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.
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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:
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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.
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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):
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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..
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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:
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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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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 