The Pebble smartwatch may be about to make a comeback under its original creator, Eric Migicovsky. CC-licensed photo by Orde Saunders on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

No Substack post this week. (Apologies for any dashed expectations.)

A selection of 9 links for you. Watching closely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Asteroid 2024 YR4 could strike Earth, researchers say, but the odds are small • The New York Times

Robin George Andrews:

»

You may hear about a large asteroid headed toward Earth. Don’t panic.

Just after Christmas Day, astronomers spotted something zipping away from Earth: a rock somewhere between 130 feet and 330 feet long that they named 2024 YR4. Over the next few weeks, they simulated its possible future orbits. They now say, based on the most up-to-date information, that there is a 1.3% chance that this asteroid will strike somewhere on Earth on Dec. 22, 2032.

Should this keep you up at night?

“No, absolutely not,” said David Rankin, a comet and asteroid spotter at the University of Arizona.

The object’s current odds of striking Earth may sound scary — and it’s fair to say that an asteroid in this size range has the potential to cause harm. Should it strike a city, the damage would not cause anything close to a mass extinction, but the damage to the city itself would be catastrophic.

But a 1.3% chance of a hit is also a 98.7% chance of a miss. “It’s not a number you want to ignore, but it’s not a number you need to lose sleep over,” Mr. Rankin said.
And the odds may diminish over time, as astronomers gather new data about the object.

For now, experts say, calm is warranted. The asteroid has been spotted several years ahead of its close shave with Earth — and that’s a good thing.

«

Honestly, asteroids really need to make their minds up. Are they lifebringers (Bennu, yesterday) or civilisation destroyers (this one)?

Hoping we aren’t in Don’t Look Up territory.
unique link to this extract

Meta agrees to pay $25m to settle lawsuit from Trump after Jan. 6 suspension • AP News

Zeke Miller and Aamer Madhani:

»

Meta has agreed to pay $25m to settle a lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump against the company after it suspended his accounts following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, according to three people familiar with the matter.

It’s the latest instance of a large corporation settling litigation with the president, who has threatened retribution on his critics and rivals, and comes as Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, have joined other large technology companies in trying to ingratiate themselves with the new Trump administration.

The people familiar with the matter spoke on the condition of anonymity Wednesday to discuss the agreement. Two of the people said terms of the agreement include $22m going to the nonprofit that will become Trump’s future presidential library. The balance will go to legal fees and other litigants, they said.

The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the settlement.

Zuckerberg visited Trump in November at his private Florida club to try to mend fences with the incoming president, something other technology, business and government officials have done as well. At the dinner, Trump brought up the litigation and suggested they try to resolve it, kick-starting two months of negotiations between the parties, the people said.

…Trump filed the lawsuit months after his first term ended, calling the action by the social media companies “illegal, shameful censorship of the American people.”

Twitter, Facebook and Google are all private companies, and users must agree to their terms of service to use their products. Under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, social media platforms are allowed to moderate their services by removing posts that, for instance, are obscene or violate the services’ own standards, so long as they are acting in “good faith.” The law also generally exempts internet companies from liability for the material that users post.

«

Trump’s “presidential library”? That’s going to be quite the telephone box. Clearly, Trump said “pay” and Zuckerberg said “how much?”
unique link to this extract

Books written by humans are getting their own certification • The Verge

Jess Weatherbed:

»

The Authors Guild — one of the largest associations of writers in the US — has launched a new project that allows authors to certify that their book was written by a human, and not generated by artificial intelligence.

The Guild says its “Human Authored” certification aims to make it easier for writers to “distinguish their work in increasingly AI-saturated markets,” and that readers have a right to know who (or what) created the books they read. Human Authored certifications will be listed in a public database that anyone can access. The project was first announced back in October in response to a deluge of AI-generated books flooding online marketplaces like Amazon and its Kindle ebook platform.

Certification is currently restricted to Authors Guild members and books penned by a single writer, but will expand “in the future” to include books by non-Guild members and multiple authors. Books and other works must be almost entirely written by humans to qualify for a Human Authored mark, with minor exceptions to accommodate things like AI-powered grammar and spell-check applications.

…CEO Mary Rasenberger said in a statement on Wednesday: “Authors can still qualify if they use AI as a tool for spell-checking or research, but the certification connotes that the literary expression itself, with the unique human voice that every author brings to their writing, emanated from the human intellect.”

«

OK, and how is this going to be enforced? (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
unique link to this extract

Why we’re bringing Pebble back • Eric Migicovsky

Migicovsky was behind Pebble, the most successful crowdsourced hardware product ever back in 2012:

»

You’d imagine that smartwatches have evolved considerably since 2012. I’ve tried every single smart watch out there, but none do it for me. No one makes a smartwatch with the core set of features I want:

• Always-on e-paper screen (it’s reflective rather than emissive. Sunlight readable. Glanceable. Not distracting to others like a bright wrist)
•
Long battery life (one less thing to charge. It’s annoying to need extra cables when traveling)
•
Simple and beautiful user experience around a core set of features I use regularly (telling time, notifications, music control, alarms, weather, calendar, sleep/step tracking)
•
Buttons! (to play/pause/skip music on my phone without looking at the screen)
•
Hackable (apparently you can’t even write your own watchfaces for Apple Watch? That is wild. There were >16k watchfaces on the Pebble appstore!)

Over the years, we’ve thought about making a new smartwatch. Manufacturing hardware for a product like Pebble is infinitely easier now than 10 years ago. There are plenty of capable factories and Bluetooth chips are cheaper, more powerful and energy efficient.

The challenge has always been, at its heart, software. It’s the beautifully designed, fun, quirky operating system (OS) that makes Pebble a Pebble.

PebbleOS took dozens of engineers working over four years to build, alongside our fantastic product and QA teams. Reproducing that for new hardware would take a long time.

Instead, we took a more direct route – I asked friends at Google (which bought Fitbit, which had bought Pebble’s IP) if they could open source PebbleOS. They said yes!

«

Pebble crashed in 2016 and was sold to Fitbit, which then sold itself to Google, which is how Google wound up with the Pebble software.

Migicovsky is going to get the band together again. (Well, a new band, but playing many of the old songs.) This is going to be interesting: he’s a very capable entrepreneur who looks for gaps (he ran the “we can do iMessage on Android” startup Beeper, since sold) and exploits them.

This could be interesting. Meanwhile, over at the hardware division of Google…
unique link to this extract

Google announces ‘voluntary exit program’ for Pixel, Android team • 9to5 Google

Abner Li:

»

Last year, the teams responsible for Pixel hardware and Android software were merged into one division, and Google today announced a “voluntary exit program” for employees working in the Platforms & Devices group.

SVP Rick Osterloh sent out a memo to employees Thursday morning about the “voluntary exit program,” and the company confirmed to 9to5Google that this is happening.

This program applies to US employees working on Platforms & Devices, which includes Android (Auto, TV, Wear OS, XR), Chrome, ChromeOS, Google Photos, Google One, Pixel, Fitbit, and Nest. Google has many people around the world working on these products, but today’s announcement is just for those stateside.

Meanwhile, this is not a company-wide offer that applies to Search, AI, or other groups, though Alphabet’s new CFO last October said “driving further efficiencies” was a key priority.

Separately, software and hardware were already two very large organizations, with some overlap. Now that things have settled in recent months, employees have a better idea of their roles. Osterloh said the division received questions about the possibility of voluntary exits since the Pixel-Android merger. Not offering people the option to leave in advance was a complaint about how Google handled past layoffs.

The memo frames this exit program as being beneficial for those who might not be aligned or passionate about the combined organization’s mission or are having difficulty with their roles, and hybrid working requirements.

«

Very obvious where Google’s priorities now lie. The Pixel was never going to set the (sales) world on fire; and Android is no longer required to make giant leaps, unlike a decade or so ago.
unique link to this extract

Deep impact • Where’s Your Ed At

Ed Zitron, in his standard prolix style:

»

The current models developed by both the hyperscalers (Gemini, Llama, et. al) and multi-billion-dollar “startups” like OpenAI and Anthropic are horribly inefficient. I had just made the mistake of assuming that they’d actually tried to make them more efficient.

What we’re witnessing is the American tech industry’s greatest act of hubris — a monument to the barely-conscious stewards of so-called “innovation,” incapable of breaking the kayfabe of “competition” where everybody makes the same products, charges about the same amount, and mostly “innovates” in the same direction. 

Somehow nobody — not Google, not Microsoft, not OpenAI, not Meta, not Amazon, not Oracle — thought to try, or was capable of creating something like DeepSeek, which doesn’t mean that DeepSeek’s team is particularly remarkable, or found anything new, but that for all the talent, trillions of dollars of market capitalization and supposed expertise in America’s tech oligarchs, not one bright spark thought to try the things that DeepSeek tried, which appear to be “what if we didn’t use as much memory and what if we tried synthetic data.”

And because the cost of model development and inference was so astronomical, they never assumed that anyone would try to usurp their position. This is especially bad, considering that China’s focus on AI as a strategic part of its industrial priority was no secret — even if the ways it supported domestic companies was. In the same way that the automotive industry was blindsided by China’s EV manufacturers, the same is now happening to AI. 

«

DeepSeek, for those who didn’t know, was a side project from a hedge fund. The Zitron piece is not short; I often think he’d benefit from a brutal editor or a word limit.
unique link to this extract

The unflattening of music • Midia Research

Mark Mulligan:

»

by pulling consumption, creation, and monetisation closer together than ever before, streaming has transformed the tense but often distant relationship between business and culture into one that now resembles a single entity. People make, and are encouraged to make, music that feeds the machine. This has resulted in what is often referred to as the flattening of music, which is most visible in the rise of ‘functional music’ and of the song over the artist. It is a process that can feel both inevitable and unstoppable.

…[But] we are already seeing more artists going non-DSP [digital streaming platform] (e.g,. Ricky Tinexz, SEIDS, Mary Spender), triggering the start of the bifurcation of the music business, with an emerging generation of creators bypassing streaming entirely. Meaning that the foundations of tomorrow’s music culture are being laid elsewhere. It may only be a trickle for now, but already, one of the most critically acclaimed albums of 2024, Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee, was pointedly not released onto streaming. How long before the trickle of streaming exiles becomes a flood?

What makes the non-DSP world so important for the unflattening of music is not the absence of algorithm (because there are plenty of those there too) but: a) the diversity of models (bandcamp, TikTok, SoundCloud) and b) being different and distinct is a feature not a bug.

…Yesterday’s artists’ influences stemmed from inherently limited sources (their parents’ and friends’ record collections, their local record store, etc.). Today’s can listen to virtually every song ever written. The history of music is a steady evolution, with each generation of genres imitating and innovating the previous one. Now, creators can pull from over a hundred years’ worth of popular music, thousands of genres and millions of artists to create their own, unique take on just what music is.

Streaming may have made itself the (flattened) establishment –but the thing about the establishment is that culture almost always rebels against it.

«

I was in my local (vinyl) record shop the other day: the owner told me the Big New Thing now is releasing songs on cassette.
unique link to this extract

London to New York in 3.5 hours: how Boom Supersonic is learning from Concorde’s mistakes • Euronews via MSN

Joanna Bailey:

»

The company has developed its own engine solution that it says will reduce fuel consumption. These engines are designed to run on 100% sustainable aviation fuel which, although not available at scale yet, would further reduce its environmental impact.

Overture hasn’t quite managed to eliminate the sonic boom effect, but thanks to more optimised aerodynamics, the impact will be reduced significantly. The company promises that Overture will be able to fly over land at Mach 0.94, about 20% faster than subsonic aircraft, without breaking the sound barrier.

For now, the supersonic aircraft would be restricted to breaking the sound barrier over water. Boom says there are more than 600 transoceanic routes on which Overture could provide a supersonic solution without changing current regulations relating to sonic booms.

“Overture was created to achieve optimal performance while meeting our stringent safety and sustainability requirements,” says Boom Supersonic. “We are leveraging more than fifty years of advancements in aerodynamics, materials, and propulsion to build economically and environmentally viable supersonic aeroplanes”.

But what of the market demand? By the end of Concorde’s lifespan, British Airways said it was selling only around half of its available tickets. Air France, still suffering from the tragic crash in 2000, was selling less, only around 35%.

Concorde’s ticket prices were up there in the ultra-luxury category. In contrast, Boom is targeting business travellers, and pricing seats accordingly. Early estimates suggest a round trip Europe to USA ticket for around $5,000 (€4,800), in the ballpark of what passengers pay for business class seats on regular jets today.

“Today, there’s both the market demand and the technology to enable mainstream supersonic travel,” the company says. “Business and leisure travel has continued to grow, and travellers are willing to pay for speed.”

«

I flew on Concorde once (at Oracle’s expense: a circular trip just to experience it). It was cramped and low-ceilinged. Boom seems to have learnt from that. And the demand for flights – especially across the Pacific from the US west coast – is probably going to be there, if it has sufficient range. Never say never: some ideas just need to happen at the right time.

Then again, I wrote about the Concorde crash in 2000. It only takes one accident like that to kill a class of travel.
unique link to this extract

An illustrator’s review of the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil • Fantastic Maps

Jonathan Roberts, back in 2015:

»

I would have settled for the iPad Pro being a really nice sketching tool – but what I’ve discovered is that the iPad Pro, the Pencil, and Procreate, get me 95% to a final illustration, and quicker than I would get there on my desktop.

In many respects, this is better than working in Photoshop on my Mac. I never expected to say that. The last 5% is due to the pieces that Procreate doesn’t do, that Photoshop does – text, labels, some of the more advanced features. So that’s software, not hardware – and I expect the app store will get a lot more firepower very quickly once developers really get to grips with the Pro.

This is a serious piece of kit that will find a central place in an illustrators workflow – but it will not replace a desktop.

The iPad Pro is big, but treads lightly. It’s not bulky, and when drawing I can easily rest it on my lap and hold it up with one hand, whilst drawing with the other. I’ve used this for drawing solidly for 2+ hours in coach, and didn’t have any tiredness, or muscle pain. I couldn’t even say that about the iPad 2 which somehow felt more cumbersome than this.

The screen is beautiful, crisp, and bright. The thickness of the glass is basically unnoticeable. This is a lovely refinement for general use, but it’s key for illustration. If the glass has a visible offset from the screen, then your drawing precision changes with your viewing angle. Not here, the pen tip looks like it’s right on your illustration.

It does take a while to charge – no great surprise given that a lot of the extra size is given to a larger battery. Many reviews say that this can last for days. I don’t agree. Using Procreate and the Pencil (which uses Bluetooth, and increases screen sampling rates) the battery dropped to 20% over the course of the day. If you’re using this heavily, you’ll be charging this every night – but that workflow is fine for me. The one hardware niggle I found was that when I leave it plugged in overnight it sometimes requires a hard restart to wake up. That’s surprising, but may just be my one.

«

Earlier this week I posted a link about the iPad’s tenth anniversary and wondered who it was really good for. Via Matt L, here’s the answer: illustration, which is was already good for ten years ago.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Stones from the Bennu asteroid turns out to contain 14 amino acids and give nucleobases from DNA and RNA. Life’s origin? CC-licensed photo by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Lively. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Asteroid fragments upend theory of how life on Earth bloomed • Nature

Alexandra Witze:

»

Fragments of the asteroid Bennu, carefully collected and ferried to Earth by a robotic spacecraft, contain the building blocks for life, NASA announced on Wednesday.

Not only does Bennu contain all five of the nucleobases that form DNA and RNA on Earth and 14 of the 20 amino acids found in known proteins, the asteroid’s amino acids hold a surprise. On Earth, amino acids in living organisms predominantly have a “left-handed” chemical structure. Bennu, however, contains nearly equal amounts of these structures and their “right-handed”, mirror-image forms, calling into question scientists’ hypothesis that asteroids similar to this one might have seeded life on Earth.

The work appears in Nature Astronomy.

“What makes these results so significant is that we’re finding them in a pristine sample,” says co-author Daniel Glavin, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. When meteorites fall to Earth, they are heated in the atmosphere and contaminated by the planet’s molecules. The Bennu samples were ferried to Earth in a sealed canister, protected from the heat, and analysed in a super-clean laboratory space under inert gas.

The specimens contain the richest bounty of life-friendly extraterrestrial compounds ever brought to Earth.

But that’s not all they contain. In an accompanying paper published in Nature on Wednesday other researchers report that the material from Bennu is also rich in salts created billions of years ago, probably when watery ponds on Bennu’s parent asteroid evaporated and left behind a crust of minerals. Although no signs of life were spotted on Bennu, those salty ponds would have been a good environment to foster the chemistry that could lead to it. This might involve small, carbon-rich molecules such as methanal (formaldehyde) — a simple compound that was found in the Bennu samples.

«

This is big news: another part of the finding is that radioactivity made the salty waters warm, which also encourages the process of.. whatever causes amino acids to form. And then it crashes into an early planet, seeding life.

Of course this doesn’t quite solve the question of “how did life get started?” – it only really moves it back one step, to an asteroid rather than primitive Earth – but implies it could be widespread. One asteroid is much like another. And every solar system has a ton of asteroids banging into things.

unique link to this extract

On the Undesign of Apple Intelligence features • Pixel Envy

Nick Heer:

»

As noted, the Writing Tools popover is not the same width as the other popovers it will spawn. By sheer luck, I had one of my test windows positioned in such a way that the Writing Tools popover had enough space to display on the lefthand side of the window, but the popovers it launched appeared on the right because they are a bit wider. This made for a confusing and discordant experience.

Choice of component aside, the way the results of Writing Tools are displayed is so obviously lacklustre I am surprised it shipped in its current state. Two of the features I assumed I would find useful — as I am one person shy of an editor — are “Proofread” and “Rewrite”. But they both have a critical flaw: neither shows the differences between the original text and the changed version. For very short passages, this is not much of a problem, but a tool like “Proofread” implies use on more substantial chunks, or even a whole document. A user must carefully review the rewritten text to discover what changes were made, or place their faith in Apple and click the “Replace” button hoping all is well.

Apple could correct for all of these issues. It could display Writing Tools in a panel instead of a popover or, at least, make it possible to disconnect the popover from the selected and transform it into a panel. It should also make every popover the same width or, at least, require enough clearance for the widest popover spawned by Writing Tools so that they always open on the same side. It could bring to MacOS the same way of displaying differences in rewritten text as already exists on iOS but, for some reason, is not part of the Mac version. It could cache results so, if the text is unchanged, invoking the same tool again does not need to redo a successful action.

Writing Tools on MacOS is the most obviously flawed of the Apple Intelligence features suffering from weak implementation or questionable U.I. choices, but there are other examples, too.

«

Heer goes on to list them: Image Playground, automatic replies in Messages, and the settings themselves for Apple Intelligence. His complaints aren’t about what the feature(s) do/es, it’s about the associated UI. But Apple has been letting itself down on that front for quite some time.
unique link to this extract

Why Apple uses JPEG XL in the iPhone 16 and what it means for your photos • PetaPixel

Jeremy Gray:

»

JPEG XL is a next-generation image encoding standard formally standardized in early 2022. Since then, JPEG XL (.jxl) has been adopted by numerous operating systems and applications, albeit with some notable holdouts.

Apple and its various software iterations have supported JPEG XL for at least a year, including in Finder, Preview, Final Cut Pro, Pages, Photos, Mail, Safari, and more. Adobe has also supported the format for a while, including in Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom Classic.

Despite JPEG XL supporting reversible JPEG transcoding and being superior to JPEG in terms of quality and efficiency, the format has yet to be widely adopted. Neither Chrome nor Firefox, two very popular web browsers, support the format natively, for example. Extensions are available to support JPEG XL files, but they’re not installed by default.

The JPEG XL community website cites the format’s ability to reduce file size while delivering “unmatched quality-per-byte.” Compared to a standard JPEG, a JPEG XL file is up to 55% smaller while providing a cleaner image that is visually lossless. Gone are typical JPEG artifacts.

Although it’s easy to appreciate the technical advantages of JPEG XL, it is also worth pointing out a substantial benefit of smaller file sizes: reduced environmental impact. As the world generates increasing amounts of data, it’s essential to consider ways to reduce data load. All that stuff lives somewhere, and wherever it is, it requires energy to operate.

It’s also important to note that JPEG XL supports wide-gamut and high dynamic range images. “JPEG XL is specifically designed to handle the rich colors of high-precision, high-dynamic range images,” the creators explain.

…As for why it is including JPEG XL in the iPhone 16 Pro, Apple tells PetaPixel that the format promises two primary benefits over standard JPEG format: improved image quality and better compression performance. If there’s a 32MB JPEG image, that same photo will be 24MB in lossless JPEG XL and, even more impressively, about five megabytes in perceptually lossless format.

Apple has wrapped JPEG XL photos inside a DNG container, enabling ProRAW files to retain their flexibility while being significantly smaller — up to nearly five times smaller.

«

This is a great format but the problem is its lack of adoption. (This article is from September.) You can enable JPEG XL in various browsers, including Chrome – since 2021.
unique link to this extract

Quartz has been quietly publishing AI-generated news articles • TechCrunch

Rebecca Bellan:

»

Quartz, the international business news outlet, has been quietly aggregating reporting from other outlets, including TechCrunch, in order to publish AI-generated articles under the byline “Quartz Intelligence Newsroom.”

Quartz started publishing simple AI-generated earnings reports months ago, but beginning last week, the outlet moved on to short articles. One of the 18 AI-generated articles published as of Monday afternoon, titled “South Korea shares preliminary findings on Jeju Air crash investigation,” aggregates reporting done by real journalists at CNN, MSN, and The Associated Press on MSN.com.

Each of the outlet’s AI-generated articles is roughly 400 words in length, and includes no full quotes from sources. Rather than attributing information in the body of the text, as flesh-and-blood journalists do, Quartz’s AI writer only cites its sources at the very top of its pieces.

A spokesperson for Quartz corporate parent G/O Media confirmed to TechCrunch the existence of a “purely experimental” AI newsroom, without commenting on which AI models or tools the publication uses to write AI-generated news articles. 
It is not clear how Quartz’s AI newsroom chooses which stories to cover. The spokesperson said that the goal is to free up Quartz’s editorial staff to “work on longer and more deeply reported articles,” and that the editorial staff reviews each AI-generated story before it is published.

«

Somehow this is reminiscent of Philip K Dick’s “homeopapes”, which would “speedily provide you with a fresh, up-to-the-minute” news summary tailored to your likings. The more advanced ones could interview people too.
unique link to this extract

Logitech’s peel-and-stick radar sensors could let companies invisibly monitor their offices • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

»

Logitech sales boomed during the pandemic as people outfitted their home offices, and it’s getting a piece of the hybrid workplace with teleconferencing gear too. But Logitech’s also got a little-known corporate office management solution that could soon expand beyond conference rooms — using a pebble-shaped person detection device called the Logitech Spot.

It’s a millimeter wave radar sensor you can peel and stick up anywhere, letting companies invisibly see whether people are in a room. The company claims it’ll last four years on a single D-cell shaped lithium battery, no wires required at all.

It’s not just a radar sensor; it also measures particulates, VOCs, CO2, temperature, pressure, and humidity, so your company can get a health score for any given room. But the first clear draw is for companies to know whether workers are actually using their office space, and which rooms get used, as they make decisions about downsizing those offices, issuing return-to-office mandates, or reconfiguring them for hybrid work.

«

Personally, I wondered if this could be a silent burglar alarm of sorts. But it needs a connection to the Logitech cloud. Also, no price has been announced. But that battery life is astonishing.
unique link to this extract

AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Last summer, Anthropic inspired backlash when its ClaudeBot AI crawler was accused of hammering websites a million or more times a day.

And it wasn’t the only artificial intelligence company making headlines for supposedly ignoring instructions in robots.txt files to avoid scraping web content on certain sites. Around the same time, Reddit’s CEO called out all AI companies whose crawlers he said were “a pain in the ass to block,” despite the tech industry otherwise agreeing to respect “no scraping” robots.txt rules.

Watching the controversy unfold was a software developer whom Ars has granted anonymity to discuss his development of malware (we’ll call him Aaron). Shortly after he noticed Facebook’s crawler exceeding 30 million hits on his site, Aaron began plotting a new kind of attack on crawlers “clobbering” websites that he told Ars he hoped would give “teeth” to robots.txt.

Building on an anti-spam cybersecurity tactic known as tarpitting, he created Nepenthes, malicious software named after a carnivorous plant that will “eat just about anything that finds its way inside.”

Aaron clearly warns users that Nepenthes is aggressive malware. It’s not to be deployed by site owners uncomfortable with trapping AI crawlers and sending them down an “infinite maze” of static files with no exit links, where they “get stuck” and “thrash around” for months, he tells users. Once trapped, the crawlers can be fed gibberish data, aka Markov babble, which is designed to poison AI models. That’s likely an appealing bonus feature for any site owners who, like Aaron, are fed up with paying for AI scraping and just want to watch AI burn.

…”Ultimately, it’s like the Internet that I grew up on and loved is long gone,” Aaron told Ars. “I’m just fed up, and you know what? Let’s fight back, even if it’s not successful. Be indigestible. Grow spikes.”

«

Oh, Aaron. The internet has had so, so many deaths. The “internet” I knew has died at least twice, and yet continues.
unique link to this extract

AI optimization: how to optimize your content for AI search and agents • Search Engine Land

Jed White:

»

Optimizing for AI search is an ongoing process, as AI crawlers are far from perfect. Right now:

• 34% of AI crawler requests result in 404 or other errors
• Only Google’s Gemini and AppleBot currently render JavaScript among major AI crawlers
• AI crawlers show 47 times inefficiency compared to traditional crawlers like Googlebot
• AI crawlers represent about 28% of Googlebot’s volume in recent traffic analysis
• As AI indexing improves, staying ahead of these trends will help ensure your content remains visible.

Remember, it’s a balance. You want to be accessible to helpful AI tools while protecting against bad actors. 

«

It’s so peculiar: what is it that these sites think they’re going to gain by being easy to index by AI chatbots? And yet SEL is highly regarded. If it’s giving this sort of advice, then things are changing. Just look at the headlines on its main page – AI, AI, AI everywhere.
unique link to this extract

Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek censors itself in realtime, users report • The Guardian

Robert Booth and Dan Milmo:

»

Before the censor’s cut comes, DeepSeek seems remarkably thoughtful. In Mexico, Guardian reader Salvador asked it on Tuesday if free speech was a legitimate right in China. DeepSeek approaches its answers with a preamble of reasoning about what it might include and how it might best address the question. In this case Salvador was impressed as he watched as line by line his phone screen filled up with text as DeepSeek suggested it might talk about Beijing’s crackdown on protests in Hong Kong, the “persecution of human rights lawyers”, the “censorship of discussions on Xianjiang re-education camps” and China’s “social credit system punishing dissenters”.

“I was assuming this app was heavily [controlled] by the Chinese government so I was wondering how censored it would be,” he said.

Far from it, it seemed incredibly frank and it even gave itself a little pep talk about the need to “avoid any biased language, present facts objectively” and “maybe also compare with western approaches to highlight the contrast”.

Then it started its answer proper, explaining how “ethical justifications for free speech often centre on its role in fostering autonomy – the ability to express ideas, engage in dialogue and redefine one’s understanding of the world”. By contrast, it said: “China’s governance model rejects this framework, prioritising state authority and social stability over individual rights.”

Then it explained that in democratic frameworks free speech needed to be protected from societal threats and “in China, the primary threat is the state itself which actively suppresses dissent”. Perhaps unsurprisingly it didn’t get any further along this tack because everything it had said up to that point was instantly erased. In its place came a new message: “Sorry, I’m not sure how to approach this type of question yet. Let’s chat about math, coding and logic problems instead!”

“In the middle of the sentence it cut itself,” Salvador said. “It was very abrupt. It’s impressive: it is censoring in real time.”

«

Now that’s what I call intelligence!
unique link to this extract

Dismay at plan to cut back A-level maths support programme • Financial Times

Peter Foster, Amy Borrett and Michael Peel:

»

The Advanced Mathematics Support Programme, which has been running since 2018, helps state schools in England teach A-level maths, further maths and a core maths programme that provides “maths for life” skills, such as statistics and finance.

Government officials said the “difficult decision” to reduce the programme budget had been taken as Whitehall seeks to address the “£22bn black hole” in the public finances Labour says it inherited from the Conservative administration.

The plan to halve the budget of the widely-praised scheme from April this year was described as a retrograde step by leading maths campaigners at a time when the government is promoting its new AI and digital technology strategies as the key to the UK’s growth prospects.

Jens Marklof, president of the London Mathematical Society, said the decision to pare back the scheme would harm the chances of children from poorer areas, where schools are less likely to offer further maths A-levels needed to access higher-tier universities.

“There’s no AI without maths and if the government is really serious about its AI strategy they have to significantly scale up the support for maths education at all levels,” he said.

“The big success of AMSP was to enable kids who went to schools that didn’t offer further maths to give them this opportunity,” he added.

«

Terrible idea. The failure of economic growth in the past 15 years is really starting to bite now, and will affect us for years to come.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The iPad has just turned 15. So has it lived up to its promise? And what, exactly, was that promise? CC-licensed photo by void-oo on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Ageing. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

White House evaluates effect of China AI app DeepSeek on national security • Reuters

Andrea Shalal, David Shepardson and Kanishka Singh:

»

U.S. officials are looking at the national security implications of the Chinese artificial intelligence app DeepSeek, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Tuesday, while President Donald Trump’s crypto czar said it was possible that intellectual property theft could have been at play.

The National Security Council is reviewing the app’s implications, Leavitt said. “This is a wake-up call to the American AI industry,” she added, echoing Trump’s comments from a day earlier while also saying the White House was working to “ensure American AI dominance.”

Investors sold technology stocks across the globe on Monday over concerns the emergence of a low-cost Chinese AI model would threaten market dominance of U.S.-based AI leaders such as OpenAI and Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O), opens new tab Google.

White House artificial intelligence and crypto czar David Sacks was asked on Fox News if there was intellectual property theft involved in the rise of DeepSeek.

“Well, it’s possible. There’s a technique in AI called distillation, which you’re going to hear a lot about, and it’s when one model learns from another model,” Sacks said in the interview.

“I think one of the things you’re going to see over the next few months is our leading AI companies taking steps to try and prevent distillation … That would definitely slow down some of these copycat models,” he added.

During his administration, former President Joe Biden placed a wide range of export restrictions on AI chips and the equipment used to make them, hoping to hamper AI development in China.

Trump said on Monday the Chinese app should act as a spur for American companies and added it was good that companies in China have come up with a cheaper, faster method of artificial intelligence.

“The release of DeepSeek AI from a Chinese company should be a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win,” Trump said.

«

Oh noes the AI may have used content from.. another model? Stop, you copycat!
unique link to this extract

iPad at 15: hit or a miss? • On my Om

Om Malik:

»

Over the years, it’s fair to say the iPad has suffered from a subpar operating system experience. There has been a distinct lack of popular and hit applications. Still, one can’t ignore the amazing hardware and its true capabilities. If only there were more interesting apps — not games — that tapped into what Apple packs into it. The device has been a playground for new technologies — screens, LiDAR, M-class silicon, for example.

Still, there is no denying that for children and elders, the iPad is a perfect computer. Children, in particular, seem to be intuitively drawn to it, swiping and interacting with ease. Giving my mother an iPad and seeing it open up her world has been a joy to watch. I am sure that sentiment is shared by others with aging parents. Not surprisingly, those of us who have grown up using desktop computers struggle with the elegance, simplicity, and constraints of the iPad.

I fell in love with the iPad the minute I played with it. I still am! It reminded me of a slate — on which I learned to write from my grandfather. That slate was very analog. “On January 27th, when I first picked up the iPad, I was that 4-year-old boy again. I felt like I was getting that old slate of mine one more time,” I wrote in my first (but not last) essay about the iPad.

Still, my first impression of the iPad was that it was device “made for the consumption of digital media: games, music, photos, videos, magazines, newspapers and e-books. Sure, you can use it to check your email or work on a keynote, but the iPad’s primary purpose is to help you consume the ever-expanding amount of digital content on offer.”

Looking back, I think I might have gotten that right.

«

Great for kids and older users unfamiliar with computers and people who just want to watch stuff? Yes, but nobody had been filling that gap before.
unique link to this extract

Google Maps will rename Gulf of Mexico as Gulf of America in US • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

»

Google has confirmed it will rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America on Google Maps in the US, after an executive order from Donald Trump.

It will remain the Gulf of Mexico in Mexico, while users outside of the US and Mexico will see both names on Google Maps. The Alaskan peak Denali, the tallest mountain in North America, will also be changed to Mount McKinley in the US in line with Trump’s executive order on 20 January.

“We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government,” said Google in a post on X.

Explaining the different labels for the gulf in the US, Mexico and the rest of the word, Google added: “When official names vary between countries, Maps users see their official local name. Everyone in the rest of the world sees both names. That applies here too.”

…Google has applied the same locale-based labelling conventions to other locations subject to naming disputes. Outside of Japan and South Korea, the body of water bordering both nations is listed as the “Sea of Japan (East Sea)”.

In 2012, Iran threatened to take legal action against Google over its decision to drop the name Persian Gulf from Google Maps and leave the waterway between Iran and the Arabian peninsula nameless. The body of water is now labelled “Persian Gulf (Arabian Gulf)” in other countries.

«

Trump’s impatience with everything is quite the spectacle. But Google is, as the previous examples point out, just choosing to go with the path of least political resistance, as it has done in the past.
unique link to this extract

Middle East becomes fastest-growing renewables market outside China • Financial Times

Malcolm Moore:

»

Until this month, the oil-rich United Arab Emirates had modest ambitions when it came to renewable energy: to install roughly as many solar panels each year as the UK.

But then Masdar, the country’s state-owned renewable energy company, decided to make a splash at a huge trade fair in Abu Dhabi.

In front of the UAE president, it announced it would build a $6bn 5 gigawatt solar plant backed with more than 19GWh of battery storage — the largest such project ever attempted. 

When it starts in two years’ time, its batteries will give the country a constant output of 1GW, enough to power more than 700,000 homes without having to rely on gas-fired plants when the sun is not shining.

“This will transform renewable energy into baseload energy,” said Sultan Al Jaber, the chair of Masdar. “It is a first step that could become a giant leap.”

As the UAE was revealing its new solar project, Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, announced a joint venture that would start producing lithium, a key ingredient for batteries, as early as 2027.

«

It’s taken a very long time, but maybe the Arab oil states are realising that it’s not going to be eternal.
unique link to this extract

UK energy storage slows down as Ireland pipeline gains traction • Energy-Storage.News

Cameron Murray:

»

With another record-breaking year in global energy storage deployment, the UK and Ireland saw diverging trends. The UK’s energy storage market seemingly slowed down in 2024, compared to Ireland’s strong growth.

In the UK, over 30GWh of battery energy storage system (BESS) planning applications were submitted, with over 35% coming from the last quarter alone: whereas in Ireland, despite having less than four times the capacity submitted, there was a 63% rise in new capacity submitted compared to 2023.

…However, energy storage is still a growing industry. Several large projects have been announced and are in the TEC register (remaining in the pre-planning stage). This slow-down in applications could possibly show that developers are now focusing on the build-out of projects. Some notable applications in 2024 included NatPower’s Teeside Green Energy Park with a capacity over 1GW.

The number of large projects is staying at about the same level: in both 2024 and 2023, around 23% of applications submitted were for BESS projects over 100MW. But the proportion of >100MW projects in the overall capacity submitted decreased by 10 percentage points, showing that 2024 saw developers prioritising larger projects.

By country, England maintained the most applications at 62%, followed by Scotland at 21%, then Northern Ireland and Wales. Wales also saw the largest increase in applications in 2024, growing 150% from the prior year; the county is ramping up its energy storage plans with the 1GW Rover Way Energy Storage projects both submitted and approved last year, and the overall capacity submitted nearly quadrupling from 2023. The country with the highest average capacity per site was England at 167MWh/site.

«

I wondered to myself if home installations are having any impact. Answer: not yet:

»

home BESS installations had a record-breaking year, with 20,044 installations completed – over quadruple the number of BESS installations in 2023. The average installation cost for home BESS saw significant and somewhat votatile change, ending in a £72 increase in average installation cost between January and December 2024. Across 2024, the average cost of a home BESS installation sat at £8,035, a 13% decrease from 2023’s average of £9,343.

Notably, more remote areas of the UK appear to be some of the most interested in home BESS installations, with the Isles of Scilly and the Shetland Islands topping the table for regions with the highest percentage of homes with BESS installations at 0.78% and 0.7% respectively. Just behind these island regions is the Moray region of Scotland, on the northeast coast of the nation, which, at 185 home BESS installations, has a 0.44% installation rate for battery technology.

«

unique link to this extract

As Trump dumps clean energy, fossil fuels lose their grip on Europe • Forbes

David Vetter:

»

As U.S. president Donald Trump promises to “drill baby drill,” new figures from Europe show fossil fuels are being pushed out of the EU’s electricity system, with solar energy generation overtaking coal power for the first time.

Hot on the heels of Trump withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement and stopping American offshore wind projects, energy research group Ember announced Wednesday that clean energy sources generated more than 70% of the EU’s electricity in 2024, while electricity generation from fossil fuels fell 8.7% to comprise just 28.9% of the total.

Significantly, solar power rose 21.7% to generate more than 11% of the EU’s electricity, while a fall in coal generation led to the most polluting fossil fuel producing just 9.8% of the total.

“Fossil fuels are losing their grip on EU energy,” said report lead author Chris Rosslowe, commenting on the release. “At the start of the European Green Deal in 2019, few thought the EU’s energy transition could be where it is today; wind and solar are pushing coal to the margins and forcing gas into structural decline.”

Not including nuclear power, renewables rose 7.6% from 2023 figures to generate almost 48% of European electricity last year. The rapid drop in the use of fossil fuels, meanwhile, caused EU power sector emissions to fall to 585 million tons of CO2—less than half the peak of 1,218 million tons seen in 2007.

«

Great – now can we have more nuclear plants too please? Although if we get enough batteries in homes, maybe that means we can balance demand better.
unique link to this extract

Sky News to overhaul newsroom around paid-for content • Financial Times

Daniel Thomas:

»

Sky News has unveiled plans for a root and branch overhaul of its programming and newsroom aimed at creating a model of premium paid content to safeguard its future from an existential threat to traditional TV.

In a speech to staff on Tuesday, David Rhodes, executive chair of the Comcast-backed news broadcaster, laid out a strategy dubbed Sky News 2030 that will reshape its digital-focused service over the next five years to attract new audiences willing to pay for news, according to people familiar with the matter.

Rhodes told staff that the business’s revenue streams were “largely stagnant” given a reliance on advertising and sponsorship, the people said, prompting the need for new income streams centred on subject hubs that will offer paid products from podcasts and newsletters to events and live shows.

This is expected to include some subscription-based services where premium content is held back for paying customers. While its traditional 24-hour linear TV channel will continue to be important, Rhodes said priorities and resources would be shifted to these premium content tiers.

As with most linear channels, Sky News is struggling to arrest a steep decline in traditional TV audiences, putting pressure on revenues as advertising moves online and where viewers increasingly use social media platforms such as YouTube and TikTok.

«

Everyone is struggling to make news pay – but for video-based news, their lunch is absolutely being eaten by all the video-capable services. This is going to be brutal. How will CNN and all the others adapt?
unique link to this extract

UK weighs making Netflix users pay licence fee to fund BBC • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Ellen Milligan and Ailbhe Rea:

»

The UK is considering making households who only use streaming services such as Netflix and Disney pay the BBC licence fee, as part of plans to modernize the way it funds the public-service broadcaster.

Extending the fee to streaming applications is on a menu of options being discussed by Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office, the Treasury and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named discussing internal government deliberations.

Alternatives under discussion include allowing the British Broadcasting Corp. to use advertising, imposing a specific tax on streaming services, and asking those who listen to BBC radio to pay a fee.

The government is the early stages of examining how to overhaul the funding of Britain’s public broadcaster when its current 11-year charter ends on Dec. 31, 2027. Ministers are looking to either retain and alter the current television license fee model or scrap it and instead fund the BBC through alternative models such as taxation or subscription. That’s because viewing habits have changed as users gravitate toward on-demand services.

The talks are sensitive because the UK’s national broadcaster is often viewed as a key vehicle for the country’s soft power around the world. But the BBC — which is committed to maintaining impartiality in its editorial output — also frequently faces criticisms of bias from both the left and right of the country’s political spectrum.

«

Tricky. A levy on streaming is the most like the licence fee as it currently stands – a levy on television watching. Advertising would be unpopular. Demanding a radio licence fee faces all sorts of problems because almost everyone has one, and you’d struggle to know whether people had paid or not.

Also if this is the “early stages”, they’d better get a move on. Three calendar years is going to zoom by.
unique link to this extract

‘Stamp out paper mills’ — science sleuths on how to fight fake research • Nature

Anna Abalkina, René Aquarius, Elisabeth Bik, David Bimler, Dorothy Bishop, Jennifer Byrne, Guillaume Cabanac, Adam Day, Cyril Labbé and Nick Wise:

»

Certain research fields seem to be particularly susceptible, namely those in which the number of possible experiments far exceeds the available scientific resource. Fields we know of include non-coding RNAs in human cancer and crystallography — vast numbers of different RNA combinations and crystal structures can potentially be investigated. In chemistry, 44% of papers that are retracted owing to fraud are published in crystallography. There are sure to be other fields.

Paper mills are already exploiting large language models (LLMs) to avoid plagiarism detectors and AI image generators to mass-produce papers. One preprint9 suggests that at least 10% of all PubMed abstracts published in 2024 were written with LLMs — although it is challenging to differentiate between papers from mills and those by legitimate authors who want to improve their writing. We predict further exploitation of AI-generated images to produce figures in future paper-mill products. These are likely to be difficult to detect. Journals can help by promoting open science and demanding the raw data for studies — the more information is available about papers, the easier it is to spot new tricks by paper mills.

We’re often asked to speak at universities and conferences, and consistently come across academics and PhD students who have never heard of paper mills. By preparing people to recognize and call out fake research, the scientific community can build up immunity against paper mills.

Everyone involved in disseminating and digesting research — editors, publishers, students, authors, funding organizations, institutions, bibliographic databases and governments — needs to understand what paper mills are and know how to spot the telltale signs of fake papers. Anyone can learn to look out for image falsification or duplication in papers in their field, as well as for nonsensical text or equations, problematic references and reagents, irrelevant citations and implausible co-authorships. Free tools such as the Problematic Paper Screener10 developed by one of us (G.C.) can help researchers to spot papers that might be fraudulent.

«

Paper mills, of course, are networks of publications which offer fake peer review or sell authorships or generally don’t do what scientific publication demands.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Politicians in the US are wondering whether China’s TP-Link should be banned, like TikTok. CC-licensed photo by Kārlis Dambrāns on Flickr.
You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Routine. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

DeepSeek: everything you need to know right now • Exponential View

Azeem Azhar has been up to his knees and elbows in the whole world of AI for ages: »The math has changed. Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Nvidia have all bet on capital spending being the path forward and huge amounts of it. Cash would buy chips. Lots of chips. This was going to provide the moat, the source of advantage.
US model makers have been locked into a single paradigm of building ever-larger, more compute-hungry models. After all, the capital markets were willing to fund outsize spending on GPUs, so why not go for it?
With China’s venture capital market becoming moribund, local players could not access enough capital. Even those that could, such as the Qwen team from Alibaba or the Doubau from ByteDance, export restrictions would hamper access to compute.
Steven Sinofsky put it aptly when he observed that the history of computing is one of innovation followed by a scale-up, eventually disrupted by a “scale-out” approach—when bigger and faster methods are replaced by smaller, more numerous alternatives.
According to Steven,
China faced an AI situation not unlike Cisco did in its early years. Many point to the Nvidia embargo as the cause, but the details don’t really matter. The point is they had different constraints: more engineers than data centers to train in. Inevitably, they would develop a different kind of solution.
One thing for certain is that all firms will look at model development practices with an emphasis on driving efficiencies. As I wrote about OpenAI’s o3 in December:
Early versions are often expensive, but we can assume that the performance we get at $3,500 will cost us substantially less, perhaps a dollar or two, within no more than a couple of years.
The cost of GPT4 quality results has declined by more than 99% in the last two years. GPT-4 launched in March 2023 at $36 per million tokens. Today, China’s DeepSeek offers similar performance for $0.14, or 250 times cheaper.
But what does this mean for who?«

This is a much more detailed look at what DeepSeek can do than you may expect. But there’s a lot to be found in it.
unique link to this extract

U.S. stocks sink amid fears over DeepSeek and Chinese AI advancements • The New York Times

Jason Karaian and Joe Rennison: »On Monday, the S&P 500 index fell nearly 2% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped more than 3%. Nvidia was hit hard, plunging over 17% and losing hundreds of billions of dollars in market value. Falling tech stocks also dented market indexes in Europe and Japan.
Excitement over the prospects for A.I. had helped send technology stocks soaring over the past year, but concerns have been rising, too. Investors have become increasingly worried that the small cohort of tech companies that drove the broader market’s gains won’t live up to the lofty expectations that their sky-high prices suggest.
The pain was concentrated at companies at the forefront of the A.I. boom, including the multitrillion-dollar behemoths that drove the largest back-to-back annual gains for U.S. markets since the 1990s. Alphabet and Microsoft fell, and in addition to Nvidia, other chipmakers like Arm, Broadcom and Micron, and semiconductor equipment specialists like ASML slid.
DeepSeek could be the start of a new phase in how investors think about A.I., said Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers. He called it a “big slap in the face” for investors that could reset the way they calculate risk.
The Chinese company unveiled its new system last month but grabbed the tech world’s attention late last week with a research paper detailing how it built the technology. That “serves as a reminder that competition in the global A.I. arena is intensifying, and Nvidia may not be in the pole position forever,” Charu Chanana, chief investment strategist at Saxo Bank, wrote in a research note.«

Doesn’t take long for Wall Street to join the dots on this stuff, does it. Whose stock didn’t fall? Apple’s. You could say: because it isn’t reliant on Nvidia or other AI cloud models; it can use on-device AI. Or: Wall Street thinks Apple isn’t in the AI game yet.
unique link to this extract

The potential impact of 25% tariffs on Canadian GDP • The Lens

Stephanie Kelton: »The world has awakened to the power of Deepseek, the rival to OpenAI’s Model o1 that has tech stocks reeling. I played around with Deepseek for a couple of hours yesterday, and I talked with a number of friends who are already using it to do some pretty advanced coding and problem solving.
Early this morning, Apollo’s Torsten Slok shared a new report from the Bank of Canada. He highlighted a simulation the Bank ran to assess the potential impact on Canada if the US imposes a 25% tariffs on all exports into the United States. The results show that Canadian GDP would decline by a whopping 6%.
I wondered whether Deepseek would come up with a similar estimate. So I asked it: “create a model and run a simulation to show the impact on Canadian GDP if the US imposes 25% tariff on all exports from Canada to the US”.«

This is very interesting and impressive, particularly because it shows every single step of its “reasoning” – and she was explicit about requiring a model so she could prod it.
unique link to this extract

US‘s wind and solar will generate more power than coal in 2024 • Ars Technica

John Timmer: »In the first 11 months of 2024, the US saw its electrical use grow by 2.8%, or roughly 100 Terawatt-hours. While there’s typically year-to-year variation in use due to weather-driven demand, the US’s consumption has largely been flat since the early 2000s. There are plenty of reasons to expect increased demand, including the growth of data centers and the electrification of heating and transit, but so far, there’s been no clear sign of it in the data.
As a result, the rapid growth of renewables has largely displaced fossil fuel generation—specifically coal—rather than meeting increased demand. Despite the rise in demand, however, the long-term decline in coal has continued in 2024, with generation via coal down by nearly 5%. This will mean that this is the first year that wind and solar will combine to outproduce coal. Collectively, they’ll account for roughly 17% of the US’s energy production, while coal will only provide about 15%.
The boost in wind and solar production has also been larger than the increase in generation from natural gas, which remains the single largest source of power on the grid, generating nearly 44% of the electricity used in the US.«

Trump won’t be able to reverse the abandonment of coal; it’s like commanding water to run uphill. But the nuclear plants, are needed urgently.
unique link to this extract

Automation in retail is even worse than you thought • The Nation

Ann Larson: »From self-checkout machines to payment by app, technology is rapidly changing the way we buy groceries. Progressive members of Congress are sounding the alarm: Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and 13 colleagues wrote to the CEO of the supermarket behemoth Kroger in November about electronic price tags (often called electronic shelf labels or ESLs). These digital displays allow companies to change prices automatically from a mobile app. Tlaib warned that this so-called “dynamic pricing” permits retailers to adjust prices based on their whims.
Just as Uber raises prices during storms or rush hour, retailers like Kroger use ESLs to adjust prices based on factors like time of day or the weather. Supermarkets could conceivably mine a shopper’s personal data to set prices as high as possible. “My concern is that these tools will be abused in the pursuit of profit, surging prices on essential goods in areas with fewer and fewer grocery stores,” Tlaib wrote.
In August, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bob Casey wrote to Kroger raising similar concerns about price gouging. Noting that the company has already implemented the technology in hundreds of stores across the county, they warned that “ESLs may help Kroger extract maximum profits from consumers at a time when…high grocery prices are a leading concern among Americans who are concerned about inflation.”
Warren and Casey also voiced concern about Kroger’s partnership with Microsoft to install facial-recognition technology in stores, which could be used to identify individual customers: When a shopper approaches the shelf, she would see a price calibrated specifically for her. The next shopper might pay a different amount based on their profile. Retailers could use shopper data to charge higher prices to those who can afford to pay more, but since stores do not have to disclose who is making pricing decisions or why, the senators worry that shoppers on a budget are particularly vulnerable. “It is outrageous that, as families continue to struggle to pay to put food on the table, grocery giants like Kroger continue to roll out surge pricing and other corporate profiteering schemes,” they wrote.
It’s unclear whether Kroger will respond to the lawmakers. The company ignored a prior letter from Representative Tlaib and previously dismissed concerns about ESLs, saying that the negative effects of the technology have been exaggerated.«

If only lawmakers could pass laws that might, you know, stop such abuse of facial recognition and ESLs. Wouldn’t that be a thing?
unique link to this extract

Intel: the Gordian Knot • Digits to Dollars

Jay Goldberg: »A takeover of Intel has become a Gordian knot. The big problem is funding the company’s fabs, which will will require tens of billions of dollars and years to get back on track. Few companies, and no private equity funds, really want to deal with that large of a funding need and time horizon. On the other hand, the US government has given Intel a lot of money, and so simply shutting down the fabs is deeply problematic. No one wants the fabs, but the company cannot be sold without them.
In theory, the new administration could give a buyer approval to shut the fabs, but if someone has enough political capital for that purpose, why not use that political capital to get some direct government support? In speaking with investors, our impression is that the Street assumes that the only way to save Intel is for the government to intervene. We maintain that this is not a hard requirement, but recognize that this is now the common perception of the situation. There are of course rumors that a certain highly-connected, deeply troubling, tech mogul has a plan to buy the company. And from the very narrow perspective of saving the US’s semis manufacturing capacity that may be what it takes.
We are increasingly convinced that the only way for Intel to survive is for someone to buy them and remove the board. Unfortunately for the company, and the semis industry, that path looks very challenging.«

Every day that goes past brings Intel closer to its crisis point. It can’t go on being in distress forever. The question is, what is its salvation – if any? Just because you haven’t thought about Intel for a bit doesn’t mean it hasn’t been getting deeper into trouble.
unique link to this extract

After TikTok, your home WiFi may be the US’s next Chinese tech ban target • CNBC

Kevin Williams: »While the TikTok ban has lawmakers scurrying and chatter about Chinese influence over U.S. tech at a fever pitch, another danger is lurking. One of Amazon’s top-selling router brands, TP-Link, has been under scrutiny by regulators as posing a threat to American infrastructure. Experts worry that China could exploit the routers to launch attacks on critical infrastructure or steal sensitive information.
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (Democrat-IL) and Rep. John Moolenaar (Republican-MI) sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Commerce last summer, touching off a flurry of investigations and calls for a ban. The letter, which the Wall Street Journal first reported, flagged “unusual vulnerabilities” and required compliance with PRC law as disconcerting. “When combined with the PRC government’s everyday use of SOHO [small office/home office] routers like TP-Link to perpetrate extensive cyberattacks in the United States, it becomes significantly alarming,” the letter stated.
But so far, no action has been taken, and Krishnamoorthi is concerned.
“I am not aware of any plans to get them out,” Krishnamoorthi said. He pointed to the government’s “rip and replace” plan with Huawei network equipment as a precedent that could be followed. The government mandated in 2020 that companies rid themselves of Huawei equipment, which was deemed to pose a national security threat. Efforts to remove the equipment are still ongoing.  
According to data he cited, TP-Link has a 65% share of the U.S. router market, and its success has followed a similar playbook used by China with other technology: make a lot more than they need, export the surplus to undercut the competition, and use the technology to backdoor access or to disrupt.
…The routers were among brands in the market linked to hacks on European officials and the Typhoon Volt attacks.«

Among brands. Though they don’t have a great record for security.
unique link to this extract

Elon Musk email to X staff: ‘we’re barely breaking even’ • The Verge

Richard Lawler: »Ever since Elon Musk closed his deal to buy Twitter he’s claimed the company, now called X, is in “a very dire situation from a revenue standpoint.”
Now, the Wall Street Journal reports that banks are preparing a coordinated move to sell off some of the $13bn in debt they loaned Musk to finance the deal. It mentions an email sent to employees this month, also confirmed by The Verge, where the Chief Twit said, “…we’ve witnessed the power of X in shaping national conversations and outcomes,” but also claimed, “Our user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and we’re barely breaking even.”
Part of the reason Bank of America, Barclays, and Morgan Stanley are holding so much of the debt is from trying to avoid selling at a loss after economic conditions changed, and Musk had an extended court battle attempting to get out of the deal. While equity investors have reportedly slashed the value of their stakes by as much as 78 %, the Journal reports, “banks hope to sell senior debt at 90-95 cents on the dollar, while retaining more junior holdings.”«

If Musk really bought it thinking it was going to be a massive moneymaking enterprise.. he may have mistaken it for Facebook, which Twitter did not resemble in the slightest. News is not profitable, and Twitter is in many ways more like a news product than anything.
unique link to this extract

What really happens to your phone when it’s stolen • The Times

Dipesh Gadher and Harry Yorke: »he UK’s most senior police officer has accused tech giants including Apple and Google of “enabling” a phone theft epidemic that gangsters have turned into a “global criminal business”.
Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, disclosed that about a third of all activity by organised crime groups in London now revolves around stolen smartphones and other thefts. “They are making a fortune out of this,” he told The Sunday Times. “The organised crime business model is enabled by the reusability and resaleability of stolen phones.”
Rowley said the tech companies had allowed the trade in second-hand phones to proliferate by failing to introduce sufficient security measures to permanently disable devices. “I’m sure it’s inadvertent, but it’s enabling the criminal business models, which are leading to tens of millions of pounds being made out of this,” he said.«

The article describes how phones are stolen – out of people’s hands, from shops, from delivery vans – for organised crime gangs. Later, It continues:
»Rowley is now calling on the tech companies to introduce two short-term solutions that he argues will have a swift and “big effect” on the criminal trade.
Initially, he wants Apple and Google to automatically prevent stolen phones from being able to reconnect to cloud services, which he says would have a “suppressive effect” because it “disables so much of the use of the phone”.
He is calling on manufacturers to make each handset’s unique 15-digit international mobile equipment identity (IMEI) number more accessible so that victims can easily report a theft, and buyers and police are able to check swiftly whether a device has been stolen.
In the longer term, he would like to see manufacturers, including Samsung, introduce the equivalent of a kill switch, which when flipped remotely would “digitally destroy” a stolen phone and prevent it from being reused anywhere in the world. Industry experts, however, believe such a drastic move could be problematic, because many phones that are reported missing or stolen are in fact later found by their owners.«

Who seriously records their IMEI while they have their phone? (It’s in Settings – About on an iPhone.) The problem is that phones are being stolen while unlocked, so they can be wiped and repurposed. Apple and Google have locked down phones so you can’t do much if they’re locked. The IMEI idea isn’t a bad one, but hard to implement.
unique link to this extract

• 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.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The economics of modern playgrounds are surprising – and can keep them shut. CC-licensed photo by Dan Gaken on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Another undersea cable damaged in Baltic Sea: Sweden launches probe, seizes suspected ship • France 24

»

Latvia said it had dispatched a warship on Sunday after damage to a fibre optic cable to Sweden that may have been “due to external factors”.

The navy said it had identified a “suspect vessel”, the Michalis San, which was near the location of the incident along with two other ships.

The Michalis San was headed for Russia, according to several websites tracking naval traffic.

Nations around the Baltic Sea are scrambling to bolster their defences after the suspected sabotage of undersea cables in recent months.

After several telecom and power cables were severed, experts and politicians accused Russia of orchestrating a hybrid war against the West as the two sides square off over Ukraine.

NATO earlier this month announced it was launching a new monitoring mission in the Baltic Sea involving patrol ships and aircraft to deter any attempts to target undersea infrastructure in the region.

“We have a warship patrolling the Baltic Sea around the clock every day and night, allowing us to quickly dispatch it once we learnt about the damage,” Latvian navy commander Maris Polencs said at a briefing Sunday.

Prime Minister Evika Silina said: “We have notified the Swedish authorities and are working together with them to assess the damage and its reason.”

«

That monitoring mission by NATO needs to step up its game. Also, what sort of threat would put off a captain under instruction from, presumably, Russia? Undersea cables have become a new, significant vulnerability.
unique link to this extract

An asteroid got deleted because it was actually Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster • Astronomy.com

Mark Zastrow:

»

On Jan. 2, the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced the discovery of an unusual asteroid, designated 2018 CN41. First identified and submitted by a citizen scientist, the object’s orbit was notable: It came less than 150,000 miles (240,000 km) from Earth, closer than the orbit of the Moon. That qualified it as a near-Earth object (NEO) — one worth monitoring for its potential to someday slam into Earth.

But less than 17 hours later, the Minor Planet Center (MPC) issued an editorial notice: It was deleting 2018 CN41 from its records because, it turned out, the object was not an asteroid.

It was a car.

To be precise, it was Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster mounted to a Falcon Heavy upper stage, which boosted into orbit around the Sun on Feb. 6, 2018. The car — which had been owned and driven by Musk — was a test payload for the Falcon Heavy’s first flight. At the time, it received a great deal of notoriety as the first production car to be flung into space, complete with a suited-up mannequin in the driver’s seat named Starman.

«

You might think (well, I did): sure, but if a Roadster were to hit the Earth it would make quite a mess, wouldn’t it? But it turns out that the car is on a path to Mars using a Hohmanm transfer orbit. It’s not going to rain cars.
unique link to this extract

10,000 AI tracks uploaded daily to Deezer, platform reveals, as it files two patents for new AI detection tool • Music Business Worldwide

Daniel Tencer:

»

France-headquartered music streaming service Deezer has launched a new AI detection tool – after filing two patent applications for the technology in December.

On Friday (January 24), the company revealed that its new tech has already discovered that roughly 10,000 ‘fully AI-generated tracks’ are being delivered to its platform every day.

That amounts to about 10% of the daily content delivered to Deezer.

Deezer CEO Alexis Lanternier also said on Friday the company plans to “exclude” fully AI-generated tracks “from algorithmic and editorial recommendation.”

“Generative AI has the potential to positively impact music creation and consumption, but its use must be guided by responsibility and care in order to safeguard the rights and revenues of artists and songwriters,” Lanternier said.

The company says it set out last year to develop an AI detection tool that “surpass[ed] the ability of available tools.”

“Tools that are on the market today can be highly effective as long as they are trained on data sets from a specific generative AI model, but the detection rate drastically decreases as soon as the tool is subjected to a new model or new data,” explained Aurelien Herault, Chief Innovation Officer at Deezer

«

Odd really, because Deezer claimed it was already detecting AI-generated music back in June 2023. Maybe it feels better about it now it has patents?
unique link to this extract

The end of the playground • The Value of Nothing

Martin Robbins:

»

This is a tale of two playgrounds. One is closing soon while the other – brand new – has stood empty for nearly a year, ringed with steel fencing to stop people from using it. Their stories aren’t the most important thing you’ll read today, but they illustrate something much bigger: the collapse and retreat of local government, and the profound effect it will have on our public spaces.

«

There’s no easy way to précis this, so you’ll have to take my word for it that this is worth reading. With a footnote about surly British teenagers as “hospitality” staff that’s worth the price of entry itself. As is the one about how developers near Shuttleworth placated the local NIMBYs.

Also, from later in the piece:

»

The preamble to Central Bedfordshire Council’s 2025-26 budget reads like a panic attack in written form. It’s not just bad, it’s completely unsustainable with no prospect of improvement. School transport costs have increased by over 100% – from £9m to £20m – in just four years. In a single year, residential care costs for children have increased by £2,000 per child… per week. (I’ve sort of glossed over it here, but I want to come back to these costs in a future post as some of these increases seem frankly bonkers.) Adult social care costs have risen a staggering 35% in the same period. The average cost per adult has increased 13% in that time, which is bad enough, but the number of older people seeking support has sky-rocketed, increasing “beyond any reasonable forecast based on previous trend data.” A key driver is that people who “previously would have paid for their care are now finding their finances depleted and seeking council support.”

«

unique link to this extract

Nvidia stock may fall as DeepSeek’s ‘amazing’ AI model disrupts OpenAI • Forbes

Peter Cohan:

»

America’s policy of restricting Chinese access to Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips has unintentionally helped a Chinese AI developer leapfrog U.S. rivals who have full access to the company’s latest chips.

This proves a basic reason why startups are often more successful than large companies: Scarcity spawns innovation.

A case in point is the Chinese AI model DeepSeek R1 — a complex problem-solving model competing with OpenAI’s o1 — which “zoomed to the global top 10 in performance”— yet was built far more rapidly, with fewer, less powerful AI chips, at a much lower cost, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The success of R1 should benefit enterprises. That’s because companies see no reason to pay more for an effective AI model when a cheaper one is available — and is likely to improve more rapidly.

“OpenAI’s model is the best in performance, but we also don’t want to pay for capacities we don’t need,” Anthony Poo, co-founder of a Silicon Valley-based startup using generative AI to predict financial returns, told the Journal.

Last September, Poo’s company shifted from Anthropic’s Claude to DeepSeek after tests showed DeepSeek “performed similarly for around one-fourth of the cost,” noted the Journal.

When my book, Brain Rush, was published last summer I was concerned that the future of generative AI in the U.S. was too dependent on the largest technology companies. I contrasted this with the creativity of U.S. startups during the dot-com boom — which spawned 2,888 initial public offerings (compared to zero IPOs for U.S. generative AI startups).

DeepSeek’s success could encourage new rivals to U.S.-based large language model developers. If these startups build powerful AI models with fewer chips and get improvements to market faster, Nvidia revenue could grow more slowly as LLM developers replicate DeepSeek’s strategy of using fewer, less advanced AI chips.

«

At some point the spending insanity has to end. DeepSeek may be exactly the shock that the arms race needs to end.
unique link to this extract

The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a total disaster • ZDNET

Ed Bott:

»

You’d think that Microsoft’s marketing team would have learned something after last year’s shambolic rollout of the Recall feature. Maybe, before trying another rollout, they might talk to a few customers, do some focus groups, even ask a few members of the press and analyst community for their advice.

But no.

Shortly after the New Year, someone in Redmond pushed a button that raised the price of its popular (84 million paid subscribers worldwide!) Microsoft 365 product. You know, the one that used to be called Microsoft Office? Yeah, well, now the app is called Microsoft 365 Copilot, and you’re going to be paying at least 30% more for that subscription starting with your next bill.

As far as I can tell, the response from customers has been overwhelmingly negative. I monitor Microsoft-focused online forums obsessively, and I read hundreds of complaints without seeing a single compliment. Seriously, the reaction to this rollout was an Excel #DIV/0 error.

«

A 30% rise for the AI element? It’s not that valuable.
unique link to this extract

How long do golden retrievers live? The answer could change our relationship with dogs • Slate

Isobel Whitcomb:

»

Inbreeding coefficients are commonly used by biologists to assess the health of an entire population of creatures. In human populations, an average inbreeding coefficient of 3% to 5% is considered unhealthy.

Studies suggest that in golden retrievers, that value, on average, hovers around 8%—not great. When Boyko and an international team of researchers analyzed the effects of inbreeding on longevity in golden retrievers, they found that dogs whose parents shared identical copies of the same genes lived shorter lives, on average, than those whose parents’ genes included less overlap.

The genetic mutations that erode dog lifespans can pop up seemingly out of nowhere, then spread rapidly through a population, like a spark exploding into a wildfire. Bernese mountain dogs, for instance, are plagued by a form of blood cancer called histiocytosis, said Ruple, the canine epidemiologist. In both humans and dogs, this cancer is associated with a mutation on one particular gene. While this cancer is incredibly rare in humans, 1 in 7 of these dogs dies of it. That wasn’t always the case: These gentle giants have existed for thousands of years, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that the first case of histiocytosis was described in a Bernese mountain dog. According to Ruple, it’s likely that the mutation happened in just one dog, was passed down to all of its puppies, then began causing cancer once those dogs were bred to one another.

In dogs, that can happen quickly. The average breeding-purebred male dog, called a sire, will father more than 100 puppies. That number can be much higher for particularly prolific sires—for instance, a male dog that wins a show. The tendency of one sire to spread a harmful mutation among its descendants even has a name, “the popular sire effect.” As it turns out, golden retrievers have the highest proportion of popular sires of any dog breed.

«

Genetic screening for dogs? Canine GATTACA? A 12-year US study into retrievers published in 2024 has found definite genetic causes for shorter lifespans.
unique link to this extract

Los Angeles shows cities can burn spectacularly. Vancouver is not exempt • Vancouver Sun

Dana Gee interviews John Valliant, an expert on fires:

»

JV: What L.A. is showing us is that major cities can burn spectacularly, and Vancouver is not exempt from that…we were capable of generating a heat dome. So, imagine if it had been 37ºC with 40 knot winds. The whole west side would have gone. All the Pacific Spirit Park would have gone, no problem. And that’s what L.A. shows us, is really how vulnerable we are, and it’s a very stern invitation to reevaluate the flammability of our neighbourhoods and how we engage with fire and how we measure fire risk, because it’s not 1990 anymore. We don’t live in a rainforest anymore. We’re living in something new, and it’s not as wet as it used to be.

DG: What can we do to help mitigate the risk?
JV: Get a heat pump. Get rid of your gas car…probably stop eating beef or eat less beef. A really great thing about Canada and about British Columbia (BC) is we have the FireSmart B.C. Program, which is run by the fire service. And you can have firefighters experienced, you know, flammability, people, experts on fire, come to your community, come to your neighbourhood, your cul-de-sac, to your backyard, and help you look at your garden, your back porch, your wood pile, through the lens of fire…I think we’re at a disadvantage in Vancouver because the houses are old. They’re wooden, and they’re built very close together, and that is a recipe for conflagration, as we saw in Pacific Palisades.

And so it’s not like we’re gonna tear out every second house and create a space, but if you’re going to re-roof, re-roof with tin, don’t use vinyl siding. Think about having a sprinkler system, like a garden sprinkler, that you can mount on your roof to create a water curtain over your house…when embers start flying. You can reduce the flammability of your home and neighbourhood by double digit percentages…No one, as we saw in Los Angeles and as we saw in Fort McMurray, no one is stopping a firestorm. But firestorms are rare, but fires are going to be increasingly common…

«

Just in case you were wondering where the next human-aided climate fire calamity might happen.
unique link to this extract

How I use ChatGPT • The Ruffian

Ian Leslie:

»

My headline is slightly misleading. I use ChatGPT and Claude (the two leading LLMs, from OpenAI and Anthropic respectively) But I use Claude much more; it’s the only one I pay for.1 I cite ChatGPT above simply because it’s much better known. This is interesting in itself. I don’t think even those who prefer ChatGPT would argue it’s significantly better than Claude, and it has a clearly inferior brand name.

But OpenAI’s headstart on Anthropic, and everyone else, allied with their CEO’s talent for PR, has given their product a big advantage in brand awareness and market share, at least for now (it seems to be levelling out somewhat). ChatGPT has become the category generic: people say “ChatGPT” to mean “an LLM chatbot”, like they say “Jacuzzi” to mean “whirlpool bath”.

[A selection of the approximate prompts:]
• I’ve just bought a Logitech webcam and light and I’m having trouble setting them up on my Mac Air. [Description of problem]. Can you tell me what I’m doing wrong?
• How would you characterise the different movements of Mahler’s Third Symphony? Please use nontechnical language. I’m particularly interested in the emotional effects that Mahler conveys.
• Here’s a piece that I’ve written for my Substack. Can you check it for a) Spelling errors b) Grammatical errors c) Any problems with flow and clarity?
• Can I get to Belfast from London City Airport? What times are the flights?
• I live in London. I’m looking to buy a secondhand car. I’m looking for [list of things I want from a car]. Can you suggest which models I should look at, give me a rough idea of price, and how the payments might work out on different purchase schemes?
• I’m making an oxtail stew according to this online recipe [cut and paste]. I’ve just bought some Jerusalem artichokes, is it OK to throw them in? If so when should I add them?

«

There are plenty more. I’m intrigued and puzzled by them: many seem like questions that could be answered by good search technique. Plus I’d constantly wonder if it was hallucinating. But: asking these questions may well be an efficient short cut to the right answer(s). So, a very efficient method after all. (And less digging through forums, says Leslie.)

One of the most fun questions, for a cryptic crossword: “that confounded pane in the neck (4)”. Neat. Though he doesn’t say if the LLM answered correctly.
unique link to this extract

Bluesky 2024 moderation report • Bluesky

Aaron Rodericks:

»

In late August, there was a large increase in user growth for Bluesky from Brazil, and we saw spikes of up to 50k reports per day. Prior to this, our moderation team handled most reports within 40 minutes. For the first time in 2024, we now had a backlog in moderation reports. To address this, we increased the size of our Portuguese-language moderation team, added constant moderation sweeps and automated tooling for high-risk areas such as child safety, and hired moderators through an external contracting vendor for the first time.

We already had automated spam detection in place, and after this wave of growth in Brazil, we began investing in automating more categories of reports so that our moderation team would be able to review suspicious or problematic content rapidly. In December, we were able to review our first wave of automated reports for content categories like impersonation. This dropped processing time for high-certainty accounts to within seconds of receiving a report, though it also caused some false positives. We’re now exploring the expansion of this tooling to other policy areas. Even while instituting automation tooling to reduce our response time, human moderators are still kept in the loop — all appeals and false positives are reviewed by human moderators.

Some more statistics: the proportion of users submitting reports held fairly stable from 2023 to 2024. In 2023, 5.6% of our active users [those who haven’t been suspended or deleted] created one or more reports. In 2024, 1.19M users made one or more reports, approximately 4.57% of our user base.

In 2023, 3.4% of our active users received one or more reports. In 2024, the number of users who received a report were 770K, comprising 2.97% of our user base.

«

Bluesky grew almost tenfold in 2024, from 2.89m to 25.9m users. So they grew the moderation staff to 100 people – and are still growing. In the year, they received 6.48m reports – up 17x from 2023. Odd how reports aren’t linear with growth.

As a view into a burgeoning social network, this is fascinating. We never got insight like this into Twitter’s early days.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In China, a huge decades-old bet on EVs is paying off, with reduced demand for fuel. CC-licensed photo by Saad Akhtar on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 10 links for you. Electrified. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

How China’s bet on EVs two decades ago is paying off big • CNN

Laura Paddison and Ella Nilsen:

»

The roots of China’s EV surge go back nearly two decades.

Legacy automakers in the US, Japan and Europe had “such a big head start” on gas-powered vehicles that it was unlikely China would ever catch up, Shuo said. EVs offered the chance to dominate a new market.

There was also another key benefit: energy security. …The advantage of EVs is that they can be powered by China’s plentiful supplies of homegrown electricity. The government started introducing EV-friendly policies in earnest around 2009, [China climate policy expert Ilaria] Mazzocco told CNN, offering manufacturers cheap credit and funding for research.

It was “a pretty big bet,” she said, and the road wasn’t smooth. A few years in, “it was considered kind of a failure.” But ultimately the bet paid off, thanks to a combination of consistent support from China’s city and central governments, advances in battery technology and a slew of highly competitive companies, she said, including Tesla’s main rival, China-based BYD.

The country now boasts a robust charging infrastructure and homegrown EV expertise, technologies and materials. It’s producing large amounts of cheap EVs that people actually want to buy, [co-founder of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, Lauri] Myllyvirta said.

It’s a very different picture in the US, where the economic case for EVs without subsidies is weaker, he added, because gas is “extraordinarily cheap” and Americans prefer “absolutely massive vehicles.” With President Donald Trump now in office, the country is poised to sprint even further from policies promoting EVs and increase tariffs on Chinese EVs and battery materials.

The result is likely to be a US market that diverges further from the rest of the world, Myllyvirta said, “and that just makes it harder and harder for US automakers to compete overseas.”

China’s progress in electrifying transportation — including a vast, high-speed rail network — is slamming the brakes on its previously soaring oil consumption.

Gasoline demand fell by about 1% in 2024 and is on course to fall faster this year, even as people’s incomes grow and car ownership rises, said Ciarán Healy, an oil market analyst at the International Energy Agency. “For a country of China’s economic profile, it’s extraordinary,” he told CNN.

«

unique link to this extract

Not so super, Apple • One Foot Tsunami

Paul Kafasis:

»

I decided to be methodical. I asked my iPhone2 who won Super Bowls 1 through 60 (that’s “I” through “LX” in Super Bowl styling) and captured a screenshot of each result.3 The timestamps tell me this took just under 10 minutes. It also made my thumb hurt a little.

I then used ChatGPT to make assorted text lists, including the Roman numerals from I to LX, as well as all the actual Super Bowl winners.4 This saved my thumb, and other fingers, some amount of pain. I shoved all this into a Numbers spreadsheet for analysis.5 On the graphical front, I worked with Flying Meat’s excellent Retrobatch to process the collection of images.

So, how did Siri do? With the absolute most charitable interpretation, Siri correctly provided the winner of just 20 of the 58 Super Bowls that have been played. That’s an absolutely abysmal 34% completion percentage. If Siri were a quarterback, it would be drummed out of the NFL.

Siri did once manage to get four years in a row correct (Super Bowls IX through XII), but only if we give it credit for providing the right answer for the wrong reason. More realistically, it thrice correctly answered three in a row (Super Bowls V through VII, XXXV through XXVII, and LVII through LIX). At its worst, it got an amazing 15 in a row wrong (Super Bowls XVII through XXXII). Most amusingly, it credited the Philadelphia Eagles with an astonishing 33 Super Bowl wins they haven’t earned, to go with the one 1 they have.

Below, I’ve gathered a dozen of my favorite responses, in sequential order.

«

This is in effect a companion piece to John Gruber’s, who goes into greater detail – after first acknowledging that for an American computer company, being able to answer questions about its most iconic sporting event should be table stakes – by asking Siri, then DuckDuckGo, then various AI engines, about a really quite obscure, and randomly chosen, sporting outcome. (You’ll probably be surprised by which one comes out worst.)

Siri isn’t good at anything except very simple tasks. Personally, I use it for controlling my home, and reading map directions, but that’s about it. Apple really has a mountain to climb.

unique link to this extract

28 days of media slides • The Mediator

Doug Shapiro:

»

Last month, I tried a little experiment on X/Twitter: each day, for 28 days, I posted a slide or two about the media business.

Most of these are pulled from long-form posts on The Mediator, but some are new or updated. Some are data-centric, some conceptual; most are proprietary analyses, some aren’t—but collectively they tell a story about the current and evolving state of media, especially the video business.

Overall, they show an industry in upheaval, particularly for traditional media:

• Time spent with media is stagnating, putting a cap on growth
• Attention is fragmenting as corporate media loses share to creator media
• Technology is disintermediating traditional intermediaries, shifting bargaining power to the top creatives and creators
• Platforms with massive scale and different profit motives are increasingly dominating the media business
• The distribution of popularity is becoming more power-law like, making the business riskier
• And all this is a lagging indicator of the last disruption—falling barriers to distribution (the internet)—while another disruption is looming—falling barriers to creation (GenAI)

«

None of which sounds good for what we might call traditional media organisations. The slides are absolutely eye-opening, and as Helen Lewis likes to point out, the “mainstream” media these days is people like Joe Rogan. Hence we’re calling organisations like the BBC and New York Times “legacy” media, which sounds somewhat dismissive, given that they do things which the others don’t, such as fact-checking, sending people to dangerous locations, being consistent and admitting their mistakes.
unique link to this extract

Trump issues Executive Order to boost cryptocurrency industry • The New York Times

David Yaffe-Bellany:

»

The executive order, which was light on details, said the Trump administration would create a working group on digital assets to come up with the plan, which would include “regulatory and legislative proposals.” The group would also evaluate a potential national cryptocurrency stockpile, a government-controlled stash of digital coins that the industry has spent months lobbying the new administration to create.

“The digital asset industry plays a crucial role in innovation and economic development in the United States, as well as our nation’s international leadership,” the order said. “It is therefore the policy of my administration to support the responsible growth and use of digital assets.”

Mr. Trump has a significant personal stake in the success of the crypto industry. He and his sons last year helped start a crypto company called World Liberty Financial, which is selling a new digital currency called WLFI. Last week, he and his wife, Melania, each began selling memecoins, a type of cryptocurrency inspired by an online joke or celebrity mascot.

The ventures have drawn criticism from ethics experts concerned about conflicts of interest. In effect, Mr. Trump is trying to write the rules for business ventures from which he may personally profit. He has vowed to end the Biden administration’s crackdown on crypto companies and made a series of personnel selections at key federal agencies that appear poised to boost the crypto industry’s prospects.

Still, the executive order did not go nearly as far as many in the crypto industry had hoped. Mr. Trump did not order federal agencies to drop lawsuits against crypto companies, nor direct the government to start buying Bitcoin.

«

Ah, the utter shambles has begun. One reader sent me this apropos observation, believed to be a Turkish proverb: “If a clown moves into a palace, he does not become a king; it makes the palace a circus.”
unique link to this extract

TabBoo: a Chrome extension for sites you’re trying to avoid

“Justin”:

»

Stuck in an addictive, endless loop, loading the same sites over and over again? Install the extension and let aversive conditioning do the rest. Add random jumpscares to sites you’re trying to avoid.

«

Certainly something to try if you’ve got a problem where you just can’t stay off a site. Perhaps.
unique link to this extract

Fitbit fined $12m for Ionic smartwatches that burned 78 people • The Verge

Gaby Del Valle:

»

Fitbit is paying a $12.25m fine over its Ionic smartwatches, which the company recalled in 2022 after reports that the watches’ lithium-ion batteries overheated and, in some cases, burned customers. 

The Consumer Product Safety Commission has provisionally accepted the settlement. The commission worked with Fitbit to recall 1.7m Ionic watches in 2022 after receiving 115 reports of overheating batteries. Of those reports, 78 mentioned burn injuries, including two instances in which consumers received third-degree burns from their watches and four instances of second-degree burns. Despite complaints throughout 2018, 2019, and 2020 — that continued after a firmware update to address the issue in 2020 — the government agency says “Fitbit did not immediately report to the Commission as required.”

The recall only affected Fitbit’s Ionic watches, but some consumers say other Fitbit devices have similar issues. In 2023, consumers sued Google — which owns Fitbit — claiming that all its devices had battery issues that led to overheating, creating fire hazards and even burning customers.

«

If your battery catches fire in a computer or phone or electric bike, it’s bad enough – but if it overheats in a wearable (especially one that’s strapped onto you) the problem is much bigger. Fitbit wasn’t owned by Google at that point, which only goes to show how difficult wearables are.
unique link to this extract

Google buys part of HTC’s Vive VR team for $250m • Engadget

Mariella Moon:

»

Google is paying HTC $250m in cash for a deal that will give the bigger company’s plans for Android XR a boost. Under the terms of their agreement, some members of the HTC Vive engineering team will be joining Google, which describes them as an “incredibly strong technical team with a proven track record in the VR space.” HTC released the consumer version of its first Vive VR headset, designed in partnership with Valve, back in 2016. Last year, it launched the Vive Focus Vision more than a year after it released its first standalone headset for consumers, the Vive XR Elite.

In addition to absorbing certain Vive team members, Google will also get a non-exclusive license to use HTC’S extended reality technologies. HTC can still use its own IPs, and it vows to continue developing and supporting its XR headsets. The companies will also “explore future collaboration opportunities.” Google says the deal will help “its acceleration across the headset and glasses ecosystem.” The company laid out its vision for a unified Android XR ecosystem in December, which will span a range of virtual and mixed reality headsets and glasses. We’re bound to see the first Android XR devices this year, including one codenamed Project Moohan from a Google-Samsung collaboration.

«

HTC. Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a very long time. I took a look at its financials: for Q3 (fiscal and calendar) its revenues were $23.5m, and it lost $37m. Its cash reserves are about $385m. It’s been a long time since HTC was top of the pile in the Android smartphone world.

So this $250m is going to be very welcome. But without its Vive team, acquihired by Google, how is it going to improve its position?
unique link to this extract

Apple, Google mobile ecosystems face U.K. probe under new tech rules • WSJ via MSN

Edith Hancock:

»

The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority is investigating mobile ecosystems controlled by Apple and Alphabet’s Google to work out if they need to obey a strict new law governing digital competition.

The CMA said Thursday the probes will assess the companies’ dominance in spaces like mobile phone operating systems, app stores and web browsers and explore their impact on smartphone users as well as developers that rely on those devices to make money. If the investigations determine that the companies have what it calls ‘strategic market status,’ it can impose bespoke rules on them under the new law.

This is the second round of investigations the watchdog has launched under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, a new U.K. law designed to curb the outsized market power of the world’s largest technology companies. The law bans tech giants the CMA deems as having strategic market status in the digital economy from favoring their own products and services over those of rivals.

The CMA’s started enforcing the new rules this year by opening an investigation into Google’s search services on Jan. 14.

«

Intriguing that the CMA’s chief was fired on Wednesday as the government is keen to remove “regulatory barriers”. Presumably this was already in the pipeline. Wonder if it will get kicked into the long grass?
unique link to this extract

100 things you should know about people: #19 — it’s a myth that all-capital text is inherently harder to read • The Team W, Inc.

Susan Weinschenk:

»

WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO READ IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH IS COMMONLY BELIEVED, BUT NOT TRUE — You read by recognizing the shapes of words and groups of words. Words that are in all capital letters all have the same shape: a rectangle of a certain size. This makes words displayed in all uppercase harder to read than upper and lower case (known as “mixed case”).  Mixed case words are easier to read because they make unique shapes.

OK, NOW THE TRUE STUFF STARTS — When I started this article the topic was supposed to be why all capital letters are harder to read. Like most people with a usability background or a cognitive psychology background, I can describe the research — just what I wrote in the first paragraph above. I decided to look up and cite the actual research rather than just passing on the general knowledge and belief.

The research doesn’t exist, or “It’s complicated” — Something happened when I went to find the research on the shape of words and how that is related to all capital letters being harder to read. There isn’t research showing that exactly. It’s more complicated, and ultimately, more controversial. In July of 2004 Kevin Larson wrote an article that is posted at the Microsoft website that explains in depth all the research on this topic. I’ve picked out several ideas from that article and am presenting them here.

«

This is surprising; Larson suggests that it’s simply unfamiliarity with reading all-caps text that makes us slower at reading it. But words in capital letters have less shape than words in lower case; capitals have no descenders or ascenders, so they fill out the line, meaning we only have their width to go on. Needs more research, really.

The one thing that does seem to be agreed is that words with alternating capitals and lower-case are harder to read. Which makes me think a bit of American newspapers headlines and their insistence on capitalising so many first letters. Harder to read, maybe?
unique link to this extract

The ultra-fast cancer treatments which could replace conventional radiotherapy • BBC Future

David Cox:

»

Eleven years ago, Marie-Catherine Vozenin, a radiobiologist now working at Geneva University Hospitals (Hug), and others published a paper outlining a paradigm-shifting approach to traditional radiotherapy treatment which they called Flash. By delivering radiation at ultra-high dose rates, with exposures of less than a second, they showed that it was possible to destroy tumours in rodents while sparing healthy tissue.

Its impact was immediate. International experts described it as a seminal breakthrough, and it galvanised fellow radiobiologists around the world to conduct their own experiments using the Flash approach to treat a wide variety of tumours in rodents, household pets, and now humans.

The Flash concept resonated as it addressed some of the long-standing limitations of radiotherapy, one of the most common cancer therapies, which two-thirds of all cancer patients will receive at some point in their treatment journey. Typically delivered through administering a beam of X-rays or other particles over the course of two to five minutes, the total dose is usually spread across dozens of individual treatment sessions over up to eight weeks, to make it more tolerable for the patient.

Over the past three decades, advanced imaging scans and state-of-the-art radiotherapy machines have made it possible to target an individual tumour with increasing precision. But the risk of damaging or deadly side effects is still present.

…Cancer specialists have long believed that being able to boost the radiation dose would greatly enhance their ability to cure patients with difficult-to-treat cancers, according to Vozenin. For example, research has previously indicated that being able to increase the radiation dose in lung cancer patients with tumours that have metastasised to the brain could improve survival.

«

Now being tested at CERN – yes, the home of the Large Hadron Collider.

unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Can Amazon make its Alexa line of products turn a profit by adding an LLM to them? CC-licensed photo by Stock Catalog on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Intelligent enough. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Samsung and Meta are looking into earbuds with cameras, following Apple’s AirPods’ lead • TechRadar

Carrie Marshall:

»

Apple isn’t the only firm considering sticking cameras into your earbuds, although it’s probably closer than most: as we reported last year, Apple has been experimenting with IR cameras in AirPods, and is apparently planning to use them to help inform AI and deliver the audio equivalent of smart glasses.

A new report says that Apple isn’t the only firm wanting to be an eye-in-ear pioneer. Meta and Samsung are apparently looking into people’s ears too, but the path to in-ear cameras has proved to be a little tricky.

The report, by Bloomberg, details the efforts of Apple’s earbud rivals. Meta’s system appears to have the same goal as Apple’s one – not to take photos or record video, but to analyze the world around you and provide input to AI assistants – and “would let users look at an object and ask the earbuds to analyze the item”, much like Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses do. However, such devices are at least a few years away.

Meta has encountered several issues, which presumably Apple has encountered too. The report says that there have been issues with people who have long hair, and Meta is apparently unsatisfied with the camera angles of the devices currently named “Camera Buds”.

As for Samsung, those legendary leakers “people with knowledge of the matter” say that the firm is also considering a version of earbuds with cameras inside. However as yet there’s no detail of how advanced that project is, or if it’s even begun.

Cameras on earbuds make a lot of sense as an alternative to the idea of smart AR glasses, because there will be a big hurdle to get people who don’t wear glasses normally to put them on.

«

Fabulous story about not one, not two, but three companies’ plans for products which may or may not be under development. The absolute pinnacle of speculative reporting. Though I think it will be a lot easier to persuade people to put AirPods (and similar) in their ears than to wear glasses they don’t need.

Though those would be some tiny, tiny cameras. How do you get the weight down, and the battery charged?
unique link to this extract

​​Beijing’s targeting of Taiwan’s undersea cables previews cross-strait tensions under a Trump presidency • The Diplomat

Hans Horan:

»

On January 5, the Taiwanese government alleged that the Chinese-owned vessel Shunxin-39 cut an undersea fiber-optic cable near Taiwan’s Keelung Harbor by reportedly dragging its anchor across the seabed. Taiwan’s government-run telecommunications operator, Chunghwa Telecom, discovered the alleged sabotage after receiving a disruption warning around 7:51 a.m. While the ship is reportedly registered in Cameroon and Tanzania, the Taiwanese Coast Guard stated that all seven crew members were Chinese nationals and the ship’s owner was based in Hong Kong. 

On January 10, a director of the company operating Shunxin-39 refuted the allegations, despite the ship’s movements reportedly sustaining the sabotage hypothesis. 

This incident appears to be the latest example of Beijing-directed “gray-zone harassment.” In 2023, similar sabotage severed two submarine cables connecting Taiwan’s Matsu Islands, which temporarily disrupted their internet services. This most recent incident highlights the complex dynamics of China’s gray-zone tactics against Taiwan. Most notably, its timing – just weeks before Donald Trump’s inauguration for a second term as the United States’ president – raises the stakes, with China potentially testing the resilience of the Taiwan-U.S. partnership and Washington’s broader commitment to Indo-Pacific security.

The investigation into the Shunxin-39 incident remains inconclusive thus far, though the incident is far from isolated.

«

“Dragging our anchor” is the new “shooting down your satellite”.
unique link to this extract

AI mistakes are very different from human mistakes • Schneier on Security

Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders:

»

Someone who makes calculus mistakes is also likely to respond “I don’t know” to calculus-related questions.

To the extent that AI systems make these human-like mistakes, we can bring all of our mistake-correcting systems to bear on their output. But the current crop of AI models—particularly LLMs—make mistakes differently.

AI errors come at seemingly random times, without any clustering around particular topics. LLM mistakes tend to be more evenly distributed through the knowledge space. A model might be equally likely to make a mistake on a calculus question as it is to propose that cabbages eat goats.

And AI mistakes aren’t accompanied by ignorance. A LLM will be just as confident when saying something completely wrong—and obviously so, to a human—as it will be when saying something true. The seemingly random inconsistency of LLMs makes it hard to trust their reasoning in complex, multi-step problems. If you want to use an AI model to help with a business problem, it’s not enough to see that it understands what factors make a product profitable; you need to be sure it won’t forget what money is.

This situation indicates two possible areas of research. The first is to engineer LLMs that make more human-like mistakes. The second is to build new mistake-correcting systems that deal with the specific sorts of mistakes that LLMs tend to make.

…Humans may occasionally make seemingly random, incomprehensible, and inconsistent mistakes, but such occurrences are rare and often indicative of more serious problems. We also tend not to put people exhibiting these behaviors in decision-making positions. Likewise, we should confine AI decision-making systems to applications that suit their actual abilities—while keeping the potential ramifications of their mistakes firmly in mind.

«

unique link to this extract

‘Severance’: Apple TV+ series has generated $200m for streamer • Deadline

Max Goldbart:

»

Severance‘s long-awaited second season returned to the small screen last Friday and research from Parrot Analytics has found that the first generated more than $200m for the tech giant.

Parrot came to these figures via its Content Valuation methodology, which uses a formula to correlate audience demand with subscribers and therefore revenue. The system also examines how shows and movies generate value for streamers in markets across the globe.

According to Parrot, Severance is doing well compared with Apple hits like Slow Horses and The Morning Show. The former generated $184.8M during a similar timeframe to Severance Season 1, while the latter made $299.4M but across a much longer period of time. From Q3 2020 to Q3 2024, Ted Lasso, which has been teasing a fourth season, generated a whopping $609.4M, Parrot said.

As an acquisition driver, Parrot noted that the EMEA and Latin America regions have seen the greatest contribution from Severance. 

Severance Season 2 launched last Friday but is dropping episodes weekly, meaning fans will have to wait patiently for their fix of Mark S, Helly R and Mr Milchick. This builds into Parrot Senior Entertainment Industry Strategist Brandon Katz’s notion that “the critically acclaimed first season of Severance not only aligns with Apple’s premium brand, but provided a long tail of value for the streamer.”

Parrot’s research found that almost half of the revenue generated by Dan Erickson and Ben Stiller‘s hit came in the 12 months after the finale, which “underscores the show’s unique ability to elicit catch-up viewing and rewatches from hungry fans,” according to Katz. It is perhaps no wonder then that Apple has chosen weekly drops for Severance Season 2.

“All of this, plus its healthy pre-release demand trends, sets the stage for a ‘break out sequel’ type of performance for Season 2, which would help Apple fill the anchor series void without Ted Lasso,”added Katz. When looking at the 28 days leading into the upcoming season, Severance Season 2 now compares favorably to rival hits such as Cobra Kai, The Mandalorian and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Parrot said, backing up Katz’s claim.

«

The subscription for Apple TV+ (to get Severance etc) is $9.99 monthly, or £8.99 – which is ~$120 annually. I don’t see how you can get to $200m “generated” from the first season unless you think around two million people signed up and stayed signed up specifically because of Severance. (Which is, no argument, terrific.) I find that hard to credit.
unique link to this extract

A Samsung integration helps make Google’s Gemini the AI assistant to beat • The Verge

David Pierce:

»

According to recent reporting from The Wall Street Journal, CEO Sundar Pichai now believes Gemini has surpassed ChatGPT, and he wants Google to have 500 million users by the end of this year. It might just get there one Samsung phone at a time. [The new Galaxy phones use Google Gemini by default, rather than Samsung’s Bixby.]

Gemini is now a front-and-center feature on the world’s most popular Android phones, and millions upon millions of people will likely start to use it more — or use it at all — now that it’s so accessible. For Google, which is essentially betting that Gemini is the future of every single one of its products, that brings a hugely important new set of users and interactions. All that data makes Gemini better, which makes it more useful, which makes it more popular. Which makes it better again.

Right now, Google appears to be well ahead of its competitors in one important way: Gemini is the most capable virtual assistant on the market right now, and it’s not particularly close. It’s not that Gemini is specifically great; it’s just that it has more access to more information and more users than anyone else. This race is still in its early stages, and no AI product is very good yet — but Google knows better than anyone that if you can be everywhere, you can get good really fast. That worked so well with search that it got Google into antitrust trouble. This time, at least so far, it seems like Google’s going to have an even easier time taking over the market.

«

Bet there’s a juicy contract for Samsung to use Gemini rather than Bixby. However, I keep seeing examples of terrible misinformation being quoted by people in screenshots of Gemini results. Do not trust the chatbots. Do not trust the search engines. Check it yourself.
unique link to this extract

Anthropic chief says AI could surpass “almost all humans at almost everything” shortly after 2027 • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that AI models may surpass human capabilities “in almost everything” within two to three years, according to a Wall Street Journal interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Speaking at Journal House in Davos, Amodei said, “I don’t know exactly when it’ll come, I don’t know if it’ll be 2027. I think it’s plausible it could be longer than that. I don’t think it will be a whole bunch longer than that when AI systems are better than humans at almost everything. Better than almost all humans at almost everything. And then eventually better than all humans at everything, even robotics.”

Amodei co-founded Anthropic in 2021 with his sister, Daniela Amodei, and five other former OpenAI employees. Not long after, Anthropic emerged as a strong technological competitor to OpenAI’s AI products (such as GPT-4 and ChatGPT). Most recently, its Claude 3.5 Sonnet model has remained highly regarded among some AI users and highly ranked among AI benchmarks.

During the WSJ interview, Amodei also spoke some about the potential implications of highly intelligent AI systems when these AI models can control advanced robotics.

“[If] we make good enough AI systems, they’ll enable us to make better robots. And so when that happens, we will need to have a conversation… at places like this event, about how do we organize our economy, right? How do humans find meaning?”

He then shared his concerns about how human-level AI models and robotics that are capable of replacing all human labour may require a complete re-think of how humans value both labour and themselves.

“We’ve recognized that we’ve reached the point as a technological civilization where the idea, there’s huge abundance and huge economic value, but the idea that the way to distribute that value is for humans to produce economic labour, and this is where they feel their sense of self worth,” he added. “Once that idea gets invalidated, we’re all going to have to sit down and figure it out.”

«

Clever timescale: close enough to feel dangerous, far enough away to be deniable. Perhaps even further. “Better than humans at almost everything”? Really?
unique link to this extract

Solar-charging backpacks are helping children in Africa to read after dark • CNN

Joshua Korber Hoffman:

»

Fewer than half of households in mainland Tanzania are connected to electricity. This falls to just over a third in rural areas. Consequently, many families rely on kerosene lamps to provide light after dark.

These lamps produce dim light and are expensive to fill. They also pollute the air and carry the risk of burns. Parents often opt to send their children to bed, James explained, rather than allowing them to use the lamp to read.

James’ solution – flexible solar panels sewn onto the outside of bags to power a reading light – was inspired by a university professor who carried around a solar charger for his phone, sewn into a fabric pouch. “It gave me the confidence that what I want is going to work,” said James.

He started in 2016 by handmaking 80 backpacks per month, sewing on a solar panel sourced from China that charged during the children’s walk to and from school. By the time they returned home, they would have enough power for a reading light. A fully charged bag can power a light for six to eight hours, meaning that one day of bright weather can allow for multiple nights of reading, even if cloudy weather arrives.

James says the solar backpacks are more affordable than using an oil lamp. A solar bag costs between 12,000 and 22,500 Tanzanian shillings (approximately $4-8), with the reading light included – the same price as 12-22.5 days of using a kerosene lamp, according to an average cost estimated in a survey of Soma Bags customers.

Sold mainly from his growing franchise of mobile library carts, the bags became popular, and James increased production. He founded Soma Bags in 2019 and oversaw the construction of his own factory in the village of Bulale, in the Mwanza region, in 2020. The company now employs 65 staff.

«

unique link to this extract

AI simulates 500 million years of evolution to discover artificial fluorescent protein • EL PAÍS English

Javier Yanes:

»

In New York, a group of former researchers from Meta — the parent company of social networks Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — founded EvolutionaryScale, an AI startup focused on biology. The EvolutionaryScale Model 3 (ESM3) system created by the company is a generative language model — the same kind of platform that powers ChatGPT. However, while ChatGPT generates text, ESM3 generates proteins, the fundamental building blocks of life.

ESM3 feeds on sequence, structure, and function data from existing proteins to learn the biological language of these molecules and create new ones. Its creators have trained it with 771 billion data packets derived from 3.15 billion sequences, 236 million structures, and 539 million functional traits. This adds up to more than one trillion teraflops (a measure of computational performance) — the most computing power ever used in biology, according to the company.

…Rives and his collaborators applied ESM3 to the task of creating a new green fluorescent protein (GFP). GFP is a naturally occurring protein that glows green under ultraviolet light and is commonly used in research as a marker. The first GFP was discovered in a jellyfish, but other versions can also be found in corals and anemones. The scientists trained ESM3 to generate a new GFP, and the result surprised them: a fluorescent protein, which they named esmGFP, that is only 58% similar to the most closely related GFP. According to the researchers, this is equivalent to simulating 500 million years of evolution. ESM3 is now available to the scientific community as a new tool for designing proteins with therapeutic functions, environmental remediation capabilities, and other potential applications.

Thus, AI has uncovered a path that nature could have taken 500 million years ago, but for reasons unknown, did not.

«

unique link to this extract

Amazon races to transplant Alexa’s ‘brain’ with generative AI • Financial Times

Madhumita Murgia and Camilla Hodgson :

»

Amazon is gearing up to relaunch its Alexa voice-powered digital assistant as an artificial intelligence “agent” that can complete practical tasks, as the tech group races to resolve the challenges that have dogged the system’s AI overhaul.

The $2.4tn company has for the past two years sought to redesign Alexa, its conversational system embedded within 500mn consumer devices worldwide, so the software’s “brain” is transplanted with generative AI. 

Rohit Prasad, who leads the artificial general intelligence (AGI) team at Amazon, told the Financial Times the voice assistant still needed to surmount several technical hurdles before the rollout.

This includes solving the problem of “hallucinations” or fabricated answers, its response speed or “latency”, and reliability. “Hallucinations have to be close to zero,” said Prasad. “It’s still an open problem in the industry, but we are working extremely hard on it.” 

The vision of Amazon’s leaders is to transform Alexa, which is still used for a narrow set of simple tasks such as playing music and setting alarms, to an “agentic” product that acts as a personalised concierge. This could include anything from suggesting restaurants to configuring the lights in the bedroom based on a person’s sleep cycles.

Alexa’s redesign has been in train since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, backed by Microsoft, in late 2022.

«

Just a reminder that back in July, the WSJ reported that “Between 2017 and 2021, Amazon had more than $25bn in losses from its devices business, according to the documents. The losses for the years before and after that period couldn’t be determined.” Wonder if ChatGPT is going to fix that. I have my doubts.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new motorcycle helmet promises all-round vision thanks to AI. Will that reduce accidents? CC-licensed photo by sprklg on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Envisioned. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

This AI motorcycle helmet promises 100% blind-spot elimination • New Atlas

Utkarsh Sood:

»

AI has now made its way to motorcycle helmets. Gone are the days of cautious shoulder checks. Intelligent Cranium Helmets promises to provide riders with the highest level of protection by combining improved visibility, crash detection, and seamless connectivity into a single, high-tech helmet.

After showing a design concept back in 2015, the company has finally been able to produce an actual mass-produced, retail-ready product that is full as a tick with futuristic functionality. It’s called the iC-R, which is actually a range of four smart motorcycle helmet models, each with an added set of features to tickle your fancy. It was unveiled at CES 2025, and proved successful at garnering a fair amount of attention in the moto world.

But first, who is Intelligent Cranium Helmets? The Virginia-based company started in 2015 with a safety-first smart helmet tech approach that put a prime focus on integrating artificial intelligence into its product range.

“While driving to work one day, I noticed a number of motorcyclists traveling in the same direction I was,” says CEO and co-founder, Ambrose Dodson. “I observed the motorcyclists repeatedly turning their heads whenever they needed to change lanes, and I said to myself – there has to be a safer way for these riders to ride.”

The focal point of the AI helmet is its 240º field of reverse camera vision, which stitches together footage from two rear-mounted cameras into a wrapraound rear view video feed. This feed can be displayed right above the rider’s eyeline in a heads-up display (HUD).

The rider’s own visual field of view covers somewhere around a further 120º, adding up to what Intelligent Cranium claims is a full 360º of visual awareness. What’s more, there’s a 1080p/60fps action camera at the front of the helmet that covers a 152º angle.

«

I’m reminded of XKCD 538, “Security”, which overlooks how incredible technology is foiled by simple force. And this is nice, but won’t stop drivers pulling out of side roads or affect any of the most common motorcycle crash causes.
unique link to this extract

Cutting-edge Chinese “reasoning” model rivals OpenAI o1—and it’s free to download • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

Alongside the release of the main DeepSeek-R1-Zero and DeepSeek-R1 models, DeepSeek published six smaller “DeepSeek-R1-Distill” versions ranging from 1.5 billion to 70 billion parameters. These distilled models are based on existing open source architectures like Qwen and Llama, trained using data generated from the full R1 model. The smallest version can run on a laptop, while the full model requires far more substantial computing resources.

The releases immediately caught the attention of the AI community because most existing open-weights models—which can often be run and fine-tuned on local hardware—have lagged behind proprietary models like OpenAI’s o1 in so-called reasoning benchmarks. Having these capabilities available in an MIT-licensed model that anyone can study, modify, or use commercially potentially marks a shift in what’s possible with publicly available AI models.

“They are SO much fun to run, watching them think is hilarious,” independent AI researcher Simon Willison told Ars in a text message. Willison tested one of the smaller models and described his experience in a post on his blog: “Each response starts with a … pseudo-XML tag containing the chain of thought used to help generate the response,” noting that even for simple prompts, the model produces extensive internal reasoning before output.

«

Ben Thompson at Stratechery, who follows this stuff in a manner that is a bit more reader-friendly than Willison, is very excited at the prospect of a locally-run LLM that fits in a suitably enabled home computer.

It feels like this stuff is rapidly becoming commoditised; the only thing you’ll need is a computer with LOTS more RAM. Which takes us back to the good old 1990s/2000s, when getting more RAM was almost more important than having a faster CPU.
unique link to this extract

Gaming on Apple Vision Pro could see huge growth soon, suggest game makers • 9to5Mac

Ryan Christoffel:

»

As published by GamesBeat, a recent Game Developers Conference survey sought to gauge engagement from developers with Apple’s new spatial computing platform.

The data points to big growth coming soon. Here’s what it says:

»

Although only 8% of VR/AR developers are currently making games for Apple vision OS, the platform looks to be growing its foothold. Almost one-fifth (18%) of respondents say their next games will be on the platform, and one-fourth are interested in Apple’s VR headset.

«

These three data points are all interesting in their own ways.

First, it’s a bit surprising that 8% of VR/AR game developers are currently working on a visionOS project. We certainly haven’t seen much from their efforts yet, as Vision Pro gaming options have been scarce so far. That number is encouraging to hear.

Second, the fact that 18% of respondents confirmed their next game would be on Vision Pro shows how much growth we should see soon.

The final question is especially relevant too, especially when comparing visionOS interest to that of other platforms.

Notably, 26% of respondents said that visionOS was of high interest to them as a game developer, while only 25% said the same for PlayStation VR2—a platform that might be about to bolster Apple’s Vision Pro efforts.

«

I’ll believe it when I see it, because the Vision Pro just doesn’t have a big enough user base to be attractive. That would be the most sunk of sunk costs.

The Gamesbeat link is worth reading, because it distils an analysis of the current situation and mood in games. Which is: gloomy.
unique link to this extract

Trump Admin accused of using AI to draft Executive Orders • Futurism

Maggie Harrison Dupré:

»

Mere hours after being sworn in as the 47th president of the United States on Monday, returning President Donald Trump got to work signing dozens — and counting — of executive orders, which range from commands for the US to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization to ordering an end to birthright citizenship and renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.”

But while the executive actions range in scope, legal experts have called attention to some curious common threads: bizarre typos, formatting errors and oddities, and stilted language — familiar artifacts that have led to speculation that those who penned them might have turned to AI for help.

“Lots of reporting suggested that, this time around, Trump and his lawyers would avoid the sloppy legal work that plagued his first administration so they’d fare better in the courts,” Slate journalist and legal expert Mark Joseph Stern remarked last night in a Bluesky post. “I see no evidence of that in this round of executive orders.”

“This is poor, slipshod work,” he added, before alleging that the actions were “obviously assisted by AI.”
In another post, Stern pointed to a deeply questionable section of an executive action titled “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential,” which details how the US will take advantage of the state’s “untapped supply of natural resources,” in part by drilling for fossil fuels in regions of previously-protected natural land.

In that section, the order includes a numbered list of several distinct Public Land Orders to be reinstated. Each land order, however, is listed next to the number one — an apparent slip-up, we should point out, that we’ve noticed on seemingly AI-generated content in the past.

«

I wouldn’t rule out it just being slipshod humans, given it’s the Trump team. If they did use AI, the output is probably greatly improved from the original.
unique link to this extract

Weight-loss jabs linked to reduced risk of 42 conditions including dementia • The Guardian

Nicola Davis:

»

People with diabetes taking medications found in weight-loss jabs have a reduced risk of 42 conditions, research has found, paving the way for such drugs being used to treat a host of health problems.

The most comprehensive study of its kind showed that psychotic disorders, infections and dementia were among conditions found to be less likely to occur when using GLP-1RAs, which are found in the medications Saxenda, Wegovy and Mounjaro.

The researchers compared health outcomes for people with diabetes who received usual care with those also given drugs such as liraglutide, semaglutide and tirzepatide. While the team revealed the risk of many conditions was lower for the latter group, the risk of other conditions, including arthritic disorders, was increased.

And the scientists say that the benefits are not just restricted to people with diabetes, suggesting they could also be found in other people using the jabs, such as those who take them to fight obesity.

“We only studied people with diabetes but there is no biologic or clinical reason to think that the beneficial and risk profiles would be very different in people without diabetes,” said Dr Ziyad Al-Aly, a co-author of the research from Washington University in St Louis.

However, Aly said it was unlikely people without obesity would experience a similar range of potential benefits. He added that some of the positive associations might be linked to weight loss, while it was also important to consider the risks.

«

Greater weight leads to higher risk of psychotic disorders, infections and dementia? (For the latter, the study only has 3.5 years of data, so that seems an odd conclusion.)
unique link to this extract

The making of Community Notes • Asterisk

Asterisk magazine:

»

what falls out of those later studies that compare Community Notes to expert fact checks as well — the trust is higher. 

Lucas [Neumann, product designer at X]: Yes. But one thing to note about that outcome is that we had to put a lot of work into overcoming people’s priors. If you go back to 2021, and someone sees a tweet with a box on it, they immediately think, “Oh, this is a fact check.” They would assume that Twitter wrote it, or that the Twitter CEO decided that it should be there. What we’re taking one hour to tell you here is something we had to explain to them in a split second with just one line of copy. Arriving at that design and what those words are — I don’t think anyone here has ever done so many iterations on one rectangle. Things like, what’s the shade of blue that will make people calmer when they see this? The original design that Keith made was an orange box with “This is misleading information” at the top. Coming from that design to what we have now was a learning process. 

Keith [Coleman, VP of product at X]: That line — “Readers added context they thought people might want to know” — we iterated on that line so many times to find something that could succinctly describe what had happened here, how this came to be, that this was by the people, not by the company, and that it was there for your information, not to tell you what to think. 

Emily [Thai, formerly University of Chicago consultant to the Birdwatch scheme which became Community Notes]: I don’t think you will ever hear any of us — anybody who worked on this project — ever say the word “fact check.” There’s a care to avoid using that phrasing in any of the things we say about the product, any of the language about it, anything on the product surface, because it’s entirely about providing context and information and then letting you make your own decision about how to trust it.

«

This is a long but very interesting interview with this team.
unique link to this extract

Netflix UK audience reach overtakes BBC1 for first time in 2024 • Deadline

Jake Kanter:

»

Netflix was the most-watched TV service in the UK for three months last year, overtaking dominant domestic network BBC1 for the first time, according to a Deadline analysis.

The unseating of Britain’s most popular channel may not have been permanent, but represents a possible inflection point in the battle between traditional broadcasters and U.S. streaming giants. The BBC said it was “meaningless” to compare the entirety of Netflix with a single channel and that its portfolio had double the number of viewers of the Squid Game streamer.

Viewing figures from BARB, the UK’s official ratings body, showed that Netflix’s audience reach overtook BBC1 in September, October, and November 2024. For these three months, Netflix’s average audience reach stood at 43.2M, compared with BBC1’s 42.3M viewers.

BBC1 pulled ahead again in December, despite Netflix posting a record reach of 46.4M after streaming series including UK original Black Doves. BBC1’s reach was 48.4M last month, no doubt buoyed by festive hits including Gavin & Stacey and Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.

«

Yet you never hear anyone complaining about the news on Netflix, or demanding it be defunded. (Nor listening to its radio stations or reading its news website.) A basic ad-free Netflix subscription will cost £132 per year (likely going up presently, see below); the standard BBC licence fee is £169.50. Amazing what that extra £37.50 gets you.
unique link to this extract

Netflix is raising prices again – The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

Netflix is raising prices yet again. In its latest earnings report released Tuesday, the streaming service announced that “we are adjusting prices today across most plans” in the US, Canada, Portugal, and Argentina.

Netflix spokesperson MoMo Zhou tells The Verge that the ad-supported tier is increasing from $6.99 to $7.99 per month, while the standard ad-free tier will go from $15.49 to $17.99 per month. Its highest-priced premium tier is also increasing from $22.99 to $24.99 per month. The price hikes will go into effect during subscribers’ next billing cycle, according to Zhou.

“As we continue to invest in programming and deliver more value for our members, we will occasionally ask our members to pay a little more so that we can re-invest to further improve Netflix,” the company’s letter to investors says. Netflix last raised the price of its subscription in October 2023. This is also the first time it’s raising the price of this ad-supported plan, which it rolled out in 2022.

Netflix added 19 million new subscribers over the past few months — the most in its history during a single quarter — bringing its global total to 300 million.

«

A graphic with the story shows that since 2015, prices have risen by 25% (no HD, one screen) to 100% (HD or 4K, two to four screens). Has the content really got that much more expensive to make/license?
unique link to this extract

Reeves intervenes in UK car finance mis-selling case to protect lenders • Financial Times

George Parker, Alistair Gray and Akila Quinio:

»

In April the Supreme Court is due to hear an appeal brought by car loan providers challenging an October ruling from the Court of Appeal that sided with consumers who complained about “secret” commissions on car loans.

The judgment that it was unlawful for banks to pay a commission to a car dealer without the customer’s informed consent sent shockwaves through the UK banking system and triggered thousands of pounds in compensation payments from lenders FirstRand Bank and Close Brothers.

HSBC analysts have estimated the total cost of compensation could reach £44bn, echoing the £50bn paid out by banks after the scandal of the mis-selling of payment protection insurance (PPI).

In a submission to the Supreme Court, seen by the Financial Times, the Treasury claims the case has “potential to cause considerable economic harm and could impact the availability and cost of motor finance for consumers”.

The Treasury application said that the case might “generate a perception that regulation in the UK is uncertain”. Last week Reeves called in regulators to push them into sweeping away rules that hinder growth.

It also argues that if liability is established, then the Treasury would seek to persuade the Supreme Court that “any remedy should be proportionate to the loss actually suffered by the consumer and avoid conferring a windfall”.

Treasury insiders argue that rather than taking sides with the banks against wronged consumers, the government wants to maintain the viability of a finance sector vital for the purchase of both new and second-hand cars.

«

OK, but how much did the banks get from this? How much did it push prices up? Why do banks get away with it again and again?
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

On February 28 all seven planets should be observable from the ground in an arc across the sky – a syzygy. CC-licensed photo by Alan Levine on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Well aligned. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

The powerful AI tool that cops (or stalkers) can use to geolocate photos in seconds • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

A powerful AI tool can predict with high accuracy the location of photos based on features inside the image itself—such as vegetation, architecture, and the distance between buildings—in seconds, with the company now marketing the tool to law enforcement officers and government agencies.

Called GeoSpy, made by a firm called Graylark Technologies out of Boston, the tool has also been used for months by members of the public, with many making videos marveling at the technology, and some asking for help with stalking specific women. The company’s founder has aggressively pushed back against such requests, and GeoSpy closed off public access to the tool after 404 Media contacted him for comment.  

Based on 404 Media’s own tests and conversations with other people who have used it and investors, GeoSpy could radically change what information can be learned from photos posted online, and by whom. Law enforcement officers with very little necessary training, private threat intelligence companies, and stalkers could, and in some cases already are, using this technology. Dedicated open source intelligence (OSINT) professionals can of course do this too, but the training and skillset necessary can take years to build up. GeoSpy allows essentially anyone to do it.

“We are working on something for LE [law enforcement] but it’s 🤐,” Daniel Heinen, the founder of Graylark and GeoSpy, wrote in a message to the GeoSpy community Discord in July. 

GeoSpy has been trained on millions of images from around the world, according to marketing material available online. From that, the tool is able to recognize “distinct geographical markers such as architectural styles, soil characteristics, and their spatial relationships.” That marketing material says GeoSpy has strong coverage in the United States, but that it also “maintains global capabilities for location identification.”

«

It is impressive, as 404 Media demonstrated for itself by creating a free account and testing it on a couple of known pictures.

But: this seems like a useful product if its use can be limited to police.
unique link to this extract

Seven planets are lining up in the sky next month. This is what it really means • BBC Future

Jonathan O’Callaghan:

»

Six planets – Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – are currently visible in the night sky. During just one night in late February, they will be joined by Mercury, a rare seven-planet alignment visible in the sky.

But such events are not just a spectacle for stargazers – they can also have a real impact on our Solar System and offer the potential to gain new insights into our place within it.

The eight major planets of our Solar System orbit the Sun in the same flat plane, and all at different speeds. Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, completes an orbit – a year for the planet – in 88 days. Earth’s year, of course, is 365 days, while at the upper end, Neptune takes a whopping 60,190 days, or about 165 Earth years, to complete a single revolution of our star.

The different speeds of the planets mean that, on occasion, several of them can be roughly lined up on the same side of the Sun. From Earth, if the orbits line up just right, we can see multiple planets in our night sky at the same time. In rare events, all the planets will line up such that they all appear in our night sky together along the ecliptic, the path traced by the Sun.

Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are all bright enough to be visible to the naked eye, while Uranus and Neptune require binoculars or a telescope to spot.

In January and February, we can witness this event taking place. The planets are not exactly lined up, so they will appear in an arc across the sky due to their orbital plane in the Solar System. During clear nights in January and February, all of the planets except Mercury will be visible – an event sometimes called a planetary parade. On 28 February, though – weather permitting – all seven planets will be visible, a great spectacle for observers on the ground.

«

This is known as a syzygy (pronounced “sig-zee”) – though you only need two celestial objects for that. Here we’re going for the big one. Anyway, put 28 February in your diary.
unique link to this extract

Matt Mullenweg, Automattic’s CEO, seems determined to wreck WordPress • Digital CxO

Steven Vaughan-Nichols:

»

Many businesses are now wondering if they should continue to rely on WordPress, thanks to Mullenweg’s erratic behavior.

Their fears were aggravated when Automattic announced on January 15, 2025, that it would drastically reduce its contributions to the WordPress open-source project. Specifically, Automattic scaled back its weekly contribution from approximately 3,988 hours to just 45 hours. The company’s programmers will, instead, “focus on for-profit projects within Automattic, such as WordPress.com, Pressable, WPVIP, Jetpack, and WooCommerce.”

It’s worth noting that WordPress.org, which hosts the open-source version of WordPress, relies on the sites and services Mullenweg controls.

Why? Automattic blames the WP Engine lawsuits. “This legal action diverts significant time and energy that could otherwise be directed toward supporting WordPress’s growth and health. We remain hopeful that WP Engine will reconsider this legal attack, allowing us to refocus our efforts on contributions that benefit the broader WordPress ecosystem.”

What the developers, who will now work on for-profit programs, have to do with the lawsuit remains an open question.

In the meantime, more and more developers and users are looking for a WordPress fork as a possible answer. WordPress is licensed under the GPLv2, so forking it is simple legally.

«

This has been bubbling under for ages and ages, but now seems to have reached another, um, fork in the road.
unique link to this extract

Thoughts for Inauguration Day • Eating Policy

Jennifer Pahlka:

»

you don’t have to feel that the system is fundamentally rigged against you personally to entertain the possible benefits of “the rule of men,” or perhaps we could just say people. The reality is that people are frustrated with a system in which it feels like laws — a complex, tangled, often contradictory, seemingly arbitrary web of rules that most people don’t understand — dictate outcomes at the expense of reasonable human judgement. Philip Howard [in his book The Death of Common Sense: how law is suffocating America] provides an endless stream of examples of rules winning out when common sense could have prevailed, like the homeless shelter in New York that couldn’t be built without installing a prohibitively expensive elevator, despite the fact that only the first floor was to be used, or the public school custodian who, despite being perfectly capable of fixing the broken window, instead had to file paperwork to order union labor to do so, leaving the window broken for months while the paperwork made its way through the bureaucracy and a team could be assigned.

These aren’t edge cases. They are just the routine results of what Dan Davies calls the unaccountability machine, in his excellent book of the same name. Rule by people would allow for judgement, for just fixing the window. Rule by law leaves the cold air freezing the students while costs spiral.

When Biden took power back from Trump in 2021, there was enormous relief among lawyers in government. I know of one agency in which the mere statement “we will respect the rule of law,” spoken that first day of the Biden administration, elicited tears from otherwise buttoned-up bureaucrats. It’s entirely understandable, even touching, given the chaos that had ensued at that agency. But what followed during the next four years, across a Democratically-led federal government, was a retreat to the safety of process and procedure. It felt good and right after the lawlessness of the Trump years to luxuriate in its antidote.

But there is a cost to that refuge. Quinta Jurecic, also writing in the Times, describes the cost to the Department of Justice, whose leadership under Biden vowed to hold Trump accountable for the January 6th assault on the Capitol, and failed to do so, in part because of how slowly it moved.

«

Pahlka’s point is: maybe this mess does need some sort of Gordian knot treatment. Back in 2017, she wrote a post which began “remember, the status quo isn’t worth protecting”, and she reiterates that now.
unique link to this extract

I’m a 17-year-old TikTok junkie. I need this ban • The New York Times

Juliet Weisfogel:

»

Every day, I get home from school around 3:30 p.m., with a list of assignments that, if I’m focused, should take until 6 to complete. But I don’t usually end up finishing them until 11. Why? TikTok. It all starts at 3:45, when I typically flop down on my bed and open the app for “just a minute.”

But by the time I get up from bed, that “minute” has swelled into several hours. At the moment I am writing this, I could instead distract myself by looking at an orange Muppet-like monster detailing an outlandish and embarrassing story from a non-puppet person’s life. I’ll “like” one video, comment on another and keep my thumb moving. I open the comments on each to laugh and commiserate with others; oftentimes, the harmony in our responses creates the illusion of community — even though we are each very much alone with our phones. I love TikTok so much that I cannot imagine a life without it. And yet I desperately need a life without it.

This app has infiltrated American culture. The national TikTok ban, which entered into force on Sunday, was ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court on Friday. Now, the Google and Apple app stores will be penalized for carrying it and the app has gone dark. President Biden has indicated he will leave enforcement of the ban up to the incoming administration. It still remains to be seen whether President-elect Donald Trump will be able to halt the prohibition once he takes office.

Given my love of TikTok, you might think the notion of losing it would horrify me, and yet, it fills me with hope. You see, I’m a 17-year-old TikTok junkie, and I wholeheartedly support a law that would sever me forever from my fix. My support for this ban has nothing to do with national security. I don’t know whether my name, email address and phone number are stored in Washington, Texas or China. Perhaps I should care more about that, but what worries me most right now is the future of my generation.

«

There is the possibility in the law as written for Trump to institute a 90-day pause on the law. Those are going to be three interesting months.
unique link to this extract

Welcome to the era of gangster tech regulation • The Verge

Elizabeth Lopatto:

»

Our tech overlords all have problems, and they want to buy the solutions. I guess it was easier than making products people actually like.

“First Buddy” Elon Musk spent at least a quarter of a billion dollars electing Donald Trump. Corporations and wealthy donors have sent half a billion more since he was elected. Amazon, Google, Uber, Microsoft, and Meta donated $1m each to Trump’s inauguration, as did Apple’s Tim Cook and OpenAI’s Sam Altman. (Joe Biden’s inauguration hardly received this kind of largesse.) “In the first term, everybody was fighting me,” Trump said in December.  “In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”

Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, the three wealthiest men on Earth, are reportedly attending the inauguration; they were to be seated with elected officials and cabinet nominees, before the ceremony was moved indoors. (Cook is also reportedly attending.) Musk will have office space in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House, according to The New York Times. 

So what are these men buying?

Real market opportunities are rarer than they used to be. Tech executives and investors have become openly resentful about their products’ societal repercussions and an unconscionable lack of adulation from the citizenry. Zuckerberg in particular seems bored with Facebook, his major moneymaker, and has been searching for a new toy.  He spent at least $46 billion plus the cost of a company rebrand on the Metaverse, only to find that his Big New Thing didn’t have legs. His latest Big New Thing is AR glasses, which are heavily reliant on whatever AI (and, likely, tariff) policy Trump will dictate. 

Nearly every major tech company has at least one lawsuit pending. Apple has an antitrust suit pending. Google just lost one. There’s also a Federal Trade Commission suit that could peel Instagram and WhatsApp off Meta. Trump cares little about the actual purpose of antitrust enforcement: making companies compete for customers with good products. All the pending litigation is just leverage for Trump to punish anyone who doesn’t fall in line.

«

This is indeed the new reality. Still, those checks and balances in the US Constitution are bound to kick in real soon now, aren’t they?
unique link to this extract

The Pentagon says AI is speeding up its ‘kill chain’ • TechCrunch

Maxwell Zeff:

»

Leading AI developers, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, are threading a delicate needle to sell software to the United States military: make the Pentagon more efficient, without letting their AI kill people.

Today, their tools are not being used as weapons, but AI is giving the Department of Defense a “significant advantage” in identifying, tracking, and assessing threats, the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Officer, Dr. Radha Plumb, told TechCrunch in a phone interview.

“We obviously are increasing the ways in which we can speed up the execution of kill chain so that our commanders can respond in the right time to protect our forces,” said Plumb.

The “kill chain” refers to the military’s process of identifying, tracking, and eliminating threats, involving a complex system of sensors, platforms, and weapons. Generative AI is proving helpful during the planning and strategizing phases of the kill chain, according to Plumb.

…when TechCrunch asked if the Pentagon buys and operates weapons that are fully autonomous – ones with no humans in the loop – Plumb rejected the idea on principle.

“No, is the short answer,” said Plumb. “As a matter of both reliability and ethics, we’ll always have humans involved in the decision to employ force, and that includes for our weapon systems.”
The word “autonomy” is somewhat ambiguous and has sparked debates all over the tech industry about when automated systems – such as AI coding agents, self-driving cars, or self-firing weapons – become truly independent.

Plumb said the idea that automated systems are independently making life and death decisions was “too binary,” and the reality was less “science fiction-y.”

«

I’m surprised the Pentagon uses a phrase like “kill chain” when it could instead say “threat eliminator” or something less kill-y.
unique link to this extract

I shook Elon Musk warmly by the hand…more than 20 years ago • Status-Q

Quentin Stafford-Fraser did indeed meet Rocket Man way back when:

»

Though he neither founded Tesla nor designed the cars himself, his perseverance, vision, and willingness to spend his cash where others weren’t, has dragged an entire industry, mostly kicking and screaming, into a far better place, both technologically and for the planet.

I remember the shock of traditional car dealers in 2016, trying hard to sell a few more cars at discounts to fill their next quarter’s quota, when it was announced that quarter of a million people had put down a deposit for the recently-announced Model 3: a car they had never even seen. It took that kind of major eathquake to rattle the enormous global inertia of the fossil-burning world and to kick investment in battery-production up to a whole new level. I won’t pretend Musk was doing all of this for purely selfless reasons, or that he did it entirely on his own, but many thousands of Greta Thunbergs combined could not dream of having such an impact. He changed the world.

Now, it also soon became apparent that Musk wasn’t, let’s say, an entirely reliable figure! It’s funny now, looking back, to think my main criticism of him used to be his inability to hit his unrealistic deadlines, and the number of his announced products that never saw the light of day at all. There are drivers now on their third or fourth Tesla who still can’t get the ‘Full Self-Driving’ feature they paid for with their first!

But since then, it won’t have escaped your notice that almost every day’s news has included some new and bigger reason to doubt, dislike, ridicule or fear him, and even the significant amount of slack I was willing to cut him has long since been exhausted.

But here’s the thing. My Tesla is still an annoyingly wonderful car.

«

The Greta Thunberg point is a good one: similarly, one could ask how much change Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil has actually achieved, versus solar panel and battery storage vendors.
unique link to this extract

Brussels orders X to hand over documents on algorithm • Financial Times

Javier Espinoza and Andy Bounds:

»

Brussels has ordered Elon Musk to fully disclose recent changes made to recommendations on X, stepping up an investigation into the role of the social media platform in European politics.

The expanded probe by the European Commission, announced on Friday, requires X to hand over internal documents regarding its recommendation algorithm. The Commission also issued a “retention order” for all relevant documents relating to how the algorithm could be amended in future.

In addition, the EU regulator requested access to information on how the social media network moderates and amplifies content.

The move follows complaints from politicians in Germany that X’s algorithm is promoting content by the far right ahead of the country’s February 23 elections. Musk has come out in favour of Alternative for Germany (AfD), arguing that it will save Europe’s largest nation from “economic and cultural collapse”. The German domestic intelligence service has designated parts of the AfD as right-wing extremist.

Speaking on Friday, German chancellor Olaf Scholz toughened his language towards the world’s richest man, describing Musk’s support for the AfD as “completely unacceptable”. The party is currently second place in the polls with around 20% support, ahead of Scholz’s Social Democrats and behind the opposition Christian Democratic Union.

Earlier in the week, Germany’s defence ministry and foreign ministry said they were suspending their activity on X, with the defence ministry saying it had become increasingly “unhappy” with the platform.

«

unique link to this extract

Please don’t force dark mode • Vishnu’s Pages

Vishnu Haridas:

»

The real problem is the contrast ratio between the text and the background when using dark mode.

For example, pure white text on a pitch black background can strain my eyes and be very difficult to read. The contrast ratio of this combination is 21:1 (black background, pure white text). Here’s an example paragraph:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

However, light gray text on a dark gray background is easy on my eyes. Here the background is #666 and the text is #E0E0E0 which creates a contrast ratio of 4.34:1.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

In summary, higher contrast ratios in dark mode cause discomfort for my eyes. But when I say ‘higher’, just how high can it go?

«

I hate dark mode. Never use it. Hate it when people post stuff using it.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

To Walgreens, digital refrigerator doors which display images of contents sounded cool – until the makers blanked them in a dispute. CC-licensed photo by Phillip Pessar on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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.

No, you can’t use your $6,299.00 Canon camera as a webcam. That will cost $5/month • Roman Zipp

Roman Zipp takes some impressive photos. But:

»

Last year, I bought a Canon G5 X II camera, which I wanted to use mainly for taking pictures at concerts. For me, it was the best match of focal range (zoom) and sensor size (more light) of any compact camera I’ve compared.

Because I’m only using this camera for a small range of events, it’s just collecting dust in the meantime. So why not use it as a webcam with my Macbook? Admittedly, it did not cost me the $6,300 from the article’s title; much closer to $900. Nonetheless, everything I’m describing translates to every other Canon camera model!

I tried this at first in 2024 with macOS 14, which did not work. I had a similar experience with FUJIFILM’s X Webcam software where either the camera was not recognized by the software, or the camera feed will freeze or simply be not available within other apps.

As of January 2025 with macOS 15 Sequoia, these issues have been resolved for me.

Well, actually, only if you are able to download the software at all. Seems like their Microsoft IIS server is having some issues. The following error page will be presented to you, after they asked you for your full legal name and mail address – without which you can not download the software.

So I was really excited when I finally found a downloadable file on the Canon webpage which was not blocked by a faulty newsletter grift and saw the live feed of my camera!

Except the excitement didn’t last long. Nearly every single setting is disabled if you’re using the software without a paying Canon account.

«

Yes, Canon’s software isn’t a one-off free downloadable. It’s not even a single-price product: Canon wants you to pay $5/month or $50/year to connect your pricey, pricey camera and use it as a webcam. Zipp accepts that software doesn’t write itself. But that’s the sort of price you’d expect for something with incredible utility – not that does much the same job as free software (which does exist to do this).

Everything’s going subscription, and it’s not good.
unique link to this extract

Walgreens replaced its refrigerator doors with digitized ad-laden glass. It might become a $200m debacle • Fortune via Yahoo

Sydney Lake:

»

You may have started seeing digitized refrigerator doors at some of your favourite grocery stores and other retailers [in the US]. But Walgreens has had years-long drama with a provider of the ad-bearing fridge doors—and they’re trying to get out of their contract.

Doing so, however, could cost the company millions.

Cooler Screens sued the pharmacy chain for $200m in June 2023 for breach of contract, according to a case filing in Cook County, Ill. While it’s not news that Cooler Screens sued Walgreens, and Walgreens subsequently countersued Cooler Screens for monetary damages, Bloomberg reported Thursday Cooler Screens CEO Arsen Avakian found his own means of retaliation.

Avakian’s team secretly cut the data feeds to digitized refrigerator doors at more than 100 Walgreens stores in the Chicago area, Bloomberg reported. These “smart doors” would typically display images and prices for the actual products behind the glass, as well as advertisements. As part of their contract, Cooler Screens had installed 10,000 smart doors at hundreds of U.S. Walgreens locations, according to Bloomberg, and had plans to install 35,000 more doors.

But in December, the doors at the select Chicago locations “glazed over with white pixels,” or “blacked out altogether,” according to Bloomberg, preventing customers from finding the products they were searching for.

“We were disappointed in Cooler Screens’ attempts to interfere with our customers’ experience in certain stores and are pleased all their cooler doors have now been removed,” a Walgreens spokesperson told Fortune. “We look forward to showing all the ways in which Cooler Screens breached its contract and being vindicated in court.”

Counsel for Walgreens even suggested the outage hurt the pharmacy chain’s business in the last [Christmas] quarter.

«

There’s being cut-throat, and then there’s cutting your own throat, and Cooler Screens seems to be doing both. Why would anyone go with them knowing this is how they might behave?
unique link to this extract

Cameras are now fining drivers for illegally passing school buses in Florida county • The Autopian

Lewin Day:

»

Down in Florida, Miami-Dade County is famous for three things—sun, sand, and school bus traffic cameras. The city has implemented an automatic camera system on its school bus fleet known as BusPatrol. The cameras film cars that blow past school buses when they’re loading and unloading passengers—and automatically issue fines to offending drivers.

This might sound like a high-tech solution to a nothing problem, but that’s sadly not the case. As covered by NBC Miami, over 11,500 violations were recorded in the first few weeks of the 2024/2025 school year—or roughly 1,600 violations per school day. The sheer volume of incidents prompted Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office to release a video of some of the worst offenders blowing past school buses with lights flashing and stop signs out.

The city isn’t messing around with penalties, either. Pass a school bus that has its lights on and stop signs out, and you could get a fine for $225.

The cameras are supplied by a company called BusPatrol. They’re installed on the side of the bus and rely on wide-angle lenses to gain good vision of the adjacent roadway. The cameras are set up to capture footage whenever the bus has its stop sign deployed. Footage is uploaded via the cellular network, and AI models are used to process the video to determine when a vehicle has performed an illegal pass. Human reviewers then check the footage before it is provided to the city as evidence so citations can be issued.

It’s not just Miami Dade getting on board, either. The same technology has been deployed in New York, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania, amongst other jurisdictions. It’s an attractive proposition to many cities, offering safety for students, peace of mind for parents, and a new income stream from offending drivers.

«

Smart, simple, socially beneficial. This is how we like technology to be.
unique link to this extract

Global economy could face 50% loss in GDP between 2070 and 2090 from climate shocks, say actuaries • The Guardian

Sandra Laville:

»

The global economy could face 50% loss in gross domestic product (GDP) between 2070 and 2090 from the catastrophic shocks of climate change unless immediate action by political leaders is taken to decarbonise and restore nature, according to a new report.

The stark warning from risk management experts the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) hugely increases the estimate of risk to global economic wellbeing from climate change impacts such as fires, flooding, droughts, temperature rises and nature breakdown. In a report with scientists at the University of Exeter, published on Thursday, the IFoA, which uses maths and statistics to analyse financial risk for businesses and governments, called for accelerated action by political leaders to tackle the climate crisis.

Their report was published after data from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) showed climate breakdown drove the annual global temperature above the internationally agreed 1.5ºC target for the first time in 2024, supercharging extreme weather.

Without urgent action to accelerate decarbonisation, remove carbon from the atmosphere and repair nature, the plausible worst-case hit to global economies would be 50% in the two decades before 2090, the IFoA report said.

At 3ºC or more of heating by 2050, there could be more than 4 billion deaths, significant sociopolitical fragmentation worldwide, failure of states (with resulting rapid, enduring, and significant loss of capital), and extinction events.

«

They call today “blue Monday”. Just trying to help.
unique link to this extract

Apple iPhone launch: Nokia internal presentation • Aalto repository

Via John Gruber, this is an internal presentation at Nokia the day after the iPhone launched. It points out how the iPhone is “a serious high-end contender” and suggests that RIM and Palm are going to be hurt by it. (It’s part of an archive released by Nokia.)

Pretty much everything is dead on – except maybe the realisation of how quickly Google would be able to copy the interface with Android, and how *that* would eat Nokia’s lunch. (Perhaps there’s something about that elsewhere in the archive.)

One of the authors of the deck is Peter Richardson, who from 2005 to 2012 was Nokia’s global head of market & competitive intelligence. He now runs Counterpoint Research, which does excellent analysis of multiple technology markets.
unique link to this extract

TikTok starts working again after Trump says he will stall a ban • The New York Times

David McCabe:

»

TikTok flickered back to life in the United States on Sunday after President-elect Donald J. Trump said that he would issue an executive order to stall a federal ban of the app.

The abrupt shift came after just hours after major app stores removed the popular social media site and it stopped operating for U.S. users as a federal law took effect on Sunday. The company said in a post on X that in “agreement with our service providers, TikTok is in the process of restoring service.”

Mr. Trump said in a Sunday morning post on Truth Social that he would “issue an executive order on Monday to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security.”

The ban stems from a 2024 law that requires app stores and cloud computing providers to stop distributing or hosting TikTok unless it is sold by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. Lawmakers passed the law over concerns that the Chinese government could use the app, which claims roughly 170 million United States users, to gather information about Americans or spread propaganda.

App stores and cloud computing providers that do not comply with the law face potentially significant financial penalties. Mr. Trump said in his post on Sunday that his order would “confirm that there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order.”

«

But the law is in effect now, and Trump is not yet president – that doesn’t happen until 12 noon EST or so on Monday. Start as you mean to go on, I guess, telling people the law doesn’t apply to them.

Apparently Trump also wants TikTok to be 50% owned by the US government. But for that, Bytedance has to sell. It hasn’t shown any inclination to sell.
unique link to this extract

‘All hands on deck’: Bird flu in US poultry puts state cooperation to the test • The Guardian

Melody Schreiber:

»

Maryland has detected bird flu among three different commercial poultry flocks in the past week, marking the state’s first outbreak in more than a year. The discoveries come shortly after the establishment of a joint command with Delaware following the latter state’s detection of H5N1 in two other poultry operations.

Although the deadly bird flu has circulated in North America since 2022, the past few months have been especially brutal for the poultry industry. More than 20 million egg-laying hens died in the fall, the worst rates since the outbreak began, and egg prices have risen as a result.

About 134 million birds in the commercial poultry industry have been affected by the US outbreak so far, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

The USDA is creating a new stockpile of H5N1 vaccines for poultry, though there is no plan to use them yet, Eric Deeble, deputy under-secretary for marketing and regulatory programs for the USDA, told reporters on Thursday.

The outbreaks signal the need for increased vigilance of animals – and the people who come into contact with them, officials said.

Hospitals should test all flu-positive patients, especially those in intensive care units, within 24 hours to speed up contact tracing and public health investigations, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced in a health alert on Thursday.

«

OK so now it’s Trump’s watching brief. And meanwhile the state of Georgia has shut down poultry sales. It’s all kicking off.
unique link to this extract

Inside Elon Musk’s plan for DOGE to slash government costs • The New York Times

Theodore Schleifer and Madeleine Ngo:

»

An unpaid group of billionaires, tech executives and some disciples of Peter Thiel, a powerful Republican donor, are preparing to take up unofficial positions in the U.S. government in the name of cost-cutting.

As President-elect Donald J. Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency girds for battle against “wasteful” spending, it is preparing to dispatch individuals with ties to its co-leaders, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to agencies across the federal government.

After Inauguration Day, the group of Silicon Valley-inflected, wide-eyed recruits will be deployed to Washington’s alphabet soup of agencies. The goal is for most major agencies to eventually have two DOGE representatives as they seek to cut costs like Mr. Musk did at X, his social media platform.

This article is based on interviews with roughly a dozen people who have insight into DOGE’s operations. They spoke to The Times on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

On the eve of Mr. Trump’s presidency, the structure of DOGE is still amorphous and closely held. People involved in the operation say that secrecy and avoiding leaks is paramount, and much of its communication is conducted on Signal, the encrypted messaging app.

Mr. Trump has said the effort would drive “drastic change,” and that the entity would provide outside advice on how to cut wasteful spending. DOGE itself will have no power to cut spending — that authority rests with Congress. Instead, it is expected to provide recommendations for programs and other areas to cut.

«

We are entering such a peculiar period. Though it is entirely possible that these people will discover sclerotic procedures everywhere, and be able to make some difference. The question is, what does truly efficient government look like? Is there anywhere else in the world that does have it, which can be the role model?

unique link to this extract

GM banned from selling your driving data for five years • The Verge

Andrew Hawkins:

»

General Motors and its subsidiary OnStar are banned from selling customer geolocation and driving behavior data for five years, the Federal Trade Commission announced Thursday.

The settlement comes after a New York Times investigation found that GM had been collecting micro-details about its customers’ driving habits, including acceleration, braking, and trip length — and then selling it to insurance companies and third-party data brokers like LexisNexis and Verisk. Clueless vehicle owners were then left wondering why their insurance premiums were going up. 

For example, one consumer told a GM customer service representative that “[w]hen I signed up for this, it was so OnStar could track me. They said nothing about reporting it to a third party. Nothing. […] You guys are affecting our bottom line. I pay you, now you’re making me pay more to my insurance company.”

FTC accused GM of using a “misleading enrollment process” to get vehicle owners to sign up for its OnStar connected vehicle service and Smart Driver feature. The automaker failed to disclose to customers that it was collecting their data, nor did GM seek out their consent to sell it to third parties. After the Times exposed the practice, GM said it was discontinuing its OnStar Smart Driver program.

«

You’ll never go wrong if you expect every American company to do the worst thing possible with any data it gets hold of.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified