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.
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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:
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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.
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Not so super, Apple • One Foot Tsunami
Paul Kafasis:
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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.
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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.
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28 days of media slides • The Mediator
Doug Shapiro:
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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.
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Trump issues Executive Order to boost cryptocurrency industry • The New York Times
David Yaffe-Bellany:
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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.
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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.”
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TabBoo: a Chrome extension for sites you’re trying to avoid
“Justin”:
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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.
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Certainly something to try if you’ve got a problem where you just can’t stay off a site. Perhaps.
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Fitbit fined $12m for Ionic smartwatches that burned 78 people • The Verge
Gaby Del Valle:
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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.
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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.
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Google buys part of HTC’s Vive VR team for $250m • Engadget
Mariella Moon:
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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.
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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?
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Apple, Google mobile ecosystems face U.K. probe under new tech rules • WSJ via MSN
Edith Hancock:
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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.
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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?
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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:
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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.
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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?
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The ultra-fast cancer treatments which could replace conventional radiotherapy • BBC Future
David Cox:
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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.
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Now being tested at CERN – yes, the home of the Large Hadron Collider.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 