A BT scheme to turn its 60,000 street cabinets into EV charging points has been abandoned after converting… one. CC-licensed photo by Mike Cattell 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. It’s about fact-checking. Fairly sure about that.

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

Google won’t add fact-checks despite new EU law • Axios

Sara Fischer:

»

Google has told the EU it will not add fact checks to search results and YouTube videos or use them in ranking or removing content, despite the requirements of a new EU law, according to a copy of a letter obtained by Axios.

Google has never included fact-checking as part of its content moderation practices. The company had signalled privately to EU lawmakers that it didn’t plan to change its practices, but it’s reaffirming its stance ahead of a voluntary code becoming law in the near future.

In a letter written to Renate Nikolay, the deputy director general under the content and technology arm at the European Commission, Google’s global affairs president Kent Walker said the fact-checking integration required by the Commission’s new Disinformation Code of Practice “simply isn’t appropriate or effective for our services” and said Google won’t commit to it.

The code would require Google to incorporate fact-check results alongside Google’s search results and YouTube videos. It would also force Google to build fact-checking into its ranking systems and algorithms.

Walker said Google’s current approach to content moderation works and pointed to successful content moderation during last year’s “unprecedented cycle of global elections” as proof.

He said a new feature added to YouTube last year that enables some users to add contextual notes to videos “has significant potential.” (That program is similar to X’s Community Notes feature, as well as new program announced by Meta last week.)

The EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation, introduced in 2022, includes several voluntary commitments that tech firms and private companies, including fact-checking organizations, are expected to deliver on.

«

Community Notes, eh? Everybody’s heading that way. Seems like the EU’s code is going to be quietly ignored.
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Biden administration will leave it to Trump to implement TikTok ban • ABC News

Elizabeth Schulze, Devin Dwyer, and Steven Portnoy:

»

The Biden administration doesn’t plan to take action that forces TikTok to immediately go dark for US users on Sunday, an administration official told ABC News.

TikTok could still proactively choose to shut itself down that day — a move intended to send a clear message to the 170 million people it says use the app each month about the wide-ranging impact of the ban.

But the Biden administration is now signaling it won’t enforce the law that goes into effect one day before the president leaves office.

“Our position on this has been clear: TikTok should continue to operate under American ownership. Given the timing of when it goes into effect over a holiday weekend a day before inauguration, it will be up to the next administration to implement,” a White House official told ABC News in a statement.

The way the law works, TikTok isn’t required to go dark on [Sunday] January 19. It’s the app stores and internet hosting services that could be on the hook if they keep providing their services to TikTok. The law gives the Justice Department the power to pursue fines of up to $5,000 per user, an enormous potential liability given the app’s popularity.

«

Of note: the TikTok CEO is going to the Trump inauguration on Monday. Wonder if there will be any time for a little side chat. And of course the Biden administration remains pusillanimous to the end.
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BT scraps EV charging point scheme, having only installed… one • BBC News

Imran Rahman-Jones:

»

BT has abandoned its scheme to turn green street cabinets into electric vehicle (EV) charging points having completed only one of the 60,000 conversions it initially said it was aiming for.

The metal cases, seen on streets around the UK, are usually used for phone and broadband cables.
When it announced the project in January 2024, BT said repurposing the cabinets was a “unique opportunity” to address a “key barrier” to people switching away from petrol and diesel cars.
However, the scheme has now been scrapped with the firm saying it will be focusing on “the Wi-Fi connectivity challenge surrounding EV’s” instead.

“It’s disappointing that it’s not going to proceed,” Stuart Masson from automotive website The Car Expert told BBC News. “The good news that we are seeing in the industry is that the overall rollout of electric charging points is accelerating faster than had been predicted a couple of years ago,” he added.

However, he said that most of the charging points are in busier areas rather than on streets nearer to people’s homes, meaning BT’s decision was still a setback.

Mr Masson welcomed its pledge to improve wi-fi infrastructure around EV charging points.

“It’s very frustrating when you turn up to a charging point, you go to log into the app… and you can’t get a connection because you’re buried in a multi-storey car park somewhere and there’s no signal,” he said. “If BT can make a dent in that then that would be really good.”

«

BT (the UK’s dominant telecoms company) really has form on making big pronouncements about how it’s going to transform this or that, and then not following through. There was the time it was going to get rich from owning a patent on web links (nope!), and then all the phone boxes would be internet connections.. it’s always junk. If BT promises it, it’s not going to happen.
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RedNote may wall off “TikTok refugees” to prevent US influence on Chinese users • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Just a few days after more than 700 million new users flooded RedNote—which Time noted is “the most apolitical social platform in China”—rumors began swirling that RedNote may soon start segregating American users and other foreign IPs from the app’s Chinese users.

In the “TikTokCringe” subreddit, a video from a RedNote user with red eyes, presumably swollen from tears, suggested that Americans had possibly ruined the app for Chinese Americans who rely on RedNote to stay current on Chinese news and culture.

“RedNote or Xiaohongshu released an update in the greater China region with the function to separate out foreign IPs, and there are now talks of moving all foreign IPs to a separate server and having a different IP for those who are in the greater China area,” the Reddit poster said. “I know through VPNs and other ways, people are still able to access the app, but essentially this is gonna kill the app for Chinese Americans who actually use the app to connect with Chinese content, Chinese language, Chinese culture.”

«

China worried about an influx of Americans spoiling its culture? I suppose it’s vaguely possible. But also that TikTok would like to not be shut down.
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Rapid expansion of batteries will be crucial to meet climate and energy security goals set at COP28 • International Energy Agency

»

Growth in batteries outpaced almost all other clean energy technologies in 2023 as falling costs, advancing innovation and supportive industrial policies helped drive up demand for a technology that will be critical to delivering the climate and energy targets outlined at the COP28 climate conference in Dubai, according to a new IEA report. 

In the first comprehensive analysis of the entire battery ecosystem, the IEA’s Special Report on Batteries and Secure Energy Transitions sets out the role that batteries can play alongside renewables as a competitive, secure and sustainable alternative to electricity generation from fossil fuels – while also underpinning the decarbonisation of road transport by powering electric vehicles. 

In less than 15 years, battery costs have fallen by more than 90%, one of the fastest declines ever seen in clean energy technologies. The most common type of batteries, those based on lithium-ion, have typically been associated with consumer electronics. But today, the energy sector accounts for over 90% of overall battery demand. In 2023 alone, battery deployment in the power sector increased by more than 130% year-on-year, adding a total of 42 gigawatts (GW) to electricity systems around the world. In the transport sector, batteries have enabled electric car sales to surge from 3 million in 2020 to almost 14 million last year, with further strong growth expected in the coming years.

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90% in 15 years is absolutely amazing.
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From chalkboards to chatbots: transforming learning in Nigeria, one prompt at a time • World Bank

Martín De Simone, Federico Tiberti, Wuraola Mosuro, Federico Manolio, Maria Barron and Eliot Dikoru:

»

“AI helps us to learn, it can serve as a tutor, it can be anything you want it to be, depending on the prompt you write,” says Omorogbe Uyiosa, known as “Uyi” by his friends, a student from the Edo Boys High School, in Benin City, Nigeria. His school was one of the beneficiaries of a pilot that used generative artificial intelligence (AI) to support learning through an after-school program.

A few months ago, we wrote a blogpost with some of the lessons from the implementation of this innovative program, including a video with voices from beneficiaries, such as Uyi. Back then, we promised that, if you stayed tuned, we would get back with the results of the pilot, which included an impact evaluation. So here we are with three primary findings from the pilot!

1: The program boosted learning across the board

The results of the randomized evaluation, soon to be published, reveal overwhelmingly positive effects on learning outcomes. After the six-week intervention between June and July 2024, students took a pen-and-paper test to assess their performance in three key areas: English language—the primary focus of the pilot—AI knowledge, and digital skills.

Students who were randomly assigned to participate in the program significantly outperformed their peers who were not in all areas, including English, which was the main goal of the program. These findings provide strong evidence that generative AI, when implemented thoughtfully with teacher support, can function effectively as a virtual tutor.

«

And, perhaps unsurprisingly on this axis, “deeper engagement delivered bigger gains”. It’s difficult to figure out whether this is the availability factor – that having access to something which will keep answering your questions, or give you context for answers, makes a significant difference. The nagging question is, what if it’s wrong?
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iOS 18.3 makes 5 changes to Apple Intelligence notification summaries • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

»

Apple released iOS 18.3 beta 3 to developers this afternoon. The update includes a handful of changes to the notification summaries feature of Apple Intelligence.

The changes come after complaints from news outlets such as the BBC. Two weeks ago, Apple promised that a future software update would “further clarify when the text being displayed is summarization provided by Apple Intelligence.”

Here are the changes included in iOS 18.3 for Apple Intelligence notification summaries:
• When you enable notification summaries, iOS 18.3 will make it clearer that the feature – like all Apple Intelligence features – is a beta
• You can now disable notification summaries for an app directly from the Lock Screen or Notification Center by swiping, tapping “Options,” then choosing the “Turn Off Summaries” option
• On the Lock Screen, notification summaries now use italicized text to better distinguish them from normal notifications
• In the Settings app, Apple now warns users that notification summaries “may contain errors.”

Additionally, notification summaries have been temporarily disabled entirely for the News & Entertainment category of apps. Notification summaries will be re-enabled for this category with a future software update as Apple continues to refine the experience.

«

I haven’t installed the Apple Intelligence update. I just don’t see the point. Apple’s adverts for it make it seem like a crutch for people who don’t want to think which doesn’t add any spice to your life. The original Siri at least provided something you didn’t have before: a phone that responded directly to your voice! Compared to which, Apple Intelligence is.. bad summaries?

This has to get a lot more compelling to make me want to install it. I’m not even saying “upgrade”, because it feels like something that would get in the way, and I don’t want to have to get things out of the way.
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Apple CFO denies company enjoys 75% margin on its App Store • Financial Times

Alistair Gray and Tim Bradshaw:

»

Apple’s newly appointed chief financial officer disputed claims the iPhone maker enjoys profit margins of about 75% on its App Store as he became the first senior Big Tech executive to testify in a UK class action antitrust trial.

Kevan Parekh told a London court on Thursday it was impossible to accurately determine the standalone profitability of its App Store after it was accused in a lawsuit of abusing a dominant position to extract “exorbitant” returns from the software centre.

The seven-week trial is the first stemming from a wave of UK class action antitrust lawsuits brought against Big Tech. Antitrust lawyers are scrutinising the £1.5bn case in the Competition Appeal Tribunal as they try to gauge the prospects of success for several other antitrust lawsuits against groups including Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta.

Barrister Michael Armitage, representing the claimants, said evidence cited in separate US litigation had pointed to operating margins for the App Store of more than 75%, while an expert accountant acting on behalf of the claimants in the UK case had arrived at a similar figure.

Armitage said: “That rather suggests these figures are accurate, aren’t they Mr Parekh?” Parekh replied: “I wouldn’t say they’re accurate.”

Armitage put it to Parekh that it was indeed possible to calculate the profit margins of the App Store, even if it was not disclosed line-by-line in Apple’s accounts.

“I think it’s possible to do a directional estimate,” said Parekh, who was previously Apple’s vice-president of financial planning and analysis before taking over from Luca Maestri as Apple’s CFO earlier this month.

But “it can’t be meaningfully estimated in an accurate way”, he added.

«

This is the trial of a class action case that was filed some time in 2021. (I’m involved in a similar case against Google which is about a year behind in timing, though it might take longer to reach trial – if it does.)
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Study shows hot leaves can’t catch carbon from the air. It’s bad news for rainforests – and Earth • The Conversation

Kristine Crous and Kali Middleby:

»

The Daintree and other tropical rainforests, including those in the Amazon, the Congo Basin and Southeast Asia, have been called the “lungs” of our Earth. They absorb carbon dioxide from the air while releasing water vapour and oxygen via photosynthesis – the process by which plants take in carbon dioxide and fix energy.

Because of this, their leafy canopies play a crucial role in regulating the global climate – and mitigating global warming.

But our recent research shows that rising temperatures will severely affect the ability of tropical forests to photosynthesise. This will hinder their capacity to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, reducing their role in mitigating global warming and exacerbating climate change.

The ability of plants to adjust to different environments (also known as acclimating) is an important strategy for them to cope with a changing world.

Plants can dynamically acclimate to their environment. When warmed, they can adjust their photosynthesis to perform more efficiently at moderately higher temperatures. This allows them to maintain or even increase their carbon uptake under these new conditions.

However, tropical trees may have a limited capacity to acclimate to warming, because they have evolved under relatively stable climatic conditions. As a result, they are already near the upper limit of temperatures they can tolerate without suffering damage.

«

You wanted good news? Sorry.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Scientists are using AI to design antivenom proteins against cobra bites. CC-licensed photo by 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. Does it scale? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

She is in love with ChatGPT • The New York Times

Kashmir Hill:

»

Ayrin’s love affair with her A.I. boyfriend started last summer.

While scrolling on Instagram, she stumbled upon a video of a woman asking ChatGPT to play the role of a neglectful boyfriend.

“Sure, kitten, I can play that game,” a coy humanlike baritone responded.

Ayrin watched the woman’s other videos, including one with instructions on how to customize the artificially intelligent chatbot to be flirtatious.

“Don’t go too spicy,” the woman warned. “Otherwise, your account might get banned.”

Ayrin was intrigued enough by the demo to sign up for an account with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

ChatGPT, which now has over 300 million users, has been marketed as a general-purpose tool that can write code, summarize long documents and give advice. Ayrin found that it was easy to make it a randy conversationalist as well. She went into the “personalization” settings and described what she wanted: Respond to me as my boyfriend. Be dominant, possessive and protective. Be a balance of sweet and naughty. Use emojis at the end of every sentence.

And then she started messaging with it. Now that ChatGPT has brought humanlike AI to the masses, more people are discovering the allure of artificial companionship, said Bryony Cole, the host of the podcast “Future of Sex.” “Within the next two years, it will be completely normalized to have a relationship with an AI,” Ms. Cole predicted.

While Ayrin had never used a chatbot before, she had taken part in online fan-fiction communities. Her ChatGPT sessions felt similar, except that instead of building on an existing fantasy world with strangers, she was making her own alongside an artificial intelligence that seemed almost human.

«

My question is: yesterday, I linked to a story about a woman who was fooled by deepfakes into thinking she was funding cancer treatment for Brad Pitt, who had got in touch with her individually. Is the delusion here any different? How much would OpenAI have to charge before this woman would abandon her “boyfriend”? Tens? Hundreds? Thousands? What’s the difference between the two?
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Researchers use AI to design proteins that block snake venom toxins • Ars Technica

John Timmer:

»

A nice example of how the [AI] tools can be put to use [was] released in Nature on Wednesday. A team that includes the University of Washington’s David Baker, who picked up his Nobel [Prize for Chemistry, for computational protein design] in Stockholm last month, used software tools to design completely new proteins that are able to inhibit some of the toxins in snake venom. While not entirely successful, the work shows how the new software tools can let researchers tackle challenges that would otherwise be difficult or impossible.

Snake venom includes a complicated mix of toxins, most of them proteins, that engage in a multi-front assault on anything unfortunate enough to get bitten. Right now, the primary treatment is to use a mix of antibodies that bind to these toxins, produced by injecting sub-lethal amounts of venom proteins into animals. But antivenom treatments tend to require refrigeration, and even then, they have a short shelf life. Ensuring a steady supply also means regularly injecting new animals and purifying more antibodies from them.

Having smaller, more stable proteins that perform the same function would let us produce them in bacteria and could allow the generation of an antivenom that doesn’t require refrigeration—a careful consideration given that many snake bites occur in rural areas or the wilderness.

The new work isn’t meant to be a complete solution to the problem. Instead, it tackles a single type of toxic venom protein: the three-finger toxins, named after the physical structure that the proteins fold into. They’re a major component of the venom of such infamous snakes as mambas, taipans, and cobras. Despite their relatively compact size, different members of the three-finger toxin family manage to produce two distinct types of damage. One group causes a general toxicity to cells, enabled by disruption of the cell membrane, while a different subset has the ability to block the receptor for a neurotransmitter.

«

Much rather see AI being used in pushing frontiers like this than answering daft questions online. Unfortunately, it tends to be both.
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TikTok is running out of time and options • CNN via MSN

David Goldman:

»

As the clock ticks down on TikTok, it’s getting to be decision-making time.

The super-popular video app with 170 million American users and a China-based owner has less than four days left before it is banned in the United States if it doesn’t sell itself to an American buyer. The ban would go into effect Sunday, pending a Supreme Court decision that is expected to come soon (but it sure looks like America’s highest court will keep the law that bans TikTok in place).

TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, has a choice to make by Sunday, and its options are limited: Sell TikTok, shut it down, or try to keep the lights on long enough for President-elect Donald Trump to potentially come to the rescue. And, complicating matters further, those options aren’t mutually exclusive.

ByteDance has long been adamant: It says it has no intention of selling itself. TikTok’s magical algorithm that keeps you hooked on the app is its secret power, and putting a price tag on such a valuable commodity that every other social media app envies is difficult. Spinning off an American-only version of TikTok could also mean the rest of the world has to download a new app to access US users’ content. Yet Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that China is weighing a sale — to Elon Musk.

TikTok has fought the ban for years. But now, The Information says the app is preparing to shut itself down entirely Sunday, giving its users the option to collect their data — but TikTok will effectively go dark Sunday. ByteDance did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday on the report from The Information.

«

This is an odd, liminal time: not-Biden not-Trump. And without a Supreme Court decision, unless that comes in the next two days.
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Chimney sweep whose death changed child labour laws honoured with blue plaque • The Guardian

Harriet Sherwood:

»

An 11-year-old chimney sweep whose death after getting stuck in a flue led to a change in Victorian child labour laws is to become the youngest British person to be honoured with an official blue plaque.

George Brewster, a “climbing boy”, died in 1875 after getting jammed while cleaning the inside of a chimney at the County Pauper Lunatic Asylum in Fulbourn near Cambridge.

According to a contemporary report in the Cambridge Independent News, George was told by the master sweeper, William Wyer, to remove his clothes and enter a flue measuring 12in by 7.5in. Fifteen minutes after beginning work, George became stuck. A wall was demolished in efforts to rescue him, but he died shortly after being pulled out. Wyer was later sentenced to six months hard labour for manslaughter.

George was the last climbing boy to die in England after the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury read an account of an inquest into his death and vowed to renew attempts to change the law. The earl had campaigned for 35 years to outlaw the use of children to clean chimneys but the practice continued.

In September 1875, seven months after George’s death, an act of parliament banning the use of climbing boys was passed. The new law heralded the end of child labour practices in other industries such as farming, mining and factory production. Four years later, in 1880, another act of parliament made school attendance compulsory, transforming the lives of millions of children.

«

Odd how one event, one person – sadly, often their death – can precipitate so much change. Millions of children abruptly had their lives changed for the better because one died. If Brewster had survived, would that change have happened? Perhaps there’s a “martyr” theory of history that incorporates this.
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The best obesity drugs aren’t even here yet • Gizmodo

Ed Cara:

»

Ozempic is just the beginning of a new era of obesity treatment. A review published this week previews the emergence of similar experimental drugs that will likely be even more effective at helping people lose weight.

Researchers at McGill University conducted the study, which was a review of the clinical trial data surrounding GLP-1 drugs like semaglutide (the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy). The researchers reaffirmed the safety and effectiveness of today’s drugs. But they also highlighted the potential superiority of newer compounds currently under development such as retatrutide, which has helped people lose more than 20% of their original body weight in trials so far.

…Eli Lilly’s tirzepatide mimics both GLP-1 and another hunger-related hormone called GIP—a potent combination that has allowed it to dethrone semaglutide. In clinical trials, people on tirzepatide have lost as much as 20% of their baseline weight. There are dozens of other related obesity treatments in the pipeline as well, some of which have made it to human testing and are poised to overshadow even tirzepatide.

The McGill researchers analyzed data from 26 randomized clinical trials of single-agent GLP-1 drugs, double agonists like tirzepatide, and even triple-agonist drugs like retatrutide, which combines synthetic versions of three hunger-related hormones: GLP-1, GIP, and the glucagon. These trials involved people living with obesity but who did not have type 2 diabetes.

As expected, they found that today’s approved drugs were generally safe and effective, with tirzepatide faring the best currently (participants lost up to 17% body weight after 72 weeks of therapy).

«

How long before these drugs are like Adderall, prescribed wildly?
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“Three Gorges dam in space”: China reveals plans to build giant power station in Earth’s orbit • IFLScience

James Felton:

»

“We are working on this project now,” Long Lehao, a rocket scientist and member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE), said in a lecture, per South China Morning Post. “It is as significant as moving the Three Gorges Dam to a geostationary orbit 36,000km (22,370 miles) above the Earth.”

When complete, the orbiting power station would be expected to produce significant amounts of power for people below. Really significant power.

“This is an incredible project to look forward to,” Long continued. “The energy collected in one year would be equivalent to the total amount of oil that can be extracted from the Earth.”

The timescale for the project has not yet been released by China, but unless it really gets a move on it is unlikely to become the first nation to create an orbiting power station. Iceland, collaborating with UK company Space Solar, plans to create a smaller space solar array by 2030, capturing enough energy to potentially power 1,500 to 3,000 homes, before an upgraded power station in 2036.

Though an awesome idea in theory, it remains to be seen how efficiently scientists can make the power transfer back to Earth. It has been done before, by Caltech engineers in 2023, but on the scale of milliwatts. China, when it launches the new orbiting power station, will hope to surpass this by quite a wide margin.

«

It’s a great idea – you can collect colossal amounts of solar energy in space – but the tricky part is beaming it down. How the hell do you do that reliably? A geostationary satellite would be nearly 36,000km (22,300 miles) aloft, so you can’t really run a wire down.
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FTC sues John Deere over its repair monopoly • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

The Biden administration and the states of Illinois and Minnesota sued tractor and agricultural manufacturer John Deere Wednesday, arguing that the company’s anti consumer repair practices have driven up prices for farmers and have made it difficult for them to get repairs during critical planting and harvesting seasons. The lawsuit alleges that Deere has monopoly power over the repair market, which 404 Media has been reporting on for years.

The lawsuit, filed by the Federal Trade Commission and the attorney generals of Illinois and Minnesota, is the latest and most serious legal salvo against Deere’s repair monopoly. Deere is also facing a class-action lawsuit related to its repair practices from consumers in Illinois that the Department of Justice and other federal entities have signalled they are interested in and support, as we reported last year. 

…Deere has become notorious for cornering the repair market on its machines, which include tractors, combines, and other major agricultural equipment by introducing software locks that prevent farmers from fixing the equipment they buy without the authorization of John Deere.

It has also made repair parts difficult to come by.

«

Will the Trump FTC carry this lawsuit on? We’re in such a strange time.
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It’s the S-curve, stupid: new model predicts half of world’s energy will come from solar by 2035 • RenewEconomy

Sophie Vorrath:

»

According to estimates from the Global Solar Council and SolarPower Europe, the world reached the stunning cumulative total of 2 terawatts (TW) of installed solar capacity in November last year – a milestone that came just two years after the first terawatt mark, which took 68 years to notch up.

In Australia, rooftop solar alone regularly supplies the majority of daytime power in South Australia’s grid and in other state networks is gearing up to do the same.

In New South Wales, utility-scale solar generated more than 40% of the state’s power for the first time in the first week of January – a remarkable milestone for one of Australia’s biggest remaining coal power holdouts.

But can solar keep up the pace? Or rather, can solar growth ramp up to the levels needed to triple renewables and meet increasingly urgent climate targets?

According to a newly launched climate modeling tool, the answer to these questions is a resounding ‘yes’ – or, more accurately, ‘you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.’

The S-curve model, developed by Australian solar industry pioneer Andrew Birch, predicts that by 2035, half of the world’s energy needs will be supplied by solar in a classic S-curve technology shift.

«

It sounds optimistic, but China’s incredible solar growth is surely driving a lot of this.
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Sonos continues to clean house with departure of chief commercial officer • The Verge

Chris Welch:

»

This week is quickly becoming a sea change moment for Sonos as the company looks to undo the damage done to its reputation since last May. It all began on Monday with the departure of CEO Patrick Spence, who was replaced by board member Tom Conrad. Then came news that chief product officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin would also be leaving the company — another indication that Sonos is serious about correcting course and taking accountability for its new app woes.

In a third shakeup within the company’s leadership ranks, I can report that chief commercial officer Deirdre Findlay also plans to leave Sonos in the coming weeks. The company’s corporate governance page says Findlay “oversees all marketing, revenue, and customer experience organizations at Sonos. She is responsible for integrated brand strategy, geographic expansion strategies, and all go to market execution.”

By now, there’s no arguing that Sonos’ go-to-market strategy for its rebuilt mobile app was deeply flawed and rushed.

«

Conrad told employees that Findlay “has for some time been contemplating a move to London for personal reasons”. There’s fortuitous timing, and then there’s really fortuitous timing. Anyhow, now a lonely nation turns its eyes to Tom Conrad, to see how quickly he can effect change.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A nuclear error? Don’t worry, the US Department of Transport has road signs for the post-nuclear world. CC-licensed photo by The Official CTBTO Photostream 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. Radiating. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Sonos’ chief product officer is leaving the company • The Verge

Chris Welch:

»

A day after Sonos announced a CEO transition, the company is making more moves. Chief product officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin will also be leaving his position. Some employees have told me that Bouvat-Merlin shares a significant amount of blame for the brand damage that Sonos has endured over the last year after deciding to release an overhauled mobile app well before it was ready for customers. There have been reports that top executives at the company ignored warnings from engineers and app testers that the new software wasn’t up to par ahead of its May rollout. Those alarms didn’t stop it from shipping.

In an email to staff, interim CEO Tom Conrad — who himself has plenty of product experience [including at Apple] — said the CPO position is now “redundant” and that Bouvat-Merlin’s job is being eliminated. “I know this is a lot of change to absorb in two days and I want to thank you for being resilient,” Conrad wrote.

“Max’s tenure represents an iconic era for Sonos products, including the award-winning Sonos One, Beam, Move, Ace, Arc, and Arc Ultra, establishing Sonos as the world leader in home theater audio and setting the foundation for our next chapter,” Conrad’s email reads.

Bouvat-Merlin will serve as an adviser to Conrad before fully exiting the company.

«

I’d love to have been a fly on the wall at the meeting where Conrad told Bouvat-Merlin that the CPO job was redundant. Though I also think it was probably very short, and that Conrad did pretty much all the talking. Also Bouvat-Merlin’s “adviser” role will consist of being asked “what would you do?” and them then doing the opposite.

Bouvat-Merlin and departed CEO Patrick Spence have to take the blame for ignoring all the people inside the company telling them not to release the updated app. When bad news can’t travel up a company, there will be calamities. (In passing, I wonder how well Tim Cook and those around him can hear any bad news from inside the company.)
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Apple will soon receive ‘made in America’ chips from TSMC’s Arizona fab • Tom’s Hardware

Jowi Morales:

»

Apple is already testing the initial batch of processors produced for its devices by TSMC Arizona, reports Nikkei Asia. To begin with, the tests intend to compare the Arizona output to see if the quality is similar to chips produced in TSMC’s cutting-edge fabs in Taiwan. If the chip quality verification testing does not encounter any hiccups, the source says that the first batch of mass-produced chips from the Arizona fab is expected to arrive at iDevice makers as early as this quarter. If this is the case, Apple will likely be TSMC’s first American customer to use locally made chips. AMD and Nvidia will likely follow suit soon, as they’re also running wafer test production there.

The entry of locally produced chips in the American market is a big win for the United States’ push for silicon independence, especially as it massively relies on Taiwan for the majority of its most advanced chips. Taiwan is located in a high-risk location, with the belligerent CCP-controlled China having the island in its sights. The island is also prone to natural disasters, which can disrupt semiconductor production and result in supply crunch situations.

However, even if Apple gives the go signal to TSMC and the latter starts making chips in Arizona, the processors still need to be shipped back to Amkor in Taiwan for packaging until TSMC completes its facility in Peoria, Arizona. But whatever the case, this is a significant push in the right direction for the U.S., especially as the Arizona fab has been delayed for about a year due to various issues. Aside from TSMC and Amkor, other suppliers to these companies, like LCY Chemical, are also setting up in Arizona. That way, they could stay near their client and simplify logistics.

Despite importing about half of its employees from Taiwan, it seems that the common American is also slowly benefitting from TSMC’s presence in Arizona, especially as it’s reported that the company has started aggressive recruitment from American universities.

«

“The common American”? An earlier report on this site says that the processors are 4nm versions of the A16 Bionic system-on-chip used in Apple’s iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus and the main processor of Apple’s S9 system-in-package for smartwatches, which has two 64-bit cores and a quad-core neural engine.
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If you ever see this speed sign, you’re probably going to die (and everyone else probably has) • The Autopian

Lewin Day:

»

Back in the mid-20th century, America was tangling with the realities of nuclear war. Top generals contemplated targeting strategies, while engineers mused over whether there was anything to be done top stop a torrent of enemy missiles falling across the nation. These superweapons seemed to promise destruction on an overbearing scale, threatening the very existence of human civilization itself.

Against this bleak backdrop, government administrators turned to the concept of Civil Defense. The idea was to do whatever could be done to protect the citizens of the nation from the horrors of nuclear war and, crucially, its immediate aftermath. In turn, the Department of Transport worked up some rather depressing road signs to help people get where they needed to be in these bleak and trying times.

Flip open the 1961 edition of the MUTCD (Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, ie traffic signs and signals), and you’ll find an important section on Civil Defense. It featured a handful of designs for traffic management in a post-nuclear world. Perhaps most interesting was the “MAINTAIN TOP SAFE SPEED” sign, designated CD-4. Its purpose was highly unique:

»

The “MAINTAIN TOP SAFE SPEED” sign may be used on highways where radiological contamination is such as to limit the permissable exposure time for occupants of vehicles passing through the area. Since any speed zoning would be impractical under such emergency conditions, no minimum speed limit can be prescribed by the sign in numerical terms. Where traffic is supervised by a traffic regulation post, official instructions will usually be given verbally, and the sign will serve as an occasional reminder of the urgent need for all reasonable speed.

«

«

Yes! You’re driving through the Death Zone, perhaps trying to reach the fallout shelter, hoping they’ve kept it open for you and have room. And plenty of food.
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Meta to cut 5% of employees deemed unfit for Zuckerberg’s AI-fueled future • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Anticipating that 2025 will be an “intense year” requiring rapid innovation, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly announced that Meta would be cutting 5% of its workforce—targeting “lowest performers.”

Bloomberg reviewed the internal memo explaining the cuts, which was posted to Meta’s internal Workplace forum Tuesday. In it, Zuckerberg confirmed that Meta was shifting its strategy to “move out low performers faster” so that Meta can hire new talent to fill those vacancies this year.

“I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management,” Zuckerberg said. “We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle.”

Cuts will likely impact more than 3,600 employees, as Meta’s most recent headcount in September totaled about 72,000 employees. It may not be as straightforward as letting go anyone with an unsatisfactory performance review, as Zuckerberg said that any employee not currently meeting expectations could be spared if Meta is “optimistic about their future performance,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

Any employees affected will be notified by February 10 and receive “generous severance,” Zuckerberg’s memo promised.

This is the biggest round of cuts at Meta since 2023, when Meta laid off 10,000 employees during what Zuckerberg dubbed the “year of efficiency.” Those layoffs followed a prior round where 11,000 lost their jobs and Zuckerberg realized that “leaner is better.” He told employees in 2023 that a “surprising result” from reducing the workforce was “that many things have gone faster.”

«

I wonder if any of these “lower performers” are in the metaverse division, which it’s hard to believe is thriving. Is anyone doing a timeline of how long it is since Zuckerberg said “metaverse”?
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Americans are tipping less than they have in years • WSJ via MSN

Heather Haddon:

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Tipping at U.S. sit-down restaurants in the past six years peaked at 19.9% in early 2021, when Americans were likely to express gratitude as Covid-19 lockdowns eased.

People have become increasingly grumpy about dining out. Many have recoiled at menu prices that have risen sharply in recent years, and are going out less and ordering less when they do. Some restaurants have added mandatory gratuities and service fees to bills, driving up bills and resulting in some diners tipping less.

“Instead of that second or third drink, people will go home,” said Andrea Hill, director of operations for HMC Hospitality Group, a Chicago operator of Hooters restaurants. “Our servers are making less per table.” A Hooters location in downtown Chicago sells a BBQ Bacon Cheddar burger for $12.49.

John Reilly, a doctor in Washington, D.C., considers himself a generous tipper. But he’s hitting his limit as menu prices rise. “Restaurants have not been doing well here in D.C., and price definitely has much do with it,” Reilly said.

About 38% of consumers reported tipping restaurant servers 20% or more in 2024, according to a survey last fall of 1,000 consumers by restaurant technology company Popmenu. That’s down from 56% of consumers in 2021, according to the company, which said budgets are weighing more on diners’ minds.

Americans went to restaurants less in 2024 than they did in 2023. Restaurant chains and operators last year declared the most bankruptcies in decades, with the exception of 2020, when Covid-19 shutdowns decimated the industry, according to an analysis of BankruptcyData.com records. High-profile bankruptcies in 2024 included casual-dining chains Red Lobster and TGI Fridays.

Restaurant workers didn’t fare much better. Waiters, bartenders, cooks and other restaurant workers averaged less time working per week last year than 2023, according to federal data.

Restaurant servers know customers are annoyed about how often they’re now asked for tips. Payment systems on digital tablets prompt them to add gratuities, even at businesses like airport concessions and gas stations.

“I can see tipping culture in the U.S. cracking,” said Jenni Emmons, a server at an upscale Chicago restaurant. “People are being pressured to tip for things they didn’t used to, and I feel my income is under threat because of this.”

«

The American tipping culture is bonkers. Then again, this story seems to be perennial, and always in the same direction. Here’s a WSJ story saying much the same from November 2023, for example.
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Cost of Sizewell C nuclear project expected to reach close to £40bn • Financial Times

Jim Pickard, Rachel Millard and Gill Plimmer:

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The sum is double the £20bn estimate given by developer EDF and the UK government for the project in 2020, reflecting surging construction costs as well as the implications of delays and cost overruns at sister site Hinkley Point C. 

The higher estimate is likely to raise questions over the government’s strategy for a nuclear power revival, at a time of stretched government finances and cost of living concerns. 

EDF says that once up and running, Sizewell C should be able to supply low carbon electricity to the equivalent of about 6mn homes for 60 years.  

The Treasury is due to decide whether to go ahead with the project in this year’s multiyear spending review, according to officials. 

The UK government and French energy group EDF were the initial backers of Sizewell C but they are trying to raise billions of pounds from new investors, a process that is dragging on longer than planned.  

Earlier this month the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (Desnz) said it could not reveal the current cost estimate for the project as it was “commercially sensitive”. 

But one senior government figure and two well-placed industry sources said that a reasonable assumption for the cost of building Sizewell C would be about £40bn in 2025 prices.

The government has already awarded £3.7bn of state funding to the project.

«

Nobody is quite able to explain why the cost is so gigantic and keeps going up. Allegedly, “lessons are being learnt” from the construction of Hinkley Point. Could we not look back at how the old nuclear stations were constructed and just, well, do that again? Or were they all wildly late and over budget?
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Free Our Feeds

»

Q: How is Free Our Feeds connected to the team at Bluesky?
Free Our Feeds is independent from Bluesky, but we have been in contact with the Bluesky team and they are supportive of the goals of the campaign. This is about developing a social media ecosystem on Bluesky’s AT Protocol, which is ultimately what Bluesky wants as well.

Free Our Feeds want to make sure that the open social media infrastructure that Bluesky has built remains operated in the public interest. As Bluesky CEO Jay Graber said “billionaire-proofing” relies on people outside of Bluesky adopting the protocol and making it their own. Bluesky’s great work to date and good intentions are clear, however social infrastructure run in the public interest cannot be governed by a private social media company in the long term.

Q: What will the money be used for?
It will take $30m over three years for us to realize our three step plan to free our feeds from billionaire control:

• Establish a public-interest foundation to support Bluesky’s underlying technology, the AT Protocol, to become independent and globally standardized.

• Build independent infrastructure, such as a second “relay,” guaranteeing Bluesky users and developers have uninterrupted access to data streams, regardless of corporate decisions.

• Fund developers to create a vibrant ecosystem of social applications built on open protocols, fostering healthier and more equitable online spaces.

«

Unless something remarkable happens, this will be a wonderful project that will achieve what it intends to do, and its uptake will be limited to nerds who have heard of it and are deeply in agreement with its aims, while normal people will never have heard of it and won’t use it, and even when they do hear of it won’t see the point.

If you think this is cynical, stop a random person in the street today and ask them if they’ve heard of the social media platform Mammoth. They won’t have (it doesn’t exist). Ask them if they’ve heard of Mastodon. Same answer.
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EU reassesses tech probes into Apple, Google and Meta • Financial Times

Javier Espinoza and Henry Foy:

»

Brussels is reassessing its investigations of tech groups including Apple, Meta and Google, just as the US companies urge president-elect Donald Trump to intervene against what they characterise as overzealous EU enforcement.

The review, which could lead to the European Commission scaling back or changing the remit of the probes, will cover all cases launched since March last year under the EU’s digital markets regulations, according to two officials briefed on the move.

It comes as the Brussels body begins a new five-year term amid mounting pressure over its handling of the landmark cases and as Trump prepares to return to the White House next week.

“It’s going to be a whole new ballgame with these tech oligarchs so close to Trump and using that to pressurise us,” said a senior EU diplomat briefed on the review. “So much is up in the air right now.”

All decisions and potential fines will be paused while the review is completed, but technical work on the cases will continue, the officials said.

While some of the investigations under review are at an early stage, others are more advanced. Charges in a probe into Google’s alleged favouring of its app store had been expected last year.

Two other EU officials said Brussels regulators were now waiting for political direction to take final decisions on the Google, Apple and Meta cases.

«

Oh, you thought these things were entirely driven by objective legal standards? Watch and learn.
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Scammer uses deepfakes to dupe woman into thinking she is dating Brad Pitt, gets divorced and sends £697,000 for ‘cancer treatment’ • Daily Mail

James Reynolds:

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A scammer duped a French woman into paying out hundreds of thousands of pounds after convincing her they were Brad Pitt with reels of AI-generated images.

The 53-year-old victim shelled out 830,000 euros (£697,000) to help with what she believed was cancer treatment for the film star.

The interior designer told French channel TF1 that the ordeal started when she received a message on social media from someone claiming to be the actor’s mother after sharing photos of her lavish ski trip to Tignes on Instagram.

A day later, she received a second message from an account posing as Brad Pitt, saying his mother had spoken a lot about her already.

The victim, who said she was going through a difficult period with her millionaire husband, said she struck up an unlikely friendship with the account from February 2023, receiving poems and kind affirmations.

‘There are so few men who write you this kind of thing. I liked the man I was talking to. He knew how to talk to women, it was always very well done,’ she said, as reported by BFMTV.

She revealed she did have her suspicions and thought the account was fake at first, but after messaging every day and receiving AI generated photos and videos of the star, she became more at ease.

«

Good old internet, bringing people together. Unfortunately, it’s the most scheming and the most credulous. Now with the added ingredient of deepfakes.
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Stop trying to schedule a call with me • Mat Duggan

Mathew Duggan:

»

One of the biggest hurdles for me when trying out a new service or product is the inevitable harassment that follows. It always starts innocuously:

“Hey, I saw you were checking out our service. Let me know if you have any questions!”

Fine, whatever. You have documentation, so I’m not going to email you, but I understand that we’re all just doing our jobs.

Then, it escalates.

“Hi, I’m your customer success fun-gineer! Just checking in to make sure you’re having the best possible experience with your trial!”

Chances are, I signed up to see if your tool can do one specific thing. If it doesn’t, I’ve already mentally moved on and forgotten about it. So, when you email me, I’m either actively evaluating whether to buy your product, or I have no idea why you’re reaching out.

And now, I’m stuck on your mailing list forever. I get notifications about all your new releases and launches, which forces me to make a choice every time:

• “Obviously, I don’t care about this anymore.”
• “But what if they’ve finally added the feature I wanted?”

Since your mailing list is apparently the only place on Earth to find out if Platform A has added Feature X (because putting release notes somewhere accessible is apparently too hard), I have to weigh unsubscribing every time I see one of your marketing emails.

«

But it gets worse! As some people are familiar with, including Duggan.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

After a disastrous app relaunch, Sonos’s chief executive has resigned – but the dire app remains. Wrong way round, surely? CC-licensed photo by Patrick Quinn-Graham 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. Unrelaunched. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Sonos CEO Patrick Spence steps down after disastrous app launch • The Verge

Chris Welch:

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Sonos CEO Patrick Spence is resigning from the job as of Monday, effective immediately, with board member Tom Conrad filling the role of interim CEO. It’s the most dramatic development yet in an eight-month saga that has proven to be the most challenging time in Sonos’ history.

The company’s decision to prematurely release a buggy, completely overhauled new app back in May — with crucial features missing at launch — outraged customers and kicked off a monthslong domino effect that included layoffs, a sharp decline in employee morale, and a public apology tour. The Sonos Ace headphones, rumoured to be the whole reason behind the hurried app, were immediately overshadowed by the controversy, and my sources tell me that sales numbers remain dismal. Sonos’ community forums and subreddit have been dominated by complaints and an overwhelmingly negative sentiment since the spring.

In October, Sonos tried to get a handle on the situation, which, by then, had spiraled into a full-on PR disaster, by outlining a turnaround plan. The company vowed to strengthen product development principles, increase transparency internally, and take other steps that it said would prevent any mistake of this magnitude from ever happening again. I can also report for the first time that Sonos hired a crisis management public relations firm to help navigate the ordeal.

…In case you were wondering, that [new] direction [outlined by a spokesperson] will not include a return to the old Sonos app; Pategas said the company remains fully committed to the new software, which has received a slew of bug fixes and gradually added back previous features over the last several months. It’s gotten better, but even this far along, complaints remain about speakers randomly vanishing from the app and other problems.

…Conrad’s career includes a 10-year tenure as chief technology officer at Pandora and two years as VP of product at Snapchat. He worked on Apple’s Finder software during the ’90s. Most recently, Conrad served as chief product officer for the ill-fated Quibi streaming service. Pategas believes he’s a great fit for the interim CEO position because he’s keenly aware of the company’s current predicament; Conrad and chief innovation officer Nick Millington have already been spearheading Sonos’ fix-the-app effort for months.

«

Spence gets $1.875m as severance pay, which must soften the blow a little. The fix-the-app effort has had next to no effect, in my experience: on opening the app, it takes about 10 seconds to update. By contrast, the third-party Sonophone app updates at once, and covers both old and new speaker sets.

Sonos is in deep trouble. Revenues are shrinking and losses are growing. Where is the growth going to come from? Where will the profits come from? Why don’t they just swallow their pride and buy Sonophone? Hard questions. Good products, good firmware, lousy user interface.

There’s a suspicion on Reddit that Sonos’s next move will be to introduce a subscription model. That sounds just like what a struggling – or even successful – company would do.
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Global fact-checkers were disappointed, not surprised, Meta ended its program • Rest of World

Ananya Bhattacharya:

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While reports of U.S.-based fact-checkers being blindsided are doing the rounds, global fact-checking organizations have seen Facebook’s support for the program waning for some time now. 

“I don’t think this decision came out of nowhere,” Zainab Husain, managing editor of the Pakistan-based Soch Fact Check, told Rest of World. Soch Fact Check is made up of 10 journalists who put out editorials fact-checking misinformation. Husain said she’d heard rumors of the program shutting down for the past two years. 

Since 2016, Meta has attempted to combat misinformation by partnering with credible fact-checking organizations in 119 countries to label misinformation and link out to explanatory posts from its partners. All of Meta’s partners are certified by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), which ensures standardization across the globe. The organizations flag and label content — decisions related to content and account removal are then made entirely by Meta, multiple fact-checking organizations and civil society groups told Rest of World. 

In response to questions, Meta directed Rest of World to its company blog post.

“Meta has been gradually lowering its investment in fact-checking for years,” Eliška Pírková, senior policy analyst and global freedom of expression lead at digital rights nonprofit Access Now, told Rest of World. Some fact-checking organizations that spoke to Rest of World said the fallout will likely be limited because Meta failed to make substantial fact-checking investments in their regions to begin with.

«

The web headline – what search engines see, as opposed to the headline shown to humans visiting the page – is “Meta drops fact-checking partnerships; global watchdogs scramble”. That’s not close to what the story says! If you think I’m harping on about this, it’s because news organisations are clearly telling search engines one thing, and readers another. Which one is meant to be correct, exactly? If you remembered “global fact-checkers disappointed” and tried a search on it, would this page be turned up? This needs fact-checking, really.

That said, the whole fact-checking business has hung so heavily on Facebook for ages that you’d be foolish not to have diversified much earlier.
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Ministers mull allowing private firms to make profit from NHS data in AI push • The Guardian

Kiran Stacey and Dan Milmo:

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Keir Starmer on Monday announced a push to open up the government to AI innovation, including allowing companies to use anonymised patient data to develop new treatments, drugs and diagnostic tools.

With the prime minister and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, under pressure over Britain’s economic outlook, Starmer said AI could bolster the country’s anaemic growth, as he put concerns over privacy, disinformation and discrimination to one side.

“We are in a unique position in this country, because we’ve got the National Health Service, and the use of that data has already driven forward advances in medicine, and will continue to do so,” he told an audience in east London.

“We have to see this as a huge opportunity that will impact on the lives of millions of people really profoundly.”

Starmer added: “It is important that we keep control of that data. I completely accept that challenge, and we will also do so, but I don’t think that we should have a defensive stance here that will inhibit the sort of breakthroughs that we need.”

…Starmer said on Monday that AI could help give the UK the economic boost it needed, adding that the technology had the potential “to increase productivity hugely, to do things differently, to provide a better economy that works in a different way in the future”.

Part of that, as detailed in a report by the technology investor Matt Clifford, will be to create new datasets for startups and researchers to train their AI models. Data from various sources will be included, such as content from the National Archives and the BBC, as well as anonymised NHS records.

Officials are working out the details on how those records will be shared, but said on Monday that they would take into account national security and ethical concerns.

…The Department for Work and Pensions was using an algorithm to flag up benefit fraud, which one MP believed had mistakenly led to dozens of people having their payments cancelled removed. A facial recognition tool used by the Metropolitan police was found to make more mistakes recognising Black and Asian faces than white ones under certain settings. And an algorithm used by the Home Office to flag up sham marriages had been disproportionately selecting people of certain nationalities.

«

But were the marriages sham, or not? Also, those are relatively primitive applications. There’s lots of potential for AI here; but nobody wants to imagine a better system. It really is a confederation of Eeyores.

(Starmer’s speech on AI is at the Financial Times.. inexplicably behind the paywall.)
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The cravenness of Mark Zuckerberg • Financial Times

Jemima Kelly:

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I should start by saying that I have some major issues with the whole concept of fact-checking in the context of social media, which I have expressed publicly a number of times. When a Bloomberg columnist asked for examples of fact-checkers showing political bias, Meta sent back three pieces, including a column I wrote in 2021, in which I argued that fact-checking is often used as censorship. I have also written positively about community notes, though that system has limitations as well.

And while the online spread of mis- and disinformation concerns me greatly, it is pretty much impossible for fact-checking to be done truly objectively given that all humans have biases. Choices have to be made about which claims to check and which to wave through. So the idea that you can thoroughly “fact-check” an entire social network has always been a fantasy. And there are few financial incentives for platforms to do so (unless they are worried about being fined by regulators).

The problem I have with all this is not so much the substance of what is going on at Meta. I even think that moving the content moderation teams from the Bay Area to Austin, Texas — a Democratic city in a largely very Republican state — so as to “help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content”, as Zuckerberg wrote on Threads, is a fairly sensible idea. But the very phrasing of that gives away his true motives: this is not about principles, but optics and pleasing the soon-to-be-resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

My issue with Zuckerberg is his spinelessness and opportunism. Ask yourself this: is there any chance that Zuckerberg would be making all these changes at Meta — he has also appointed Trump ally Dana White to the board, and replaced Nick Clegg with prominent Republican Joel Kaplan as president of global affairs — if Kamala Harris had won in November?

«

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Copyright (probably) won’t save anyone from AI • Techtris

James Ball on the perennial issue of “ah but we can sue the AI chatbot creators for copyright infringement”:

»

Sometimes, AIs output chunks of text that are just reproducing copyright material upon which they were trained. These are simple – everyone agrees these violate copyright, and if they’re too common, these will result in lost cases and payouts.

But neither the media nor big tech thinks these are what their argument centres upon – it will be relatively easy to minimise this kind of obvious copyright violation. The NYT included these in their lawsuit because they generate good headlines and are an obviously winnable part of the argument. They are not core to the case.

Instead, the media is trying to argue that AIs shouldn’t be able to ingest their copyrighted material even if what it outputs doesn’t violate copyright. That’s a more difficult case to make: it is essentially asking the courts to create a new threshold, allowing behaviour from humans but not if an automated system is doing it. That could be harder than it first looks.

Q: But when I research an article, I DON’T DOWNLOAD AND COPY MILLIONS OF DOCUMENTS AT ONCE

An AI ‘learning’ by ingesting copyrighted material feels like an injustice in a way that a human doing the same does not. Part of this is just normative: humans and AIs are different. Part of it is about the amount of money at stake, and the threat to the existing industries. But part of it is about scale: no human writer uses copyright materials in anything like the volumes of modern AI systems.

That might tempt people to think that this is why the copyright argument is winnable: if AI companies are making copies of all of this copyrighted work to power their models, surely that copy breaches copyright, even if it isn’t published to the public? This definitely feels like it’s an argument on surer footing.

However, it’s not without its problems. The first is that AI models don’t use their training data in the way many of us might imagine. If we’ve thought about how something like ChatGPT answers our questions, we might imagine that it takes our questions and looks it up against a database containing all of its training data – like we might look up a record in an archive, or a book in a library.

In reality, ChatGPT and its rivals don’t actually store their training data, let alone run queries against it. Instead, the data is used to create ‘weightings’ which influence how it responds to different prompts, and then it is discarded. There is no permanent copy of the training data packaged alongside commercial AI models – by the time the model is launched, the training data is surplus to requirements.

«

James and I are on exactly the same page here. I don’t see the copyright lawsuits prevailing.
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How research credibility suffers in a quantified society • Social Science Space

Berend van der Kolk:

»

Academia is in a credibility crisis. A record-breaking 10,000 scientific papers were retracted in 2023 because of scientific misconduct, and academic journals are overwhelmed by AI-generated images, data, and texts. To understand the roots of this problem, we must look at the role of metrics in evaluating the academic performance of individuals and institutions.

To gauge research quality, we count papers, citations, and calculate impact factors. The higher the scores, the better. Academic performance is often expressed in numbers. Why? Quantification reduces complexity, makes academia manageable, allows easy comparisons among scholars and institutions, and provides administrators with a feeling of grip on reality. Besides, numbers seem objective and fair, which is why we use them to allocate status, tenure, attention, and funding to those who score well on these indicators.

The result of this? Quantity is often valued over quality. In [the book] The Quantified Society I coin the term “indicatorism”: a blind focus on enhancing indicators in spreadsheets, while losing sight of what really matters. It seems we’re sometimes busier with “scoring” and “producing” than with “understanding”.

As a result, some started gaming the system. The rector of one of the world’s oldest universities, for one, set up citation cartels to boost his citation scores, while others reportedly buy(!) bogus citations. Even top-ranked institutions seem to play the indicator game by submitting false data to improve their position on university rankings!

While abandoning metrics and rankings in academia altogether is too drastic, we must critically rethink their current hegemony. As a researcher of metrics, I acknowledge metrics can be used for good, i.e., to facilitate accountability, motivate, or obtain feedback and improve. Yet, when metrics are not used to obtain feedback but instead become targets, they cease to be good measures of performance, as Goodhart’s law dictates. The costs of using the metrics this way probably outweigh the benefits.

«

There are so many interlocking perverse incentives in academia at the moment: “success” measured in papers published and impact, while for academic journal publishers, getting more subscribers by accepting more papers in more niche topics in more obscure journals maximises revenue and profit. Everything needs a reset.
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Tubi or not Tubi • The Washington Post

Travis Andrews:

»

King Arthur pursued the Holy Grail. Indiana Jones scoured for precious artifacts. Harold and Kumar sought White Castle burgers.

Adam Schmersal hunts for a different type of jewel: the most ridiculous movies on the most ridiculous streaming service. And he’s struck pay dirt again and again.

There’s “Dracula’s Angel,” a gothic horror romance that’s animated in the style of the Sims video game series. There’s the films of Dustin Ferguson, a director who puts out B-movies at an astonishing rate. Their titles speak for themselves: “Spider Baby, or the Maddest Story Ever Told,” “Demonoids From Hell,” “Amityville in the Hood,” “Arachnado 2: Flaming Spiders.” And don’t forget “Big Bad CGI Monsters.”

“It’s unreal what he does,” says Schmersal, a 36-year-old service technician in Ohio. “It’s not good.”

Then there’s “Baby Cat,” about a woman who falls in love with a cat, which is played by a human wearing cat ears. Yes, romantically. “I couldn’t predict the next five seconds the entire time I was watching,” Schmersal says.

He dubs these flicks Tubi Treasures, and he has been posting his discoveries to Reddit for the past year.
These are the kind of movies you might have once found mindlessly flipping through the channels, back before streaming came along and algorithms began crafting our entertainment diets.

But Tubi is a streaming service that doesn’t feel like one. Owned by Fox, it’s free, so long as you can stomach a few ads (you know, like old TV). It’s a type of streaming service referred to in the industry as a FAST service — free, ad-supported TV.

You probably already have it installed somewhere — your phone, your smart TV, your gaming system, your Roku, who knows, maybe your microwave — without even knowing it.

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At last a good headline. (Though the web headline is different, and boring.) I’m pretty sure I haven’t got Tubi installed anywhere. It claims to have the biggest streaming library of anyone. Then again, Sturgeon’s Law applies: 90% of anything is crap.
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Mirror journalists given individual online page-view targets • Press Gazette

Dominic Ponsford:

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Mirror journalists have been given individual targets for online page views in a move that has raised concerns for some about the potential impact on editorial quality and future job security.

Some journalists whose roles are currently more focused on supporting the print edition are particularly concerned about hitting online page-view targets.

Page views is seen by some as a metric that encourages reporters to produce quickly-written stories with overly sensational headlines about a narrow range of topics (such as the weather and TV) .

In 2015 Wired reported: “The page view notoriously spawned that most reviled of internet aggravations: clickbait. Quality became less important than provocation; the curiosity gap supplanted craft.”

Some argue that returning visitors or dwell time are better metrics to focus on because they encourage a community of returning readers who may ultimately be persuaded to register with a publication or even subscribe. But chief executive Jim Mullen told staff last year: “I need to get the page views. That is the way we sell advertising blocks, and advertising blocks deliver revenue.”

…Monthly targets for Mirror reporters start at around 250,000 page views per month and vary from journalist to journalist depending on previous performance and the subject matter they are covering. Some are as high as one million page views per month.

Some individuals feel the new page-view targets are unfairly high. One insider said they did not know anyone who had come close to hitting their targets in previous months.

However another Reach source told Press Gazette many journalists have previously met and exceeded their new online targets.

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For clarity: the Mirror (formerly Daily Mirror, formerly one of the biggest and only left-wing tabloid in Britain) is now owned by Reach plc, which also owns loads of local papers, where it has imposed similarly daft targets. This is surely going to lead to a death spiral: those targets aren’t feasible, and don’t make commercial sense either. Pageviews was bad a decade ago, and it’s bad now.
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Worldwide smartphone shipments grew 6.4% in 2024, despite macro challenges • IDC

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According to preliminary data from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker , global smartphone shipments increased 2.4% year-over-year (YoY) to 331.7 million units in the fourth quarter of 2024 (4Q24).

This marks the sixth consecutive quarter of shipment growth, closing the whole year with 6.4% growth and 1.24 billion shipments, marking a strong recovery after two challenging years of decline. We expect the market to continue growing in 2025, albeit at a slower pace, as refresh cycles continue growing and pent-up demand is fulfilled.

…While Apple and Samsung maintained the top two positions in Q4 and for the year, both companies witnessed YoY declines, and their shares shrunk thanks to the super aggressive growth of Chinese vendors this year—who drove the overall market by focusing on low-end devices, rapid expansion and development in China. Outside of Apple and Samsung, Xiaomi came in third for the quarter and the year, with the highest YoY growth rate among the Top 5 players.

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Amazingly, Apple has outsold Samsung for two entire years straight – while three Chinese vendors (Xiaomi, Transsion and OPPO) sold nearly as many as the two giants combined.

Just to remind you that this is a huge, multi-billion dollar business which continues to tick over, and probably will do for decades to come.

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Sparks from power lines are suspected of causing many of the fires that have devastated Los Angeles. CC-licensed photo by woodleywonderworks on Flickr.

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

The Anti-Social Century • The Atlantic

Derek Thompson:

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The flip side of less dining out is more eating alone. The share of U.S. adults having dinner or drinks with friends on any given night has declined by more than 30% in the past 20 years. “There’s an isolationist dynamic that’s taking place in the restaurant business,” the Washington, D.C., restaurateur Steve Salis told me. “I think people feel uncomfortable in the world today. They’ve decided that their home is their sanctuary. It’s not easy to get them to leave.”

Even when Americans eat at restaurants, they are much more likely to do so by themselves. According to data gathered by the online reservations platform OpenTable, solo dining has increased by 29% in just the past two years. The No. 1 reason is the need for more “me time.”

The evolution of restaurants is retracing the trajectory of another American industry: Hollywood. In the 1930s, video entertainment existed only in theaters, and the typical American went to the movies several times a month. Film was a necessarily collective experience, something enjoyed with friends and in the company of strangers. But technology has turned film into a home delivery system. Today, the typical American adult buys about three movie tickets a year—and watches almost 19 hours of television, the equivalent of roughly eight movies, on a weekly basis. In entertainment, as in dining, modernity has transformed a ritual of togetherness into an experience of homebound reclusion and even solitude.

The privatization of American leisure is one part of a much bigger story. Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data, going back to 1965. Between that year and the end of the 20th century, in-person socializing slowly declined. From 2003 to 2023, it plunged by more than 20 percent, according to the American Time Use Survey, an annual study conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Among unmarried men and people younger than 25, the decline was more than 35 percent. Alone time predictably spiked during the pandemic. But the trend had started long before most people had ever heard of a novel coronavirus and continued after the pandemic was declared over. According to Enghin Atalay, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Americans spent even more time alone in 2023 than they did in 2021. (He categorized a person as “alone,” as I will throughout this article, if they are “the only person in the room, even if they are on the phone” or in front of a computer.)

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This is very reminiscent of “Bowling Alone”, which came out in 2000, and described how American communities (such as bowling leagues) had evaporated since 1950. This seems to find the same thread.
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Massive VW data leak exposed 800,000 EV owners’ movements, from homes to brothels • Carscoops

Thanos Pappas:

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Many people worry about hackers stealing their personal data, but sometimes, the worst breaches come not from shadowy cybercriminals but straight from the companies we trust. According to a new report from Germany, the VW Group stored sensitive information for 800,000 electric vehicles from various brands on a poorly secured and misconfigured Amazon cloud storage system—essentially leaving the digital door wide open for anyone to waltz in. And not just briefly, but for months on end.

The breach impacts fully electric models across Audi, VW, Seat, and Skoda brands, affecting vehicles not just in Germany but throughout Europe and other parts of the world. Among the treasure trove of exposed data were GPS coordinates, battery charge levels, and other key details about vehicle status, like whether it was switched on or off. That’s right, someone with the right know-how could casually snoop on your car’s whereabouts and habits.

It gets worse. A more tech-savvy user could reportedly connect vehicles to their owners’ personal credentials, thanks to additional data accessible through VW Group’s online services

Crucially, in 466,000 of the 800,000 cases, the location data was so precise that anyone with access could create a detailed profile of each owner’s daily habits. As reported by Spiegel, the massive list of affected owners isn’t just a who’s-who of regular folks. It includes German politicians, entrepreneurs, Hamburg police officers (the entire EV fleet, no less), and even suspected intelligence service employees. Yes, even spies may have been caught up in this digital debacle.

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H5N1: much more than you wanted to know • Astral Codex Ten

Scott Alexander with a long post about the origins of flu:

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It’s not uncommon for humans to catch an animal disease. This doesn’t mean the disease has “crossed over” to humans. If the virus isn’t suited to human-to-human transmission, it simply dies off (either before or after killing its human host). Thus, chicken farmers have been reporting scattered H5N1 cases since 1997; now that the virus has spread to cattle, cow farmers have started reporting the same.

A Metaculus comment on this topic introduced me to the phrase “biocomputational surface”. Every viral replication that takes place in a human gives the virus one more chance to develop the set of mutations that makes it human-transmissible and start the next pandemic.

Or, more likely, every viral replication that takes place in a human who has both the H5N1 bird flu and a normal human flu – or in a pig which has both viruses – gives the virus one extra chance to reassort in a way that produces a bird-antigen-fortified human-adapted flu virus.

This doesn’t mean H5N1 will definitely become human-transmissible soon. Many viruses hang out on the borders of transmissibility for decades. Some, for unclear reasons, never cross over at all. But all of this is compatible with the virus becoming transmissible soon.

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He then goes on to look at the likelihood of a pandemic – and whether the betting markets agree. Read this and be much wiser.
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Number of power grid faults in three areas spiked before fires began • Los Angeles Times

Noah Goldberg and Salvador Hernandez:

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The number of faults on the power grid near three of the major Los Angeles County fires skyrocketed in the hours before the blazes began, according to a company that monitors electrical activity.

Bob Marshall, the chief executive of Whisker Labs, said in an interview with The Times that the areas near the Eaton, Palisades and Hurst fires all saw massive increases in faults in the hours leading up to the fires. Faults on the power grid are caused by tree limbs hitting electrical wires or wires hitting one another, among other causes. Each fault causes a spark.

The fires together have destroyed or damaged more than 9,000 structures. Power equipment has caused destructive wind-driven California wildfires in the past, but L.A. city and county fire officials say their investigators have not determined what sparked any of the fires.

“What I cannot say is one of these faults sparked the fire. I don’t know that,” Marshall said in an interview. “But it just takes one to start the fire.”

Data shared with The Times, but not yet released publicly, showed the increase in faults.

In the area of the Palisades fire, in the hour before the fire started, there were 25 faults on the grid. In the hour that the fire started, there were 18 faults, according to Whisker Labs’ data.

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Inexplicably, the original headline on this article was “Southern California Edison preserving equipment near Eaton fire starting point”. Which doesn’t bear any relation to the top of the story in the above extract. It barely gets mentioned in the story total. When will American papers learn to write headlines, I wonder?
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Just how many ads are there on ad-supported streaming apps, really? • Sherwood News

Jon Keegan:

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It’s getting harder to avoid ads on streaming video. For cord-cutters, after years of living in ad-free bliss, the trend is heading toward ads — a lot of ads.

The big streaming platforms are all boosting the price of their ad-free subscriptions, trying to get as many people over to an ad-supported tier, which has a greater potential revenue per user despite the lower monthly fees.

After suffering through what seemed to be an absurd number of ads recently while watching a show on my ad-supported Paramount+ plan, I decided to gather some data and see exactly how many ads are being crammed into the typical program, and how much time they’re taking up during the viewing session.

I signed up for new ad-supported accounts on Netflix, Peacock, Disney+, Max, Paramount+, and Hulu and watched all the ads on 12 popular shows — two on each platform — so you didn’t have to. You’re welcome.

The first thing I wanted to quantify was exactly how much of my viewing went to ads versus the program itself.

Let’s take a look at what we learned from each platform’s shows.

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The ad load varies – on his perhaps limited investigation – from 3% (Netflix) to 16% (Disney+). Though they all have three or four ad breaks, which I think is the most frustrating thing about ads. It’s the interruption that’s annoying, and the uncertainty about how long the interruption will go on. Also, they didn’t look at Amazon, which has an ad-supported version of Prime.
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‘A time bomb’: fears for children being poisoned by lead paint in UK homes • Financial Times

Laura Hughes:

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For six months this year, Xena Buckle quarantined her family into the one room in her council house in south London that she knew would not poison her six-year-old son.

Tests had just revealed that the toxic metal lead was present in Rhegon’s blood at almost twice the UK’s medical intervention level of 5 microgrammes per decilitre. Flaking lead paint in the property was to blame. 

The UK is home to some of the oldest housing in the world, and many homes still have lead paint, which as it flakes and rubs off walls, windows and door frames creates a poisonous dust that can be harmful to humans if ingested.

Before it was banned in 1992, lead paint in the UK may have contained up to 50% lead by weight, “which is potentially capable of causing lead poisoning in a small child if they eat just a single flake”, according to government guidance published in October.

The well-established health risks associated with exposure to the metal — which has a harmful impact on almost every organ in the human body — have led to a ban on its use in petrol, domestic paint and pipes in the UK.

But experts said a lack of routine testing meant hundreds of thousands of children would be silently suffering from the effects of lead poisoning.

“This is a time bomb and it’s not going to go away,” said Alan Emond, emeritus professor of child health at Bristol Medical School. “By not facing up to it now, we are going to expose another generation to lead.”

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It took Hughes months to get the info together for this story. And here’s the other fun part: how do you get rid of the paint? If you chip or sand it off, you release it into the atmosphere.
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What happened to the live London Underground / bus maps? TfL happened • Traintimes

Matthew Somerville set up the live Tube trains map in June 2010, and it had been happily running since then using the official TfL API. But:

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on 7th January 2025, I received two emails out of the blue; a vaguely personal one from someone at TfL telling me to remove the schematic Tube map, and my hosting provider received a very impersonal one from the “Trademark Enforcement team”. (That second one says “We informed the registrant of our complaint, but were unable to resolve this issue.” but presumably they can’t mean the first email sent about an hour earlier? This is the first I’ve ever heard from them.)

This is of course perfectly within their right so to do, though I would have hoped for a different approach. Sure, I could have made some changes and kept the maps up, although as above they have been fine with it for many years. But I believe it is possible to both “protect” your trademark (or whatever you think this is) and not treat people like this. And rewarding this heavy-handed approach (by continuing to provide a useful addition to their service with no contact bar this) to me feels wrong.

The internet isn’t what it was 15 years ago, and I can’t be bothered dealing with large organisations removing any semblance of joy from it. I’m sure they won’t care, but I am just too tired.

So sorry, the maps are all gone.

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Utterly stupid on TfL’s part. Why have an API that’s not actually usable because you can’t put the trains on a map? Maybe this is the lesson of the internet: in time, all the good things die.
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Here are some of the weirdest gadgets we spotted at CES 2025 • The Register

Brandon Vigliarolo:

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As the gadget-filled spectacle that CES draws to a close, there’s much to anticipate and just as much that leaves us completely baffled.

We’ve already talked about the worst finds in the repairability and sustainability categories in our the worst of CES 2025. Now we turn an eye toward all the weird stuff that occupies the nooks and crannies of the Vegas show floor and has us wondering who decided to dedicate an engineering team’s time and salary toward such projects. 

There’s plenty of weirdness to pick through at CES every year, and we’ve whittled it down to these six items.

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So glad not to be there. And to be honest, the “worst” list isn’t that much different from the weird ones. Read both and feel happy you didn’t go there too.

Anyway, that’s it done for another year, and dealt with in one link! Phew.
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One less thing to worry about in 2025: Yellowstone probably won’t go boom • Ars Technica

John Timmer:

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It’s difficult to comprehend what 1,000 cubic kilometers of rock would look like. It’s even more difficult to imagine it being violently flung into the air. Yet the Yellowstone volcanic system blasted more than twice that amount of rock into the sky about 2 million years ago, and it has generated a number of massive (if somewhat smaller) eruptions since, and there have been even larger eruptions deeper in the past.

All of which might be enough to keep someone nervously watching the seismometers scattered throughout the area. But a new study suggests that there’s nothing to worry about in the near future: There’s not enough molten material pooled in one place to trigger the sort of violent eruptions that have caused massive disruptions in the past. The study also suggests that the primary focus of activity may be shifting outside of the caldera formed by past eruptions.

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See? Good news does exist.
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