Chips designed by AI are more efficient, but also weirder – and early designs have “hallucinations” like LLMs. CC-licensed photo by Sikorski Arkadiusz ArQ.PL on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Apple removes advanced data protection tool in face of UK government request • The Guardian
Rachel Hall:
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Apple has taken the unprecedented step of removing its strongest data security tool from customers in the UK, after the government demanded “backdoor” access to user data.
UK users will no longer have access to the advanced data protection (ADP) tool, which uses end-to-end encryption to allow only account holders to view items such as photos or documents they have stored online in the iCloud storage service.
Apple said it was “gravely disappointed” that it would no longer be able to offer the security feature to British customers, after the UK government asked for the right to see the data.
It said the removal of the tool would make users more vulnerable to data breaches from bad actors, and other threats to customer privacy. It would also mean all data was accessible by Apple, which could share it with law enforcement if they had a warrant.
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OK, there are a lot of very bad takes on this. First: this is exactly the compromise that a lot of people who understand how governments and companies negotiate expected. With this, Apple doesn’t backdoor iOS; but the government (really, the security services), once they’ve produced a valid warrant, knows it will not encounter an iCloud backup that Apple can’t decrypt using the server keys it has always had for iCloud backups.
Note that iCloud backups will still be encrypted. If you enable two-factor authentication, as Apple has encouraged for years now, your username and password won’t help a criminal. (You’re at more risk from shoulder-surfing of your passcode.)
Second: Apple has had longstanding agreements to let law enforcement access iCloud backups (and other data). This isn’t new in that regard.
Third: this is only ADP for UK users. (Likely determined by phone number and/or user data such as App Store setting.) It doesn’t affect users worldwide – they can still implement ADP (if they can find it; it’s buried in Settings).
Fourth: you can still make an encrypted backup that even Apple can’t decrypt: on your local PC or Mac. Strange how none of the organisations proclaiming this to be the end of the world have noticed this fact. Pretty much any UK user is going to have access to a PC, unlike those in, say, Africa.
Unanswered questions: does Google’s Android Backup have the end-to-end encryption like ADP, and if so, have they had a visit from the UK government? And what about WhatsApp, which has encryption on the server?
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AI-designed chips are so weird that ‘humans cannot really understand them’ — but they perform better than anything we’ve created • Live Science
Tim Danton:
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Engineering researchers have demonstrated that artificial intelligence (AI) can design complex wireless chips in hours, a feat that would have taken humans weeks to complete.
Not only did the chip designs prove more efficient, the AI took a radically different approach — one that a human circuit designer would have been highly unlikely to devise. The researchers outlined their findings in a study published Dec. 30 2024 in the journal Nature Communications.
The research focused on millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) wireless chips, which present some of the biggest challenges facing manufacturers due to their complexity and need for miniaturization. These chips are used in 5G modems, now commonly found in phones.
…In this experiment, the resulting structures “look randomly shaped,” said lead author Kaushik Sengupta, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton. “Humans cannot really understand them.”
And when Sengupta’steam manufactured the chips, they found the AI creations hit performance levels beyond those of existing designs.
Although the findings suggest that the design of such complex chips could be handed over to AI, Sengputa was keen to point out that pitfalls remain “that still require human designers to correct.” In particular, many of the designs produced by the algorithm did not work– equivalent to the “hallucinations” produced by current generative AI tools.
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Someone should tell Apple about this work. Could have saved them some time.
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Trump bars federal scientists from working on pivotal global climate report • CNN
Ella Nilsen and Laura Paddison:
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The Trump administration told US government scientists working on a vital global climate report to stop their work, according to a scientist involved in the report – the latest move to withdraw the US from global climate action and research.
The US had been highly involved in planning for the next installment of the report due out in 2029 from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading scientific authority on climate change.
The IPCC assesses how the climate crisis is affecting the planet according to the latest science. Its reports take thousands of scientists many years to produce and are used to inform policymakers across the world of the risks posed by global warming.
In a sense, all of the world’s current, accepted knowledge about climate change stems from the IPCC and its reports, the first of which was published in 1990.
An international meeting of IPCC authors that was scheduled to take place in China next week is now in limbo. Kate Calvin, NASA’s chief scientist and senior climate advisor, was supposed to co-chair the discussion but was impacted by the stop-work order, according to the scientist involved in the report. The meeting was planned to talk about next steps in the development of the report.
“Dr. Calvin will not be traveling to this meeting,” a NASA spokesperson said. NASA denied CNN’s request for an interview with Calvin.
The person involved in the report told CNN they were “not sure what this means for the planned work going forward, or if US scientists will participate in the writing of the IPCC reports.”
“The IPCC is the backbone of global climate science, providing the world with unbiased, evidence-based insights needed to confront the climate crisis,” said Harjeet Singh, a climate advocate and founding director of Satat Sampada Climate Foundation.
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I’ll offer the contrary take: we already know. We don’t need another IPCC report to tell us that things are bad and getting worse, and that we need to take action, ideally years ago but failing that, now. Use the existing report. Get governments to act on that. Though the evidence so far is they don’t. Trump, regrettably, especially so.
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HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to ‘feedback’ • The Register
Paul Kunert:
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HP Inc on Friday abruptly ditched the mandatory 15-minute wait time that it imposed on customers dialling up its telephone-based support team due to “initial feedback.”
As The Register exclusively revealed on Thursday, HP introduced the minimum time that PC and print users would need to wait before they spoke to a human being. This was to lean on customers to use online alternatives such as social channels or live chat.
This came into force for folks phoning up the call center in the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, and Italy on February 18. It went down like a lead balloon internally at HP, with some staff on the front line unhappy that they were having to deal with a decision taken by management, who didn’t have to directly interact with customers left hanging on the telephone… for at least 15 minutes.
Now HP has abandoned the policy, and in a statement issued today, said:
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We’re always looking for ways to improve our customer service experience. This support offering was intended to provide more digital options with the goal of reducing time to resolve inquiries.
We have found that many of our customers were not aware of the digital support options we provide. Based on initial feedback, we know the importance of speaking to live customer service agents in a timely fashion is paramount. As a result, we will continue to prioritize timely access to live phone support to ensure we are delivering an exceptional customer experience.
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This is great news. Now you’ll probably only have to wait 15 minutes – perhaps a bit longer – to get through to someone.
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FCC chair Brendan Carr taking first steps in eroding key legal protection enjoyed by Big Tech • NY Post
Charles Gasparino:
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Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr is taking the first steps in eroding a key legal protection enjoyed by Big Tech, which if successful has the potential of costing some of the most profitable companies in the world billions of dollars in market value, the Post has learned.
Since being picked by President Trump to run the agency, Carr’s actions to throttle Paramount’s sale to Skydance over concerns of relentless partisanship at CBS, violating the FCC’s “public interest” rules, have garnered the most attention.
But his still inchoate plan to weaken the so-called “Section 230” protections of major tech and social media companies could — depending on how they are written and interpreted by the courts — have the most far-reaching implications.
It’s not just the Big Tech companies’ social media businesses like Facebook or Twitter (now known as X) that rely on this “liability shield” to save countless billions of dollars in legal costs over alleged libelous posting and other possible liabilities.
Investors who have piled into stocks like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and even Apple could be impacted as well depending on how far he goes in weakening liabilities of all kinds that 230 protects them from.
Congress passed the Section 230 provision as part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 — essentially giving tech a pass for third-party postings on their platforms.
…[Carr and the FCC] has the legal authority to interpret Section 230, and change the prior guidance that has given those expansive protections to Big Tech.
He can weaken or eliminate the shield by issuing a so-called advisory opinion.
Then it’s up to the courts to decide if they should use his guidance when they weigh Section 230 cases.
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This is “underpants gnomes” (1: steal underpants, 2: ????, 3: profit) but for law. The fact that in the litigation-happy US the undermining of S230 would leave pretty much any company open to opportunistic lawsuits seems to be ignored in the rush to stick it to Big Tech.
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A.I. is changing how Silicon Valley builds startups • The New York Times
Erin Griffith:
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Almost every day, Grant Lee, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, hears from investors who try to persuade him to take their money. Some have even sent him and his co-founders personalized gift baskets.
Mr. Lee, 41, would normally be flattered. In the past, a fast-growing startup like Gamma, the artificial intelligence start-up he helped establish in 2020, would have constantly looked out for more funding.
But like many young startups in Silicon Valley today, Gamma is pursuing a different strategy. It is using artificial intelligence tools to increase its employees’ productivity in everything from customer service and marketing to coding and customer research.
That means Gamma, which makes software that lets people create presentations and websites, has no need for more cash, Mr. Lee said. His company has hired only 28 people to get “tens of millions” in annual recurring revenue and nearly 50 million users. Gamma is also profitable.
“If we were from the generation before, we would easily be at 200 employees,” Mr. Lee said. “We get a chance to rethink that, basically rewrite the playbook.”
The old Silicon Valley model dictated that startups should raise a huge sum of money from venture capital investors and spend it hiring an army of employees to scale up fast. Profits would come much later. Until then, head count and fundraising were badges of honor among founders, who philosophized that bigger was better.
But Gamma is among a growing cohort of startups, most of them working on A.I. products, that are also using A.I. to maximize efficiency. They make money and are growing fast without the funding or employees they would have needed before. The biggest bragging rights for these startups are for making the most revenue with the fewest workers.
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The first big shift for Silicon Valley startups was when LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl) meant you didn’t have to buy SGI hardware nor license Windows – a huge cost saving. This most recent one is AI.
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Alarm as bird flu now ‘endemic in cows’ while Trump cuts staff and funding • The Guardian
Melody Schreiber:
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A newer variant of H5N1 bird flu has spilled over into dairy cows separately in Nevada and Arizona, prompting new theories about how the virus is spread and leading to questions about containing the ongoing outbreaks.
The news comes amid a purge of experts at federal agencies, including employees who were responding to the highly pathogenic avian influenza outbreak at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the US Department of Agriculture.
The additional spillovers are changing experts’ view of how rare introductions to herds may be – with implications for how to prevent such spread.
“It’s endemic in cows now. There is no way this is going to get contained” on its own, said Seema Lakdawala, an influenza virologist and co-director of the Center for Transmission of Airborne Pathogens at Emory School of Medicine.
The current outbreak is unlikely to end without intervention and needs close attention from the Trump administration to prevent the virus from wreaking more havoc.
Yet “we don’t seem to have a handle on the spread of the virus,” said Boghuma Titanji, an infectious disease physician.
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Oh, and just for completeness: now also found in rats. (Thanks Joe S for the links.)
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Thousands of trafficked scammers await return to Thailand • The Register
Connor Jones:
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Thailand is preparing to receive thousands of people rescued from scam call centres in Myanmar as the country launches a major crackdown on the pervasive criminal activity across its border.
Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra said around 7,000 individuals are awaiting transfer to Thailand and confirmed the government was working as quickly as possible to remedy the issue.
Countries such as Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos have become hotspots for illegal scam call centers in recent years, with many staffed by people who were illegally trafficked into them.
Two years ago, the United Nations said the number of trafficked call center staff may run into the hundreds of thousands, citing “credible sources.”
In fact, Interpol warned as far back as 2023 that the practice, which is tantamount to modern slavery, is expanding beyond Southeast Asia into South America and the Middle East. The agency started tracking the phenomenon in 2021.
Interpol said at the time that India had recently registered its first case of human trafficking for cyber fraud and that illicit organizations in Myanmar had trafficked individuals from at least 22 different countries. Hundreds of investigations remain open.
The international policing agency re-upped its concerns last year, saying all signs pointed to the practice continuing to grow on a global scale.
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I miss the days when “pig butchering” was just a practice confined to actual pigs.
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Microsoft’s new AI agent can control software and robots • Ars Technica
Benj Edwards:
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On Wednesday, Microsoft Research introduced Magma, an integrated AI foundation model that combines visual and language processing to control software interfaces and robotic systems. If the results hold up outside of Microsoft’s internal testing, it could mark a meaningful step forward for an all-purpose multimodal AI that can operate interactively in both real and digital spaces.
Microsoft claims that Magma is the first AI model that not only processes multimodal data (like text, images, and video) but can also natively act upon it—whether that’s navigating a user interface or manipulating physical objects. The project is a collaboration between researchers at Microsoft, KAIST, the University of Maryland, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Washington.
We’ve seen other large language model-based robotics projects like Google’s PALM-E and RT-2 or Microsoft’s ChatGPT for Robotics that utilize LLMs for an interface. However, unlike many prior multimodal AI systems that require separate models for perception and control, Magma integrates these abilities into a single foundation model.
Microsoft is positioning Magma as a step toward agentic AI, meaning a system that can autonomously craft plans and perform multistep tasks on a human’s behalf rather than just answering questions about what it sees.
“Given a described goal,” Microsoft writes in its research paper.…
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Whoaaa horsey. A research paper is a long way from anything that’s actually available. (Although, to be fair, Microsoft Research has a pretty good record of getting its ideas out to the real world: I recall being at a presentation where it showed how Xbox game scoring among millions of users could work in, say, racing; and in a few years, it did.) Agents are the big new thing for AI, but essentially unproven.
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Diff Tools on macOS • Tower Blog
Tobias Günther:
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Staying up-to-date in a software, writing, or design project is hard – especially when multiple people are working on it. Without the right tools, you won’t be able to understand the changes that move the project forward.
This is where a diff tool comes in handy. It makes changes visible and helps you understand them. In this article, we’ve compiled a short list that helps you get an overview of the best diff tools on the Mac.
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There are websites which will do diffs for you, but there’s always that question of security/privacy and of course speed. Useful. (The Filemerge program, from Apple, requires you to download the developer tools.)
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 