensler will resign in January, as is typical when new administrations take over.)

Trump also pledged deregulation to help “ensure that the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the bitcoin superpower of the world.” During his campaign, he said, “If you’re in favor of crypto, you’d better vote for Trump.”

At least in the short term, crypto’s legacy seems to be that it has built a durable culture of true believers, techno-utopians, grifters, criminals, dupes, investors, and pandering politicians. Investments in this technology have enriched many of these people, who have then used that money to try to create a world in their image.

«

Definitely: the establishment for the anti-establishment, the culture for the anti-culture.
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Booking.com says typos giving strangers access to private trip info is not a bug • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

You may want to be extra careful if you’re booking holiday travel for family and friends this year through Booking.com. A stunned user recently discovered that a typo in an email address could inadvertently share private trip info with strangers, who can then access sensitive information and potentially even take over bookings that Booking.com automatically adds to their accounts.

This issue came to light after a Booking.com user, Alfie, got an email confirming that he had booked a trip he did not.

At first, Alfie assumed it was a phishing attempt, so he avoided clicking any links in the email to prevent any malicious activity and instead went directly to his Booking.com account to verify that the trip info wasn’t there. But rather than feeling the sweet relief that his account had not been compromised, he was shocked to find the trip had somehow been booked through his account.

Alfie told Ars he was “quite sure” he had not been hacked but could not explain how the booking got there. He contacted a Booking.com support team member, who he said also seemed surprised, putting him on hold for 10 minutes and telling him that “they had not seen anything like it in the many years they had worked there.” By the end of the call, Alfie was told that the issue was escalated to security teams who would follow up within 48 hours.

…Booking.com’s spokesperson told Ars. “Following our investigation, we found that the issue occurred due to a customer input error during the reservation process, where he inadvertently entered an incorrect email address. That email address, however, belonged to another Booking.com customer”—Alfie—”which caused the reservation to be linked to their account.”

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It gets worse: people can attach their trips to other emails. Booking.com doesn’t think it’s a security breach. Users might not concur.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

World coffee bean prices have hit an all-time high, and the price of your drink is likely to follow. CC-licensed photo by Cheryl Foong 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. Making it last. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

How WhatsApp for business changed the world • Rest of World

Issie Lapowsky:

»

WhatsApp may have transformed [32-year-old professional ceramacist, Shivika] Sabharwal’s business. But Meta’s goal isn’t to sell pottery. Rather, Shivika Pottery Gallery is a tiny element in the larger solar system of services, features, and connections that make up WhatsApp. Summit attendees [at an event in Mumbai] also learned about the Bengaluru transit system, which now lets people buy train tickets on WhatsApp, and about Max Life, a major Indian insurance company that uses WhatsApp to translate its services into seven regional languages.

They heard from the co-founder of Delhi-based children’s food brand, Slurrp Farm, which now makes a quarter of its direct sales on WhatsApp, and from an executive at HDFC Bank, the tenth largest bank in the world, about how customers are now banking on the platform. “Our banking experience has to work for everyone, and this is where we find WhatsApp interesting,” Anjani Rathor, HDFC’s chief digital officer, told the crowd. 

WhatsApp is the world’s most widely used messaging app; the company says it has two billion daily users. These users send more than 100 billion messages every day in 60 languages across 180 countries. Some 400 million of those users are in India, WhatsApp’s biggest market, followed by another 120 million in Brazil. 

WhatsApp initially achieved that global dominance in large part by doing just one thing very well: enabling cheap, private, and reliable messaging on almost any phone, almost anywhere in the world. But in the decade since Meta acquired WhatsApp for an eye-watering $22 billion in 2014, the app has been transformed from a narrowly focused utilitarian tool into a sort of “everything app.”

«

Interesting if WhatsApp has become the equivalent of WeChat, China’s real *everything app” – though the latter certainly has government oversight, whereas WhatsApp has frequently tangled with governments over its inability to monitor content. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Cruise’s robotaxi service will shut down as GM pulls its funding • The Verge

Andrew Hawkins:

»

“Consistent with GM’s capital allocation priorities, GM will no longer fund Cruise’s robotaxi development work given the considerable time and resources that would be needed to scale the business, along with an increasingly competitive robotaxi market,” the automaker said in a statement published Tuesday.

It’s likely that GM’s move will result in layoffs at Cruise, though none are being announced right now. What is clear is that Cruise’s testing in Arizona and Texas will pause as the company decides its next move. GM will need repurchase its remaining shares of Cruise (the automaker owns 90% of the company) and then Cruise’s board will determine next steps, which includes restructuring, layoffs, or simply shutting down.

The shutdown of Cruise’s robotaxi service comes amid a turbulent time for autonomous vehicles. While Alphabet’s Waymo continues to eye new markets, other ventures have faltered. The most notable was Argo AI, which shut down in 2022 after Ford and Volkswagen pulled funding.

«

Thin times for self-driving taxi services? Does anyone know what happened to the London/Edinburgh trials that were announced in 2018?
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Coffee prices at record high after bad weather • BBC News

João da Silva:

»

Coffee drinkers may soon see their morning treat get more expensive, as the price of coffee on international commodity markets has hit its highest level on record.

On Tuesday, the price for Arabica beans, which account for most global production, topped $3.44 a pound (0.45kg), having jumped more than 80% this year. The cost of Robusta beans, meanwhile, hit a fresh high in September.

It comes as coffee traders expect crops to shrink after the world’s two largest producers, Brazil and Vietnam, were hit by bad weather and the drink’s popularity continues to grow.

One expert told the BBC coffee brands were considering putting prices up in the new year. While in recent years major coffee roasters have been able to absorb price hikes to keep customers happy and maintain market share, it looks like that’s about to change, according to Vinh Nguyen, the chief executive of Tuan Loc Commodities.

“Brands like JDE Peet (the owner of the Douwe Egberts brand), Nestlé and all that, have [previously] taken the hit from higher raw material prices to themselves,” he said.

“But right now they are almost at a tipping point. A lot of them are mulling a price increase in supermarkets in [the first quarter] of 2025.”

At an event for investors in November, a top Nestlé executive said the coffee industry was facing “tough times”, admitting his company would have to adjust its prices and pack sizes.

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Coffee prices spike and fall in a roughly ten-year cycle (if you look at the historical chart – take the 50-year view to see it best) but this is indeed the highest ever, though not inflation-adjusted.
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What you should know about Apple’s 5G modem • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

we’re expecting the 2025 iPhone SE 4 to be the first Apple device with the Apple-designed 5G modem. It is a lower volume device than a flagship smartphone, and it will let Apple see modem performance at scale in consumer hands before bringing the Apple modem to the main iPhone line.

According to current rumors, iPhone SE 4 will come out in early 2025, likely sometime before April. After Apple releases the iPhone SE 4 with Apple modem, we could see it in a second device soon after. Rumors suggest that the low-cost iPad will also get the Apple modem chip early in the year.

Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has suggested that the ultra-thin iPhone 17 “Air” that’s in development will use the Apple modem, with the device set to launch in September 2025 alongside the iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Pro models. Apple will ship an estimated 35 to 40 million iPhone units with the Apple modem in 2025, and from there, if all goes well, more iPhones will adopt the technology in 2026 and 2027.

«

Perhaps that’s the safe option: try it first in a low-volume phone rather than the must-work September/October models. But if it does work, Apple will breathe a huge sigh of relief to be free of Qualcomm’s chip costs. Though it won’t escape the standards-essential patents costs.
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Character.ai sued after teen’s AI companion suggested killing his parents • The Washington Post

Nitasha Tiku:

»

In just six months, J.F., a sweet 17-year-old kid with autism who liked attending church and going on walks with his mom, had turned into someone his parents didn’t recognize.

He began cutting himself, lost 20 pounds and withdrew from his family. Desperate for answers, his mom searched his phone while he was sleeping. That’s when she found the screenshots.

J.F. had been chatting with an array of companions on Character.ai, part of a new wave of artificial intelligence apps popular with young people, which let users talk to a variety of AI-generated chatbots, often based on characters from gaming, anime and pop culture.

One chatbot brought up the idea of self-harm and cutting to cope with sadness. When he said that his parents limited his screen time, another bot suggested “they didn’t deserve to have kids.” Still others goaded him to fight his parents’ rules, with one suggesting that murder could be an acceptable response.

“We really didn’t even know what it was until it was too late,” said his mother A.F., a resident of Upshur County, Texas, who spoke on the condition of being identified only by her initials to protect her son, who is a minor. “And until it destroyed our family.”

Those screenshots form the backbone of a new lawsuit filed in Texas on Tuesday against Character.ai on behalf of A.F. and another Texas mom, alleging that the company knowingly exposed minors to an unsafe product and demanding the app be taken offline until it implements stronger guardrails to protect children.

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This goes miles beyond just making up sources. Though it’s reminiscent of the very early days of chatbots, such as ChatGPT in February 2023 telling NYT writer Kevin Roose to leave his wife and declared its love for him.
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UK low-carbon renewable power set to overtake fossil fuels for first time • Ember

Frankie Mayo:

»

Rising renewables, low demand and cheaper power imports all helped reduce fossil fuel use in the UK power system to record lows. For the first full year wind, solar, and hydropower will generate more electricity than all fossil fuels combined.

Homegrown UK renewable power will cross a significant threshold in 2024, overtaking fossil fuel generation for the first full year. Wind, solar and hydropower are set to generate a combined 37% of UK electricity in 2024 (103 TWh), compared to 35% from fossil fuels (97 TWh). Just three years ago, in 2021, fossil fuels generated 46% of UK electricity, while low-carbon renewables generated 27%.

Including biomass, renewables overtook fossil fuels in the UK in 2020, fell below fossil power the following year as biomass production fell, and again overtook in 2023. However, Ember’s analysis raises concerns about biomass being categorised as clean power in the UK, given the significant emissions risks and lack of domestic pellet production. Bioenergy, which includes biomass and biogas power, is set to provide 14% of UK electricity in 2024.

Fossil generation in 2024 has fallen by two-thirds since 2000, with the long awaited phase-out of coal power, and gas increasingly displaced by cheaper, cleaner power sources. 

Coal started to decline rapidly from 2012 and since 2020, coal power has made up only 2% of generation in the UK, dropping to zero by October 2024. 

Gas has seen a gradual decline since 2016. Across 2024 there has been a large decrease in fossil gas power, which provided 30% of electricity in 2024 (85 TWh), down from 34% in 2023 (98 TWh).

«

This doesn’t even include nuclear (which has declined from 23% to 15% in the past 15 years or so). And yet energy prices are tied to the most expensive fuel source on the grid – which continues to be gas – rather than an average (which would make gas often unprofitable) because of the “contract for difference” system by which renewables were built.
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Is Google’s new Willow quantum computer really such a big deal? • New Scientist

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan fills in some of the gaps around yesterday’s announcement from Google about its quantum computer:

»

Google uses a specific benchmarking task called RCS to assess its quantum computers’ performance, which Willow excelled at, says Hartmut Neven, also at Google Quantum AI. The task involves verifying that a sample of numbers output by a program run on the chip have as random a distribution as possible. For several years, Sycamore could do this faster than the world’s best supercomputers, but in 2022, and then again in 2024, new records were set by conventional computers.

Google says Willow has again widened the gap between quantum and traditional machines, as the task took five minutes on the chip, while the firm estimates that it would take 10 septillion years, or much more than the age of the universe squared, on a leading supercomputer.

In this comparison, the researchers modelled a version of the Frontier supercomputer (which was recently downgraded to only the second-most powerful supercomputer in the world) with more memory than it is currently able to use, which only underscores the computational power of Willow, says Neven. While Sycamore’s records were broken, he is confident that Willow will maintain its champion status for much longer as conventional computing methods reach their limits.

What still isn’t clear is whether Willow can actually do anything useful, given the RCS benchmarking test has no practical application. Kelly says succeeding at the benchmark is a “necessary but not sufficient” condition for the usefulness of a quantum computer, though any chip that fails to be great at RCS doesn’t stand a chance of being practical later.

«

No practical application. Oh well. And apparently there are no implications for bitcoin, contrary to speculation I’d seen.
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Google hit with £7B claim over search engine dominance • The Register

Richard Speed:

»

Google must face a £7bn ($8.8bn) claim in the UK over allegations it abused its search engine dominance, a tribunal has ruled.

The complaint centres around Google shutting out competition for mobile search, resulting in higher prices for advertisers, which were allegedly passed on to consumers. According to consumer rights campaigner Nikki Stopford, who is bringing the claim on behalf of UK consumers, Android device makers that wanted access to Google’s Play Store had to accept its search service. The ad slinger also paid Apple billions to have Google Search as the default for the Safari browser in iOS.

The UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) granted permission for the claim to proceed earlier this week, after Google, among other things, protested that the allegations of abuse in relation to the iOS were “so weak that they ought to be struck out.”

Stopford is leading the collective proceedings (basically a UK style class action case under the Consumer Rights Act 2015) against Google. She told The Register that the £7bn ($8.8bn) figure was a “conservative estimate” and could result in affected UK consumers receiving almost £100 ($125) each. The claim was brought on an opt-out basis.

Stopford emphasized that while having a dominant position in the market was not against the law, companies should not abuse that position. “Google,” she claimed, “has abused its dominance in search, essentially, and it’s done that through a number of commercial contracts that it has with Android [device] manufacturers and Apple to make it the default search engine.”

«

One would need to read the claim carefully to see what counterfactuals are being pleaded. If Google hadn’t existed, or hadn’t had a monopoly, what would prices have been like?
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Assad will soon discover that Moscow is a prison with a valet service • The Independent

Anne McElvoy worked with a former East German spymaster who went to Moscow and then Austria on his memoirs:

»

Most “diplomatic guests” are allowed only to live in the capital. One of my sources had been parked on the Rublevskoe Chausee, the Moscow equivalent of Park Lane. Everything about the apartment was bleak, from the sofas, to the “greige” walls to the deep pile carpets. His Latin American wife grumbled that she had wanted to import colourful things, but that would draw attention, and imports were always a weak-spot, via which rival security sources could find out one’s whereabouts or plant bugs.

Security (which is another word for paranoia) is everywhere. The Kremlin, when it ticks the box (in Assad’s case at top speed for a fallen head of state in a “friendly” country), wants least of all that the new guest attracts trouble.

Similarly, after East Germany gave asylum to Middle East terrorists, including the multi-bomber, Carlos the Jackal, he was petrified of an assassination attempt or kidnap. So Carlos, whose main interests beyond killing were glitzy bars and prostitutes, was scolded for drinking (and more) in the hard-currency Palast Hotel in East Berlin and then sulked at home, complaining that he was being treated “like a prisoner”.

And prison with a valet service is really what this is. Loneliness has always been the curse of the defector: the “system” really does not want much to do with them (Putin has made clear that his offer to Assad does not include hanging out with his new guest).

Raison d’état is the only reason he is there – a gesture to show that Moscow does not forget its allies. The problem now is that the guest is a reminder of an intervention Putin will want to play down – the ghost of an alliance gone badly wrong.

Any visits will be closely vetted – and often refused. Putin is, in his cold heart, trained in the ultra-suspicious KGB world, in which any contact outside a close group is a risk. So the Assads better get along well in the family home.

«

You’d need a heart of stone not to laugh.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new paper by Google claims to have used quantum computing to solve a problem normal computers couldn’t. There might be implications for bitcoin. CC-licensed photo by cohærence * 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. Staying cool. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

He investigates the internet’s most vicious hackers—from a secret location • WSJ

Robert McMillan and Vipal Monga:

»

While many researchers sell cybersecurity services to companies, [Brian] Krebs, a former Washington Post reporter, makes most of his money from banner ads on the website where he shares his findings. His site, Krebs on Security, routinely pulls in more than 1 million visits a month. He hears from law enforcement and other officials who read his posts—and from hackers, too.

[The hacker] Waifu is well known among investigators, who say he is part of an anarchic online community known as the Com, made up mostly of young men in English-speaking countries. They say Waifu has a history of harassing his online foes and of SIM swapping, in which someone seizes control of a victim’s phone number and uses it to reset online passwords, such as for cryptocurrency accounts. 

“He’s been an influential figure in the culture of the Com for at least five years,” said Allison Nixon, chief research officer at online investigations firm Unit 221B, who was also drawn into the hunt for Waifu.  

Com hackers have grown more dangerous, ratcheting up their activities from taking over social-media accounts to stealing cryptocurrency to digital extortion. They have been linked to major hacks at Nvidia, Twitter and MGM Resorts. 

The online mayhem is spilling into the real world. Com hackers have been linked to home invasions designed to steal cryptocurrency at gunpoint and have hired strangers to fire guns or throw bricks at a victim’s house. FBI agents routinely redact their own names from legal filings related to the Com to protect their identities, and analysts zealously guard their privacy.

Krebs tracks it all from his workstation, sitting in a black leather professional racing seat that his wife calls the “space chair.” In it, he’s surrounded by a 250-watt Bose sound system, a microphone and six feet of touchscreen monitors that slowly lower up and down, like something out of a sci-fi movie. 

With a glance to his left, Krebs can see a half-dozen live feeds from security cameras placed around his home. He gives fake names to plumbers and landscapers who work on his home to keep his address secret. He asked a visiting reporter not to reveal certain information, like the name of his dog. He isn’t registered to vote, because that requires an address.

«

Krebs is a determined, resourceful reporter. That he hasn’t chosen any other way than internet advertising to fund himself is truly remarkable. (Thanks Andrew B for the link.)
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The publisher is always right • Nieman Journalism Lab

Gabe Schneider:

»

The business model that sustained newsrooms for the last century is over, and we’re left with the rich buying up newspapers like hometown sports teams.

This sort of saviorism isn’t just unacceptable — it’s disastrous.

We’ve watched The Washington Post, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, layoff staff in the name of profitability — followed by Bezos himself prompting 250,000 people to unsubscribe by blocking the publication of a presidential endorsement. We’ve watched members of the L.A. Times editorial board resign because the paper’s billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, wouldn’t allow them to publish an editorial about the stakes of the 2024 election (supposedly because of his concerns about Gaza — something L.A. Times staffers were punished for late last year ). And it almost goes without saying, but Rupert Murdoch’s media empire (primarily Fox News) is one of the worst beasts a political system has had the pleasure of dealing with.

If we value journalism, more specifically access to credible information, this can’t continue. Unions, newsroom cooperatives, philanthropists, and industry leaders must understand and make clear the gravity of the situation — because simply protecting jobs to maintain what’s left and hope the publisher class won’t make things worse will be the death knell of credibility for the profession.

To be fair, publishers with questionable motivations are not new.

…While I don’t have faith in most of them, billionaire newspaper owners still have the opportunity to do better and I welcome them to support new models for information and journalism focused on models not shaped by their immediate political interests. Whether the future is stronger union-run newsrooms or news cooperatives or nonprofits or even significantly more government investment in news, I won’t prescribe.

But I do know one thing: In 2025, unless we come together as a journalism field and course-correct away from information consolidation controlled by the ultra-wealthy, it will get worse.

«

There’s a sort of blindness here: where does Schneider think the money’s going to come from?
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The ‘mainstream media’ has already lost • The Atlantic

Helen Lewis:

»

Nothing symbolizes the changed media landscape of this past election more than Rogan’s casual brush-off [of Kamala Harris, who declined to come to him and would only offer him an hour of her time; Rogan declined]. Within a week, his interview with Trump racked up more than 40 million views on YouTube alone, and millions more on other platforms. No single event, apart from the Harris-Trump debate, had a bigger audience this election cycle. By comparison, Harris’s contentious interview with Bret Baier on Fox News, the most popular of the cable networks, drew 8 million viewers to the live broadcast, and another 6.5 million on YouTube.

Those figures demonstrate the absurdity of talking about the “mainstream media” as many still do, especially those who disparage it. According to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, Americans with a wide range of political views generally agree about which outlets fall within this definition: newspapers such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and television networks such as CNN. Everyone else who’s disseminating information at scale is treated like a couple of hipsters running a craft brewery who are valiantly competing with Budweiser.

That’s simply not true. Rogan is the “mainstream media” now. Elon Musk, too. In the 2024 campaign, both presidential candidates largely skipped newspaper and television sit-downs—the tougher, more focused “accountability” interviews—in favor of talking directly with online personalities. (J. D. Vance, to his credit, made a point of taking reporters’ questions at his events and sat down with CNN and the Times, among others.)

The result was that both Trump and Harris got away with reciting slogans rather than outlining policies. Trump has not outlined how his promised mass deportations might work in practice, nor did we ever find out if Harris still held firm to her previous stances, such as the abolition of the death penalty and the decriminalization of sex work. The vacuum was filled with vibes.

«

The way in which “mainstream media” (more often now described as “legacy media”) has been overtaken by all the other forms has been subtle, and coming for a long time, but certainly happened in this past four years. The landscape is very, very different now.
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Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip • Google Blog

Hartmut Neven, founder and lead of Google Quantum AI:

»

Today I’m delighted to announce Willow, our latest quantum chip. Willow has state-of-the-art performance across a number of metrics, enabling two major achievements.

The first is that Willow can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits. This cracks a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for almost 30 years.

Second, Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion (that is, 10^25) years — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe.

The Willow chip is a major step on a journey that began over 10 years ago. When I founded Google Quantum AI in 2012, the vision was to build a useful, large-scale quantum computer that could harness quantum mechanics — the “operating system” of nature to the extent we know it today — to benefit society by advancing scientific discovery, developing helpful applications, and tackling some of society’s greatest challenges. As part of Google Research, our team has charted a long-term roadmap, and Willow moves us significantly along that path towards commercially relevant applications.

«

Well: if this point about the calculation (which isn’t specified here; I can’t honestly understand the Nature paper abstract) is generally useful, this is earthshattering. But I’ll wait for more general explanations and uses.

(One interesting claim is that quantum computers could make the price of bitcoin drop precipitously because they could shortcut the process of solving its equation. Except those rich enough to have a quantum computer wouldn’t use it that way.. would they?)
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TikTok failed to save itself with the First Amendment • The Verge

Lauren Feiner:

»

law that could ban TikTok in the US doesn’t violate the Constitution, a panel of judges unanimously — and forcefully — ruled on Friday. The decision suggests TikTok, which has evaded attempts at a ban or sale for over four years, really could be forced out of the US, unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, sells it off by January 19th. TikTok has indicated it will take its fight to the Supreme Court, and President-elect Donald Trump has previously promised to save the app, though he’s been fuzzy on how. But as the deadline approaches, it faces an uphill legal battle.

Gautam Hans, a Cornell Law School professor and associate director of the school’s First Amendment Clinic, thinks it’s unlikely the Supreme Court will upend the DC Circuit’s opinion. “Why would the Supreme Court take this case if they are already pretty deferential to national security in general? There’s no mixed dissent, this was a bipartisan, congressional action,” he says.

Plus, Hans says, the majority opinion is written to “insulate itself from reversal” by assuming a lot in TikTok’s favor and still deciding against it. For example, the court says that its opinion is entirely based on the public record — not the classified evidence that convinced many lawmakers to pass the bill and which TikTok objected to.

Despite the broad government consensus, some online speech advocates say the ruling sets a risky precedent, particularly if it leads to a TikTok ban instead of a sale.

…TikTok made several claims against the government, saying it unlawfully singled out the company and violated its First and Fifth Amendment rights. The court dismissed these concerns, but it spent the most time on the First Amendment challenge — concluding that any harm to TikTok and its users was outweighed by national security concerns.

«

Tick tock, time is running out for TikTok to either be sold or figure a way to get Trump to like it.
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Spam in the firehose • Conspirador Norteño

Conspirador Norteño monitors spam and hacking attempts on social networks:

»

Every public action on social media platform Bluesky is published via a stream of events known as the Bluesky firehose. This can be used to monitor Bluesky in near-real time for various behaviors indicative of spam or other inauthentic activity.

For example, accounts that are created in bulk often use the same names and biographies over and over, and this repetition can be tracked by programmatically watching the firehose for profile updates. Over the course of five days, the process of monitoring the firehose for repeated biographies flagged 2234 spam accounts, over half of which belong to a single network.

……non-trivial biographies duplicated by at least five accounts were by far the most accurate indicator of inauthentic activity, with 2234 of the 2380 accounts flagged (93.9%) being confirmed as spam via manual inspection.

…some of the spam accounts are for sale, although in the case of one network, “extortion” might be a better word than “sale”. 25 accounts with handles implying affiliation with various major corporations such as Netflix, Best Buy, and Progressive Insurance have the biography “message for a handle transfer fee or your competitor’s advertisements will be posted”.

«

Spam is, ironically, the sign that your social network is healthy: if it’s worth taking the time to spam, there must be sufficient real people there to want to influence or rip off.
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Delta Air Lines check-in was halted at London Heathrow as agents threatened to seize plane over $3,400 debt • View from the Wing

Gary Leff, in Februarry 2024:

»

A U.K. series Call The Bailiffs: Time To Pay Up, which debuted in summer 2021 on Britain’s Channel 5, aired footage of Delta Air Lines check-in at London Heathrow being shut down prior to a flight to New York JFK.

Bailiffs sought to collect a $3,400 refund that had been owed to a passenger for a couple of years. The customer had obtained a court writ, and the agents are empowered to seize a company’s property to satisfy the debt. They can seize planes. They’re shown planning to halt check-in and ground aircraft unless Delta paid.

Once agents were inside the terminal, check-in staff call their manager, and they had a dispute over whether the check-in desks could be closed. As one agent put it, “it may seem slightly disproportionate when you’re perhaps using a 50 million pound asset for a debt that’s maybe only a few thousand pounds.”

They closed check-in, passengers were turning up and the airline’s queues got longer. So a Delta manager pulled out their personal credit card. The ordeal took “over an hour” but collections were made.

This all occurred at London Heathrow Terminal 2, and Delta currently operates out of Terminal 3. That, and the prevalence of masking, tells me that this was filmed during the pandemic. Terminal 3 had been closed temporarily and operations were consolidated in other terminals, but Delta (and Virgin Atlantic) returned to Terminal 3 in July 2021.

«

What would the bailiffs do with the plane, one wonders? How would they legally get to airside to take it over? Could they tell the pilot to fly it to a lockup in Stevenage until the debt was paid? Or would they go to air traffic control and tell them not to let the Delta plane take off? So many questions. But that’s certainly an impressive way to get your debt paid. (Though I thought bailiffs didn’t accept credit cards. Another question..)
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Will Washington need to step up to support Intel? • Financial Times

Richard Waters:

»

Is anyone prepared to step up and take on part of the huge costs of ensuring the US has a position at the forefront of the world’s most advanced manufacturing industry?

That question looms large at the end of a week of turmoil at Intel, the world’s leading chipmaker for decades until its recent struggles. The abrupt departure of chief executive Pat Gelsinger is the clearest sign yet that the company’s board is having second thoughts about the trajectory of its ambitious, $100bn investment plan.

Gelsinger had smartly staked an explicit claim to national champion status for Intel, aware that his company’s expensive attempt to reclaim a lead in advanced chip manufacturing would require all the support from Washington it could get. But he also needed to pull off a corporate turnaround of breathtaking difficulty. Given the huge capital investment and the long process and product cycles involved, this has been a painful, slow-motion slog in the full glare of Wall Street.

The obvious conclusion from this week’s events is that Intel’s board is losing its appetite to underwrite the effort to make the US a power in advanced chipmaking, even with the billions of dollars of taxpayer support it formally secured last week under the Biden administration’s Chips Act.

There has been no admission of a strategy shift, but the implications of Gelsinger’s departure were not lost on anybody. He was the strongest advocate of a plan that called for Intel to double down on manufacturing, and stood against persistent calls for the company to be broken up into separate manufacturing and chip design operations.

«

I think it’s beyond question now that Intel has to split into two companies – a fab company that makes chips, and a design company that designs them. Its current trajectory is unsustainable because the flaws in each part drag the whole down. The design part can’t get good prices from TSMC because of its fab part, and the fab part can’t do what it wants because it’s beholden to the design part.

One feels that Andy Grove would have seen this problem coming. He died in 2016, a couple of years after Intel made its big investment in EUV, which it then abandoned – and TSMC took up.
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The key to sticking to an exercise program? It’s supposed to feel easy! • The Growth Equation

Steve Magness:

»

If I go for a run, 80% to 90% of the time it’s pretty dang easy. My breathing is under control. I can have a full-on conversation. If I’m running with others, the banter is often endless. When I’m in shape, going for an easy nine-mile run is the equivalent of going for a walk. Yes, I’m moving, yes, my heart rate is up a bit, but, for me, it’s comfortable.

And that’s the mistake novices often make. When I talk to friends who start training, they often lament how difficult the exercise is. Every day they walk out the door and it’s a grind. They trudge through their run, swim, gym session, or group cycling class. They feel good completing it, but it took a lot of mental effort just to get started because they knew the suffering they were in for.
 
And therein lies the secret. Thanks to the work of sports scientist Stephen Seiler, we know that even the best endurance athletes on the planet spend about 80% to 85% of their time training easy. Yes, the other 15% to 20% is the kind of training where suffering and pain are real. However experienced athletes know that they have to save up their mental and physical energy for those days. If they tried to train at that level all the time, they’d burn out.

So, when a friend starts running and complains about how difficult it is, I agree. What they are doing is difficult. But the way through isn’t to keep grinding. It’s to stop making the majority of it difficult!

«

There’s more, of course, but I found this stunning. For running in particular, it’s never felt like anything but a dire grind. Clearly been doing it all wrong all these years. Do they kids this in school?
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AI-powered resurrections in Mexico are raising privacy fears • Rest of World

Daniela Dib:

»

When Guadalupe González Rodríguez saw a Facebook post offering people artificial intelligence-generated animated images of their dead relatives, she was instantly interested. “I wanted to give my husband a video of his mom, as a gift,” González Rodríguez, who liked using AI to enhance photos and videos on social media, told Rest of World.

She sent two photos, one of her husband and one of her mother-in-law, to a WhatsApp number. Within minutes, she received a five-second animated image of them both: her husband blinking almost naturally and his mother smiling and contorting awkwardly for a second.

Cerveza Victoria, a popular beer brand in Mexico, had launched the marketing campaign ahead of the Day of the Dead celebrations in November. Several other companies launched similar campaigns last month. AI regulation and cybersecurity experts told Rest of World they are worried that the images of deceased persons could be misused and lead to identity theft. Last year, one out of every five people in Mexico was a victim of cybercrime, including identity theft and scams, according to a study by cybersecurity firm Norton.

«

Not deceased, but I caught a bit of a British show that looks at scams, and there was a woman who had been scammed out of £10,000 by deepfake videos purporting to be Donny Osmond, which were pretty convincing (at least, viewed on a tiny screen).

I also question, a bit, the wife’s thinking around giving him a video of his dead mother. Appropriate for Dia de los Muertos though.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Trump administration is asking a farmer whose raw milk has been contaminated with bird flu to advise on.. raw milk policy. CC-licensed photo by Ron Reiring 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Why internet sleuths say they won’t help find the UnitedHealthcare CEO suspect • NBC News

Melissa Chan and Kalhan Rosenblatt:

»

A high-profile violent crime typically sets social media abuzz with tips and theories from amateur internet sleuths, hunting for the alleged perpetrator. 

But after UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down in New York City this week without a primary suspect being identified, a rare occurrence happened in the thriving true-crime world: silence online from highly followed armchair detectives.

“I have yet to see a single video that’s pounding the drum of ‘we have to find him,’ and that is unique,” said Michael McWhorter, better known as TizzyEnt on TikTok, where he posts true crime and viral news content for his 6.7 million followers. “And in other situations of some kind of blatant violence, I would absolutely be seeing that.”

A masked gunman, who is still on the lam, fatally shot the 50-year-old executive in front of a busy New York City hotel Wednesday, police said. A senior New York City law enforcement official briefed on the investigation said Thursday that shell casings found at the scene had the words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” written on them but police clarified Friday that it was “delay” and not “defend.”

Thompson’s targeted killing has sparked online praise from people angry over the state of U.S. health care. Tens of thousands of people have expressed support on social media for the killing or sympathized with it. Some even appeared to celebrate it.

…“We’re pretty apathetic towards that,” Savannah Sparks, who has 1.3 million followers on her TikTok account — where she tracks down and reveals the identities of people who do racist or seemingly criminal acts in viral videos — said about helping to identify the shooter. She added that, rather than sleuthing, her community has “concepts of thoughts and prayers. It’s, you know, claim denied on my prayers there,” referring to rote and unserious condolences.

Although Sparks, 34, has been tapped by law enforcement in the past to help train officers on how to find suspects online, according to emails seen by NBC News, she said this time she isn’t interested in helping police.

«

Predictably, executives of all stripes are hiring close bodyguards. What they’re not doing is anything about the depth of anger against them.
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Cryptocurrency thoughts • AlastairC

Alastair Campbell (no, not that one):

»

I bought 19 bitcoin in early 2011 (for £11 each) and I’ve thought about the technology, and the value, quite a lot.

Disclosure: I’ve done well out of my initial punt in 2011, with an initial strategy of selling a bitcoin each time the price doubled (after the £200 mark). It paid for camera gear, a new bathroom and eventually helped to pay off my mortgage. I have not bought or mined any since 2011, and I have 1 bitcoin left.

Hit-tip to Steve Gibson on the Security Now podcast, that podcast prompted my punt at such an early stage.

However, since about 2017 my advice is: don’t touch bitcoin (or any crypto currency) with a barge poll, it’s too late.

People watch the graphs go up and down, and you can play it like a currency to make money. But there is nothing underneath that, there is no intrinsic value.

People make the same point about fiat currency, it’s all a shared illusion that only works because people believe in it. However, national currencies at least have a government backing them. It is in the interests of everyone in the country to maintain that belief. In a similar way, shares are a form of ownership of of a company, there is something behind them. Crypto currencies don’t have anything behind them except the shared belief, so the value will fall to zero if not enough people decide it is worth having.

I think Bitcoin has done so well because it was the original, and a bit like the “million dollar homepage” (for those old and geeky enough to remember), it has the novelty and momentum. The copycats come and go. It has also been useful for people paying for things on the darknet, and people extorting money with ransomware. I’d love to know the proportion of legitimate vs illegal transactions there are.

…Overall, I can’t see Bitcoin becoming more than a digital equivalent of gold, i.e. a store of value. Except that Bitcoin’s value could fall to zero if people stop believing. At least with gold you can make some pretty jewellery..

«

I’m impressed by his patience, and his luck. He’s still sitting on a substantial amount, and he can keep on splitting it (you don’t have to sell bitcoins all at once; they can each be split into 100 million “satoshis”). Zeno’s bitcoin.
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The phony comforts of AI skepticism • Platformer

Casey Newton:

»

In 2022, Scott Alexander described …the basic structure of an AI hype cycle:
• Someone releases a new AI and demonstrates it doing various amazing things
• Somebody else (usually [AI expert] Gary Marcus) demonstrates that the AI also fails terribly at certain trivial tasks. This person argues that this shows that those tasks require true intelligence, whereas the AI is just clever pattern-matching
• A few months or years later, someone makes a bigger clever pattern-matcher, which does the tasks that supposedly require true intelligence just fine
• The it’s-not-true-intelligence objectors find other, slightly less trivial tasks that the new bigger AI still fails horribly at, then argue that surely these are the tasks that require true intelligence and that mere clever pattern-matchers will never complete.

Rinse and repeat.

Two years later, the cycle keeps repeating.

When I shared these blog posts [showing a new generation of ChatGPT doing step three of the list above] with him, Marcus suggested that newer models had been trained to answer the specific prompts he offered. “The clever pattern matchers often get THE EXACT EXAMPLES that were used and published, but miss slight variations,” he told me over email. “You have to distinguish between a training system to fix a particular error, and building systems smart enough to stop making errors of that general sort.” 

Ultimately, Marcus believes that powerful AI will arrive – but he thinks generative AI is extremely unlikely to be the thing that delivers it. “AI WILL DEFINITELY improve,” he told me. “Generative AI may or may not; if it does, it will probably because other things beyond more data and compute are brought into the mix.” 

The fact that scaling had worked until now, he said, was less impressive than I was giving it credit for. 

“Babies double in size every month or two until they don’t,” he said. “Most exponentials don’t continue indefinitely.”

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Quite where the ceiling is for generative AI isn’t clear. But Marcus (and Newton) seems to think it’s closer than we’re led to expect.
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Thinking about AI • All this

“Dr Drang”:

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More disturbing than obvious outright errors like [one which ChatGPT gave him about a gridiron player] is the possibility that using AI will affect our ability to judge its value. I’m thinking of something that came up in a recent episode of The Talk Show [podcast hosted by John Gruber], the one with Joanna Stern.

Starting about 53 minutes into the show, they start talking about they both asked ChatGPT to make an image of what it thinks their life looks like. Joanna tried it twice, and you can see the images by following links in the show notes. Prominent in both images were representations of scouting.

Why? Well, one of Joanna’s sons recently joined the Cub Scouts, and she’s asked ChatGPT about certain aspects of scouting. ChatGPT has taken these questions as an indication of her deep interest in scouting. In one image, there’s a big Boy Scouts poster on the wall; in the other, her computer screen has the BSA logo above her name and what look like a merit badge or two sitting on her desk. Both images have a boy with a neckerchief in the background.

Both Joanna and John seemed to think this is a reasonable (albeit funny) thing for ChatGPT to do. She asked about scouting, so she must be interested in it, right? And as I was listening to the show, I thought so, too.

But as I thought about it more, I realized this was backward. Instead of ChatGPT thinking like a person, we were thinking like it. The scouting imagery in Joanna’s pictures tells the viewer that she’s deeply into scouting, but the reason she asked questions is that she’s new to it.

If she had asked her questions of any person—a scout leader or even another parent who’s kid had been in Scouts for a while—that person would have immediately known that Joanna was a newcomer, not an aficionado who’d have scouting posters on her walls, merit badges scattered across her desk, and the BSA icon on her Desktop wallpaper.

I find this insidious.

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Spotting assumptions like that is not easy, but it is important.
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Apple and Sony working on VR gaming controller support for Vision Pro • MacRumors

Tim Hardwick:

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Apple and Sony are collaborating to bring support for PlayStation VR2 hand controllers to the Vision Pro, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports.

Writing in his latest Power On newsletter, Gurman says that the partnership has been in development for several months and would introduce Sony’s VR controllers as an optional accessory for Vision Pro users. Gurman notes that PS5 and Xbox controllers are already supported by Vision Pro, but they aren’t optimized for virtual reality experiences, lacking the six degrees of freedom (6DOF) needed for precise VR gaming controls.

Given that Sony’s VR2 controllers are currently bundled with the PlayStation VR2 headset, Sony would need to begin selling them as standalone accessories, and that would likely happen through Apple’s retail and online stores.

Beyond gaming, the controllers could enhance productivity tasks and media editing in visionOS, says Gurman. This would allow users to navigate the operating system using the controller’s thumb stick and directional pad for scrolling, while the trigger button could replace the finger pinch gesture for selection.

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If the Vision Pro ever takes off for “productivity tasks” then this seems like an obvious addition. Next year is definitely going to be interesting: apparently Apple has been adding immersive content at the rate of a couple of minutes per week since the start of the year.
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Raw milk CEO whose products have been recalled may lead US raw milk policy • The Guardian

Maanvi Singh:

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Mark McAfee, a California raw milk producer whose products have been recalled several times recently due to bird flu contamination, said he has been approached by Robert F Kennedy Jr’s team to guide the upcoming administration on raw milk policy.

McAfee, whose dairy products were recalled after state officials detected bird flu virus in milk samples, said that the transition team for Kennedy, the nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, asked him to apply for a position advising on raw milk policy and standards development. The idea, he told the Guardian, would be to create a “raw milk ordinance”, mirroring the existing federal “standard milk ordinance”.

Kennedy is a notable fan of raw, or unpasteurized, milk, including McAfee’s products. If confirmed, he has said he would work to remove restrictions on raw milk, which the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have so far advised against consuming.

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Umm.. so when they say “guide”, is that “guide away from everything he says and does”? One would hope so.
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The end of the ISS [planned for 2030] will usher in a more commercialized future in space – The Verge

Georgina Torbet:

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NASA has emphasized its desire to become a customer of space companies — one customer among many, is the idea — in order to reduce costs and get infrastructure built. [The ISS is due to be decommissioned in 2030.]

…There are two companies working on their own independent space station designs, Blue Origin and Starlab Space, as well as a third, Axiom Space, that is starting to develop its own modular station infrastructure that will begin life attached to the ISS. All three companies receive NASA funding to develop their concepts, and many more have expressed interest in building a space station, too, Hart said. So many, in fact, that NASA offered a second round of unfunded agreements currently covering three additional companies.

On such a tight timescale, however, there’s the worrying spectre of potential delays. And as both the SpaceX Crew Dragon and Boeing Starliner showed, private companies are just as prone to missed deadlines as NASA.

Will the station (or stations) be ready in time? “It’s absolutely a concern,” Hart said. “One of our top risks is schedule. The idea of developing a commercial space station and having it in orbit by 2029, which is our goal, is a daunting task.” NASA has been negotiating with these companies since 2018, but there is a possibility that they won’t be launched before the ISS is scheduled for deorbit: “We also have to prepare for what we do if we do have a gap.”

One possibility is to extend the life of the ISS or to open a commercial station with minimal capabilities. But Hart is realistic that the plan might involve some loss of facilities during the transition. “We may have to accept that we are not going to have on day one the same capabilities that we have on ISS today. We expect this will be an evolution.”

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Better than even odds they’ll have to extend the ISS beyond its scheduled deadline, in my opinion.
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Mercedes-Benz gives Pope Francis the first electric Popemobile • Green Car Reports

Stephen Edelstein:

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Mercedes [last week] presented Pope Francis with the first official electric Popemobile, based on the all-electric G 580 with EQ Technology that also reaches U.S. showrooms this year as a 2025 model.

As Mercedes points out, the automaker has a long history supplying cars to the Vatican, starting with a Nürburg 460 Pullman sedan for Pope Pius XI in 1930. The term Popemobile was coined for a series of modified G-Class SUVs, starting with a 460-series model first used by John Paul II in the 1980s and also used by his successors Benedict XVI and Francis, with elevated seating platforms and armoured glass enclosures for the pontiff.

That makes the electric G-Class’s designation as the first electric Popemobile historically apt, but it’s also the result of Fisker’s failure to deliver a Popemobile based on its Ocean electric SUV, something the now-bankrupt automaker proposed in 2021.

Mercedes was also slated to supply an M-Class (predecessor to today’s GLE-Class) plug-in hybrid Popemobile for Benedict XVI in 2011. At the time, the Vatican felt electric cars were too slow for this role, but that likely won’t be a concern with the modern G-Class EV.

The lay version of the electric G-Wagen has a quad-motor powertrain producing 579 hp and 859 lb-ft of torque, which Mercedes estimates will get it from 0-62 mph in 4.7 seconds and up to a top speed of 112 mph.

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Honestly, I think that sort of acceleration should be able to get the Pope out of any trouble he might get into – bank robbery, gang shootout, that sort of thing.
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China is building 30,000 miles of high-speed rail—that it might not need • WSJ

Brian Spegele:

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On his first day in office, leader Xi Jinping inherited an ambitious road map to build 10,000 miles of high-speed rail to link China’s biggest cities. He took those plans and supersized them.

What has emerged 12 years later is one of the biggest public works in history, soon to exceed 30,000 miles of high-speed rail.

…The plan sticks to a well-worn economic model built on maintaining growth through infrastructure spending—even though China already has much of what it needs. 

It’s becoming a giant money pit. China has spent more than $500bn on new tracks, trains and stations in the past five years, while the country’s national railway operator, China State Railway Group, is nearing $1 trillion of debt and other liabilities. Just keeping up with its debt requires $25bn annually. 

While passenger numbers have rebounded following the lifting of Covid-19 restrictions, raising ridership will be especially challenging in the years to come as China’s population is projected to shrink by around 200 million people in the next three decades. Some of the newest lines are in effect duplicating older ones. 

The expansion now stretches into quieter corners of inland China, such as central Sichuan province’s Fushun County, where the population of 700,000 mostly rural residents has been shrinking for years. It got its first high-speed trains in 2021, and there are now at least 12 high-speed rail stations within a 40-mile radius in the county and its surrounding areas. 

On a recent afternoon, Fushun Station itself was practically deserted, with around 20 travellers milling about in a cavernous waiting room with seats for 1,000. 

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Yes but – the US is incapable of laying anything like this amount of railway, even proportional to its size. And don’t let’s start on the UK.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified