Urban planners have been celebrating the life’s work of the man who showed how free parking carries significant external costs. CC-licensed photo by Draco2008 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. Unpriced. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
The government ordering Apple to break its encryption is stupid, counter-productive and unworkable • Odds and Ends of History
James O’Malley:
»
The British constitution has many strange traditions. We open Parliament with a knock on the door by an official known as Black Rod. When a monarch is crowned, they are anointed with oils while hidden behind a curtain. And every few years, we hold a ritual debate about whether the government can force tech companies to break their end-to-end encryption.
It’s a solemn tradition, and you know how it goes: the government or security sources outline the pressing need to access the messages or cloud storage of terrorists and child abusers. Then the plan is revealed to be laughably unworkable, and finally, as per tradition, there’s an embarrassing climbdown and the status quo persists once again.
Anyway, the reason I mention this is that it’s that time again.
According to the Washington Post, the UK government has issued an “undisclosed order” to Apple, obliging the company to hand the government “blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely assistance in cracking a specific account”.
As the Post notes, this is an unprecedented request in a western democracy, and something that Apple does not provide to any other democracy – even the United States. In fact, the only country where Apple does make this concession is China, for the obvious reason that it has an unavoidable need to remain in the good graces of the country where it manufactures its devices and where there are literally a billion possible customers.
So it’s genuinely quite a shocking thing to see that the government has demanded this capability. Both in terms of the opaque way it has happened – the existence of the “Technical Capability Notice” was only revealed by a leak – and because nobody in the government appears to have asked the opinion of anyone who knows about computers first.
«
I forgot to link to this topic yesterday. Apologies! But it isn’t going to go off the agenda in a day. This is clearly being driven by the security services – perhaps accompanied by the police – who want the Magic Formula to break into phones, which they pinkie promise won’t be shared with anyone else, no sirree, though OK maybe members of the Five Eyes spying group (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) and any double agents inside them and from there all the people they supply. As James points out, we’ve seen this dance before.
But you should read this – James’s footnotes, read in context, are excellent.
unique link to this extract
Can the human body endure a voyage to Mars? • The New Yorker
Dhruv Khullar:
»
Some medical effects of space travel are well understood. For decades, scientists have known that near-weightlessness lengthens the spine and causes the wasting of muscle and bone, which is why astronauts have to exercise frequently.
[US astronaut Scott] Kelly returned to Earth [after nearly a year on the International Space Station (ISS), 520 days total in space] two inches taller than when he left; his body mass declined by seven%, in part because his appetite for packaged and freeze-dried fare was lower than NASA planners had anticipated. Some of his other symptoms, however, were strange and unfamiliar. When he stood, his blood seemed to rush downward, causing a painful swelling in his legs. “That was probably most disturbing,” he told me. An angry rash spread across his neck, back, and legs.
Kelly has an identical twin brother, the Arizona senator and retired astronaut Mark Kelly. Before the mission, both men had agreed to participate in a comparative study of their bodies—Mark from Earth, Scott from space and Earth. Because they have the same DNA, the study was a rare opportunity to isolate the physiological effects of long-term missions. And so, before, during, and after Scott’s stay on the ISS, a team of more than 80 researchers from 12 universities studied him more closely than perhaps any other human in history.
“I wish every person was a twin,” Christopher Mason, a principal investigator of the NASA Twins Study, has said. Mason and his colleagues were troubled by some of their findings. Cognitive testing, for example, showed declines in Scott’s mental speed and accuracy. Markers of inflammation in his blood spiked to levels that laboratory tests had difficulty measuring—thousands of% above normal, which suggested an extreme stress response. “Are these the highest levels ever seen in a human body?” Mason remembers one of his colleagues asking. “How did he survive?”
«
The article goes on to point out all the ways, big and small, that the idea is just an impossibility.
unique link to this extract
A cheat sheet on Professor Donald Shoup’s groundbreaking work • Parkade
Evan Goldin:
»
Americans, rather than trying to manage a common good with prices, have tried to legislate a vast abundance of parking without much thought for the consequences. And the consequences are dire.
Almost every municipality in the United States has enacted “parking minimums” over the last century, putting in place government rules that mandate specific minimum amounts of parking in new or changing buildings. These minimums have produced poorly designed cities, where more land is often devoted to parking than to the primary purpose of the buildings on the site. Off-street parking requirements reduce density because each building has its own parking that’s typically unavailable to the general public.
Minimums have eviscerated the ability for most places to install parking meters, because meters can’t compete with free parking.
Parking minimums have broken the link between using parking and paying for parking. With 99% of all parking in America free, most people drive to where they are going (87% in 2005, for example). Meanwhile, prices of all goods — especially housing — have gone up to indirectly cover the cost of providing those parking spots. With very rare exceptions, those costs are paid by cyclists and pedestrians at the same rate as drivers, even though they don’t use parking.
«
Shoup’s influential work – The High Cost of Free Parking – was written in 2005 and became a godsend to urban planners. They have been celebrating his work following his recent death.
unique link to this extract
Christie’s flooded with fury over AI art auction • The Times
Mark Sellman:
»
As one of the most famous auction houses in the world, Christie’s has sold art by some of the greatest artists the world has known, from Leonardo da Vinci to Pablo Picasso.
However, an upcoming auction of AI art has prompted anger from thousands of artists who are calling for it to be scrapped.
An open letter to Christie’s curators, which has gathered more than 3,000 signatures, says the auction “incentivises AI companies’ mass theft of human artists’ work”.
It adds that artworks in the sale, which starts on February 20 in New York, have been created using AI that was trained on the works of artists without their permission.
“These models, and the companies behind them, exploit human artists,” it says.
“Your support of these models, and the people who use them, rewards and further incentivises AI companies’ mass theft of human artists’ work. We ask that, if you have any respect for human artists, you cancel the auction.”
Estimates for the artworks range from $10,000 to $250,000, with some AI pieces having proven popular recently. A portrait of Alan Turing by an AI-powered humanoid robot sold for $1.3 million in November at Sotheby’s.
«
Christie’s, lest we forget, was the company behind the Beeple NFT auction way back in the internet dark ages of, let’s see, March 2021. I get a feeling that it has a group of youngsters in its marketing department who refresh Techmeme in the morning and then go for long creative lunches. Have to say, they’re winning.
unique link to this extract
Musk-led group makes $97.4bn bid for control of OpenAI, WSJ reports • Reuters
Arsheeya Bajwa:
»
A consortium led by Elon Musk offered $97.4bn to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, months after the billionaire sued the artificial intelligence startup to block it from transitioning to a for-profit firm.
Musk’s bid could ratchet up longstanding tensions between himself and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman over the future of the startup at the heart of a boom in generative AI technology.
The two are already embroiled in an ongoing lawsuit. Musk criticized a massive, $500bn OpenAI-led project called Stargate announced with great fanfare at the White House just after President Donald Trump returned to office, suggesting the investors involved lacked the funding for the project.
Musk’s attorney, Marc Toberoff, said he submitted the bid to OpenAI’s board on Monday, according to the report.
“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” the WSJ cited Musk as saying in a statement provided by Toberoff. “We will make sure that happens.”OpenAI, Musk, Toberoff and OpenAI backer Microsoft, opens new tab did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
«
Musk and Altman detest each other. The money involved would put it outside the top 30 (inflation-adjusted) purchases, but it would be marginally the largest of this decade. Current shareholders: Microsoft (49%), another 49% with “various other shareholders”, 2% by the nonprofit OpenAI.
I think it’s not going to happen: Microsoft won’t abandon Altman (things are going fine, Musk is a chaos agent), and Musk won’t get anything like 30% of the others on board. Sound and fury, signifying nothing. Of course Musk is going to threaten governmental retribution. Altman, and Microsoft, are made of tougher stuff.
Altman’s response: reject the bid, but offer to buy Twitter for $9.74bn. Epic trolling.
unique link to this extract
OpenAI’s ‘deep research’ tool: is it useful for scientists? • Nature
Nicola Jones:
»
Tech giant OpenAI has unveiled a pay-for-access tool called ‘deep research’, which synthesizes information from dozens or hundreds of websites into a cited report several pages long. The tool follows a similar one from Google released in December and acts as a personal assistant, doing the equivalent of hours of work in tens of minutes.
Many scientists who have tried it are impressed with its ability to write literature reviews or full review papers and even identify gaps in knowledge. Others are less enthusiastic. “If a human did this I would be like: this needs a lot of work,” says Kyle Kabasares, a data scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute in Moffett Field, California, in an online video review.
The firms are presenting the tools as a step towards AI ‘agents’ that can handle complex tasks. Observers say that OpenAI’s deep research tool, released on 2 February, is notable because it combines the improved reasoning skills of the o3 large language model (LLM) with the ability to search the Internet. Google says its Deep Research tool is, for now, based on Gemini 1.5 Pro, rather than on its leading reasoning model 2.0 Flash Thinking.
Many users are impressed with both tools. Andrew White, a chemist and AI expert FutureHouse, a start-up in the San Francisco, California, says that Google’s product is “really leveraging Google’s advantages in search and compute” to get users up to speed on a topic quickly, while o3’s reasoning skills add sophistication to OpenAI’s reports.
Derya Unutmaz, an immunologist at the Jackson Laboratory in Farmington, Connecticut, who has free access to ChatGPT Pro granted by OpenAI for medical research, says the OpenAI deep research reports are “extremely impressive”, “trustworthy” and as good or better than published review papers. “I think writing reviews is becoming obsolete.”
«
If – if! – you can rely on it, then sure, Deep Research is going to be wonderful for ploughing through tons of literature. One question that has been raised, but not answered, is whether – or if not, why not – such tools could make the sorts of associations (“hey, perhaps stomach ulcers are caused by Helicobacter pylorii!”) that humans can. Perhaps the AI could answer it?
unique link to this extract
Sonos’ chief marketing officer has left the company • The Verge
Chris Welch:
»
In a continued shuffling of the top ranks at Sonos, chief marketing officer Jordan Saxemard has exited the company. His departure is effective immediately. The news was announced during an internal call on Monday. Lindsay Whitworth, who has been at Sonos for over 20 years, will lead the brand’s marketing on an interim basis.
Internally, employees are happy about Whitworth taking over. She’s a longtime Sonos veteran who understands the company’s culture and customer base, and giving her the marketing reins is another move by interim CEO Tom Conrad to show rank-and-file employees that he’s serious about getting Sonos back on track in 2025.
Saxemard joined Sonos in May 2024 after nearly three years at Dyson and was hired by former CEO Patrick Spence. From what I’m told, he never quite gelled with the audio brand’s mission. He also had the unfortunate luck of immediately facing a challenging ordeal when Sonos prematurely rolled out an overhauled mobile app that was buggy and missing features.
«
The fallout from the app failure continues to be astonishing – that’s chief marketing office, chief product officer, chief executive officer, chief commercial officer, not to mention 200 other staff – all out the door. In just four weeks.
Anyhoooooo, how’s the rewrite of the app going? I’d like to see that leave the company and become available to everyone. Assuming it’s an improvement, which wouldn’t be hard.
unique link to this extract
Chinese EV leader BYD to offer ‘God’s Eye’ self-driving system on all models • Financial Times
Gloria Li:
»
BYD, the Chinese electric vehicle maker that is Tesla’s biggest rival, has unveiled an advanced self-driving system that it plans to install on its entire model line-up including the Rmb70,000 ($9,600) Seagull budget hatchback.
Dubbed “God’s Eye”, the driving system was developed in-house by BYD and will equip the automaker’s mass-market models with features commonly only found on upscale electric vehicles such as remote parking via smartphones and autonomous overtaking on roads.
“[We are] starting an era where autonomous driving is for everyone,” said founder Wang Chuanfu at a livestreamed event in BYD’s Shenzhen headquarters on Monday.
Advanced driver-assistance systems were “no longer an unattainable luxury, but an essential tool . . . like safety belts and airbags”, said Wang.
BYD has become the biggest EV producer in China, the world’s largest auto market, by providing a wide range of affordable EVs built using its highly vertically integrated supply chain. However, the company’s slow progress in developing self-driving capabilities has long been regarded as one of its biggest shortcomings.
«
Meanwhile the US is focusing on the important things, such as stopping the scheme to build out more electric chargers. Though the proof of this particular pudding will be in the not crashing.
unique link to this extract
Bird flu prompts New York to shut live bird markets • TIME
Alice Park:
»
n Feb. 7, New York Governor Kathy Hochul issued an order to temporarily close live bird markets after cases of avian influenza, or bird flu, were detected in seven markets in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx in the past week. The closures apply to all bird markets, including those that didn’t report any cases, in New York City, Westchester, Suffolk, and Nassau counties.
The order requires market owners to sell or otherwise remove all live birds and conduct a thorough cleaning and disinfection of their facilities—even if bird flu wasn’t detected there. All markets must remain closed for five days after the cleaning to confirm they are free of the H5N1 bird flu virus so that the virus won’t spread again when live animals are reintroduced.
«
Suzanne Vega’s “Ironbound” from her second album, Solitude Standing, sings about “fancy poultry parts sold here”. The bird markets have been there a long time. (Thanks Joe S for the link. Only a watching brief!)
unique link to this extract
| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 