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.

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

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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:

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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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• 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: 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.