In Norway, a ski jumping scandal involving an added seam in a suit has led to two suspensions. CC-licensed photo by Alexander Nilssen on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Have humans passed peak brain power? • Financial Times
John Burn-Murdoch:
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Given its importance, there has been remarkably little consistent long-running research on human attention or mental capacity. But there is a rare exception: every year since the 1980s, the Monitoring the Future study has been asking 18-year-olds whether they have difficulty thinking, concentrating or learning new things. The share of final year high school students who report difficulties was stable throughout the 1990s and 2000s, but began a rapid upward climb in the mid-2010s.
This inflection point is noteworthy not only for being similar to performance on tests of intelligence and reasoning but because it coincides with another broader development: our changing relationship with information, available constantly online.
Part of what we’re looking at here is likely to be a result of the ongoing transition away from text and towards visual media — the shift towards a “post-literate” society spent obsessively on our screens.
The decline of reading is certainly real — in 2022 the share of Americans who reported reading a book in the past year fell below half.
Particularly striking however is that we see this alongside decreasing performance in the application of numeracy and other forms of problem-solving in most countries.
In one particularly eye-opening statistic, the share of adults who are unable to “use mathematical reasoning when reviewing and evaluating the validity of statements” has climbed to 25% on average in high-income countries, and 35% in the US.
So we appear to be looking less at the decline of reading per se, and more at a broader erosion in human capacity for mental focus and application.
Most discussion about the societal impacts of digital media focuses on the rise of smartphones and social media. But the change in human capacity for focused thought coincides with something more fundamental: a shift in our relationship with information.
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The article is paywalled (sorry) but Burn-Murdoch has a long thread on X or if you prefer on Bluesky containing many of the charts and ideas. It’s.. not encouraging.
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Five million • Substack Reads
Sophia Efthimiatou is head of “Writer Relations” at Substack:
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Today [March 11] we are celebrating five million paid subscriptions on Substack. This comes less than four months after our co-founder Hamish McKenzie shared that we crossed four million paid subscriptions. It is a milestone that can be enjoyed in purely transactional terms: these are real people rewarding the work of writers and creators with real money, allowing them to achieve and maintain their independence. But to consider this purely as a financial achievement would be myopic. What we want is to create a wealth of culture.
Five million paid subscriptions represent five million different tastes, perspectives, political views, and psyches. They represent dog lovers, cat owners, food allergics, hat wearers, high-heel haters, opera aficionados, recipe experimentalists, nudists, puritans, cinephiles, royalists, classicists, crocheters, and some who would prefer not to. Five million paid subscriptions represent five million multitudes, yet by buying a subscription to support a mind they love, they are united in their desire for a better cultural model.
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Looks like the “Substack is evil and full of Nazis, leave it at once” campaign of late 2023 had the predictable outcome, ie less than zero. Back then there were two million subscriptions (and 17,000 writers getting them, ie a mean of about 120 per paid publication – though a power law surely applies).
I certainly spend more on subscriptions to big media organisations than on Substack subscriptions, but the delta is shrinking. Increasingly, the Substack model feels like the way forward for any journalist serious about what they’re doing in the long term, especially in light of the next item below.
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Daily Mail redundancies are being watched by Fleet Street with horror • New Statesman
Alison Phillips:
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Think what you may about the Daily Mail, but it has long been committed to funding journalism. And yet now the axe has fallen even at DMGT, which runs the Mail, Mail on Sunday and Mail Online.
A redundancy process, which will lead to up to 99 job losses, is well under way. Reporters found out last week if they were casualties of this latest step to bring digital and the two papers under one operation, rather than remaining separate entities. The departure of many experienced journalists is being watched by Fleet Street with horror. If such cost-saving measures are being taken at the historically well-resourced Mail, they can happen anywhere.
As they are. The journalist’s trade mag Press Gazette (which shares a publisher with New Statesman) has taken to keeping a monthly tally of news job losses across the UK and US. More than 900 jobs were cut in January. The February tally sits at 210. Last year Press Gazette recorded a total of 4,000 jobs lost on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, those impacted included journalists at the Observer – where staff were offered redundancy after the buy-out by Tortoise Media – and the BBC World Service.
Journalism across the UK is struggling to make money from digital advertising (of which an astonishing 80% is sucked up by Google and Facebook). Digital subscriptions offer some hope, but many readers are hooked on introductory offers and reluctant to stick at full price. Print revenues still bolster profits for many British news brands, but that cannot last.
We need to start thinking seriously about the state of our news ecosystem. More than ever it is imperative that a workable alternative to the BBC licence fee is sold to the British people to protect public service broadcasting. The Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, appears to favour mutualisation, with licence-fee payers having some kind of stake in owning the business and a role in managing it. But in an interview with the Sunday Times, the BBC chair, Samir Shah, indicated he leans towards an annual fee for all households – regardless of whether they use the BBC or not.
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It’s so hard to get people to understand that the BBC is incredibly good value – all that TV and the radio stations and the news for less than the price of a monthly Netflix subscription. Joni Mitchell comes to mind: “don’t it always seem to go/That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”
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Apple reassures Siri team members feeling disappointed and embarrassed by Apple Intelligence delay • MacRumors
Juli Clover:
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In a Siri team meeting, Apple senior director Robby Walker acknowledged that employees might be feeling “angry, disappointed, burned out and embarrassed” following the Siri delay, but he praised the hard work of employees and the “incredibly impressive” features they developed, saying that Apple would continue to work to “ship the world’s greatest virtual assistant” to Apple users. “I saw so many people giving everything they had in order to make this happen and to make incredible progress together,” he said.
The situation was described as “ugly” because the Siri features were shown off in public with marketing campaigns and TV commercials before there was a fully functional product. Siri ‘s new functionality was also tied to the iPhone 16 launch in advertising, and it was a feature that Apple used to promote its iPhone 16 models.
Apple decided to delay the functionality because of quality issues, with Walker telling employees that Siri ‘s new features were only working properly 60% to 80% of the time.
To encourage employees, Walker demonstrated Siri locating his driver’s license number, manipulating apps by embedding content in an email and adding recipients, and finding specific photos of a child. Employees on the Siri team will be able to use time away to recharge and prepare for “hard work ahead.”
Walker told employees that it is not yet clear when the new Siri features will be ready for launch, but Apple’s statement about the delay mentioned “in the coming year.” That has been interpreted as 2026, or in an update to the iOS 19 operating system launching this fall.
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John Gruber (who stirred things up with his “Something is rotten in Cupertino” post last week) is extremely rude about the news of this meeting, arguing that nobody deserves any praise in this. I agree with him.
I wonder if John Giannandrea will be shuffled away from being in charge of Siri soon, because if you were giving him a performance review, what could he offer to persuade you he has done well?
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How zonal energy pricing works, and why we need it • Octopus Energy
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Pricing at the national level is leading to consumers across the country paying much more for their energy than they need to.
Take grid constraints for example: often, we are generating so much wind in places like Scotland that our cables can’t transport it to the south where it needs to go. In the current system, the solution is to simply switch the turbines off. This wastes vast amounts of clean power and still costs you money, as we have to pay the producers to shut down.
At the same time, electricity costs shoot up as consumers all over the country pay to burn gas to fill gaps.
Combined these added over a billion to British energy bills in 2024, and the costs are growing. So far, it’s already cost you over £300m in 2025. That’s £180,000 wasted every hour.
At the same time, we often send our power overseas from the south (where we need it most), whilst buying in power from overseas in the north (where we need it least), making the problem even worse.
These so-called ‘constraint costs’ are skyrocketing, and could more than double from today’s levels – up to £3.6bn per year in a best case scenario by 2030! – if we continue to use this outdated system.
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Ofgem, the electricity regulator, looked into zonal pricing in 2023 and found that it would be an unalloyed Good Thing which, apart from anything else, could save domestic households £38 per year – more than any other tweaks have managed.
Another study published in February found benefits of between £5bn and £15bn.
At which one has to ask: what’s the delay in implementing this?
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Norway suspends two staff members in ski jump cheating scandal at world championships • AP News
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The Norwegian ski federation has suspended a ski jumping coach and an equipment manager over their alleged role in a cheating scandal which shook the world championships this weekend.
The federation said coach Magnus Brevik and equipment manager Adrian Livelten were suspected of modifying ski suits by sewing in an extra seam in an attempt to create more lift in the air.
Norway is one of the traditional powers within ski jumping, and the cheating attempt at its home world championships has caused a massive outcry in a country that prides itself on its winter sports prowess.
Two Norwegian ski jumpers, Marius Lindvik and Johann Andre Forfang, were disqualified from Saturday’s men’s large hill competition after organizers said their suits broke the rules. Lindvik had finished second in the event before he was disqualified.
The federation on Sunday admitted that the suits had been deliberately altered, after a video emerged online of the alterations being made.
Brevik on Monday told Norwegian media that several team members had been involved in the decision to alter the suits, but that “I should have stopped it.”
He claimed it was the first time they had stitched in an extra seam, but made a sailing analogy to explain why a stiffer suit would help the jumpers fly farther in the air.
“A tighter sail is better than a loose sail,” Brevik said.
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Apparently this has “tarnished Norway’s standing for honesty in sports“. But the video came from a whistleblower, so one out of three for honesty?
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Why can’t programmers… program? • Coding Horror
Jeff Atwood:
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Between Reginald, Dan, and Imran [quoted in the blogpost being amazed at the lack of competence in programming of people applying for programming jobs], I’m starting to get a little worried. I’m more than willing to cut freshly minted software developers slack at the beginning of their career. Everybody has to start somewhere. But I am disturbed and appalled that any so-called programmer would apply for a job without being able to write the simplest of programs. That’s a slap in the face to anyone who writes software for a living.
The vast divide between those who can program and those who cannot program is well known. I assumed anyone applying for a job as a programmer had already crossed this chasm. Apparently this is not a reasonable assumption to make. Apparently, FizzBuzz style screening is required to keep interviewers from wasting their time interviewing programmers who can’t program. [FizzBuzz: a program that counts up from 1, writing “Fizz” for multiples of 3, “Buzz” for multiples of 5, and “FizzBuzz” for multiples of both.]
Lest you think the FizzBuzz test is too easy – and it is blindingly, intentionally easy – a commenter to Imran’s post notes its efficacy:
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I’d hate interviewers to dismiss [the FizzBuzz] test as being too easy – in my experience it is genuinely astonishing how many candidates are incapable of the simplest programming tasks.
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This blogpost appeared in February. But: which year? Have a guess. Answer at the bottom of this post.
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The cystic fibrosis breakthrough that changed everything • The Atlantic
Sarah Zhang:
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in the fall of 2019, a new triple combination of drugs began making its way into the hands of people with the genetic disease. Trikafta corrects the misshapen protein that causes cystic fibrosis; this molecular tweak thins mucus in the lungs so it can be coughed up easily. In a matter of hours, patients who took it began to cough—and cough and cough and cough in what they later started calling the Purge. They hacked up at work, at home, in their car, in bed at night. It’s not that they were sick; if anything, it was the opposite: They were becoming well. In the days that followed, their lungs were cleansed of a tarlike mucus, and the small tasks of daily life that had been so difficult became unthinkingly easy. They ran up the stairs. They ran after their kids. They ran 10Ks. They ran marathons.
Cystic fibrosis once all but guaranteed an early death. When the disease was first identified, in the 1930s, most babies born with CF died in infancy. The next decades were a grind of incremental medical progress: A child born with CF in the ’50s could expect to live until age 5. In the ’70s, age 10. In the early 2000s, age 35. With Trikafta came a quantum leap. Today, those who begin taking the drug in early adolescence, a recent study projected, can expect to survive to age 82.5—an essentially normal life span.
CF was one of the first diseases to be traced to a specific gene, and Trikafta is one of the first drugs designed for a specific, inherited mutation. It is not a cure, and it doesn’t work for all patients. But a substantial majority of the 40,000 Americans with CF have now lived through a miracle—a thrilling but disorienting miracle. Where they once prepared for death, they now have to prepare for life. “It’s like the opposite of a terminal diagnosis,” Jenny Livingston told me.
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CF is one of the conditions that has been considered for gene therapy – either of the patient, or even germ-line gene therapy to remove the gene from the person’s DNA. Neither has worked. So they focused on the protein that goes wrong and causes mucus to gather. This is a comprehensive writeup.
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Meta tries to bury a tell-all book • WIRED
Steven Levy on the Wynn-Williams book that everyone has rushed out to buy now Meta is running a campaign against it:
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The arbitrator’s Meta-friendly “emergency” ruling was the climax of an intense campaign against the book that erupted once the company got a look at it. Even as I turned the pages of Careless People, my inbox was fattening with dispatches from Meta. “Her book is a mix of old claims and false accusations about our executives,” a company spokesperson says. They characterize her firing as the result of “poor performance and toxic behavior.” They call her “a disgruntled activist trying to sell books.” Meanwhile on social media, current and former employees posted comments defending the maligned executives.
If the news is so old, one might ask why is Meta going nuclear on Wynn-Williams? For one thing, its author was a senior executive who was in the room, and on the corporate jet, when stuff happened—and she claims that things were worse than we imagined. Yes, Meta’s reckless disregard in Myanmar, where people died in riots triggered by misinformation posted on Facebook, was previously reported, and the company has since apologized. But Wynn-Williams’ storytelling paints a picture where Meta’s leaders simply didn’t care much about the dangers there.
While the media has written about Zuckerberg’s obsession with getting Facebook into China, Wynn-Williams shares official documents that show Meta instructing the Chinese government on face recognition and AI, and says that the company’s behavior was so outrageous that the team crafted headlines to show what the company would have to deal with if their plans leaked. One example: “Zuckerberg Will Stop at Nothing to Get Into China.” While making blanket statements that the book can’t be trusted, Meta hasn’t denied all these allegations specifically. (In general, when a company tries to dismiss charges as “old news,” that translates to a confirmation.)
Still, in the context of what we know about Meta already, nothing Wynn-Williams says about the company’s actions and inactions is shockingly new… Careless People’s most memorable moments come not from Meta’s substandard corporate morals, but gossipy anecdotes of misbehavior on the corporate plane or at luxury hotels. Despite the lofty F. Scott Fitzgerald title reference, much of the book reads like a Big Tech–themed episode of White Lotus.
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Levy is unpersuaded by Wynn-Williams’s stated reasons for staying at the company (healthcare, principally). But certainly Meta’s campaign has been the most amazing Streisand Effect bit of publicity. The book probably would have sunk without trace. Instead, it’s become the talk of the town.
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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: Atwood’s post was in February 2007. Has programming collapsed since then?
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 
There exist many bad programmers in the world. I have had the misfortune to need to fix the code written by a few of them. That’s one reason I have a somewhat less than terrified reaction to all the pundit articles on the theme of “AI-written code has bugs!”. AI-written code is typically not as good as the best humans, but it does seem to be significantly better than the worst humans. Anyway, I think the problem described is a sampling illusion. Any average given open programming job will tend to have more bad programmers apply for it than good programmers. Because good programmers change jobs much less frequently than bad programmers. In a way, the effect is almost an indicator of the opposite. If every open job had a bunch of “10x” (elite) programmers applying, that would say very scary things about the industry. It would be like academia. Or maybe journalism.
“the BBC is incredibly good value”
… if you use it.
It’s terrible value if you don’t.