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.

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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. Inaudible. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

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Casual Viewing • n+1 Magazine

Will Tavlin:

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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:

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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.

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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:

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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:

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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:

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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.

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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:

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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?

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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:

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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:

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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:

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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.

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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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• 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