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.

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There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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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.

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How WhatsApp for business changed the world • Rest of World

Issie Lapowsky:

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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.”

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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:

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“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.

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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:

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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:

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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.

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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:

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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:

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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).

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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:

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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.

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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:

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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.”

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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:

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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.

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