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.
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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]
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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:
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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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| • 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 