A new study finds that Thursday is the new Friday where post-work drinks are concerned. CC-licensed photo by chas B on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Soberly. 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’s appeal to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal over the UK’s encryption ‘back door’ explained • Computer Weekly
Bernard Keenan:
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the question turns on whether ordering Apple to compromise the integrity of the ADP [Advanced Data Protection, its end-to-end encrypted backup] system is proportionate to meeting the needs of national security and the prevention or detection of serious crime. The government will likely argue that the TCN [UK government’s Technical Capability Notice] merely requires Apple to facilitate the execution of lawful warrants which are in themselves subjected to careful necessity and proportionality checks. In theory this ensures such powers can only be used judiciously in a limited and targeted fashion.
Government lawyers may also point out that Standard Data Protection still applies, and that is sufficient to protect the vast majority of users’ data. In effect, the government’s position is that commercial service providers do not have a right to unilaterally provide customers with perfect encryption that cannot be disabled where absolutely necessary. If the TCN is overturned, legitimate targets of state surveillance, including terrorists and child abusers, will “go dark”.
Governments always argue that they must have access to communications. Yet while there is no doubt that malicious actors and foreign agents rely on encryption, so do millions of innocent people, including lawyers, journalists, businesses, and anyone who has a duty to take care of other people’s secrets. How should that balance be assessed? It is not just Apple that need to know the answer. As I noted in an article from 2019, a TCN could theoretically order communication providers to grant UK authorities the means secretly to disable or modify the operation of encryption protocols applied on behalf of users.
That was not idle speculation – in 2018, two GCHQ directors openly discussed an approach that would see encrypted platforms like WhatsApp modify the notifications function on a target’s device so that a law enforcement participant could be secretly added to an apparently secure chat without the target realising. All transmissions via the app would remain encrypted, but the content would be intercepted. Whether such a capability was actually developed is unknown, but it seemed unlikely to me, given the disproportionate risks to all users that such software modifications would create.
But is that correct? We do not know what the measure of proportionality is in such a profoundly important matter. The tribunal should clarify these vitally important questions in public.
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Journalists are doing their best to make sure that at least some part of this is heard in public, and Apple probably isn’t against it. The difficulty is finding which judge to trouble with the legal demand to attend the hearing(s).
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Welcome to the semantic apocalypse • The Intrinsic Perspective
Erik Hoel:
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A well-known psychological phenomenon, semantic satiation can be triggered by repeating a word over and over until it loses its meaning. You can do this with any word. How about “Ghibli?” Just read it over and over: Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. You just keep reading it, each one in turn. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli.
Try saying it aloud. Ghiiiiiiiii-bliiiiiii. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli.
Do this enough and the word’s meaning is stripped away. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. It becomes an entity estranged from you, unfamiliar. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. It’s nothing. Just letters. Sounds. A “Ghib.” Then a “Li.” Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Like your child’s face is suddenly that of a stranger. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Only the bones of syntax remain. Ghibli. Ghibli.
No one knows why semantic satiation happens, exactly. There’s a suspected mechanism in the form of neural habituation, wherein neurons respond less strongly from repeated stimulation; like a muscle, neurons grow tired, releasing fewer neurotransmitters after an action potential, until their formerly robust signal becomes a squeak. One hypothesis is that therefore the signal fails to propagate out from the language processing centers and trigger, as it normally does, all the standard associations that vibrate in your brain’s web of concepts. This leaves behind only the initial sensory information, which, it turns out, is almost nothing at all, just syllabic sounds set in cold relation. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. But there’s also evidence it’s not just neural fatigue. Semantic satiation reflects something higher-level about neural networks. It’s not just “neurons are tired.” Enough repetition and your attention changes too, shifting from the semantic contents to attending to the syntax alone. Ghibli. Ghibli. The word becomes a signifier only of itself. Ghibli.
(While writing this, I went to go read a scientific review to brush up on the neuroscience of semantic satiation. And guess what? The first paper I found was AI slop too. I’m not joking. I wish I were. There it was: that recognizable forced cadence, that constant reaching for filler, that stilted eagerness. Published 11 months ago.)
The semantic apocalypse heralded by AI is a kind of semantic satiation at a cultural level.
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Scott Alexander has a good followup post referencing this, The Colours of Her Coat. Both highly recommended.
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The impact of hybrid working on the high street • Centre for Cities
Paul Swinney and Oscar Selby:
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Five years after the UK went into lockdown, this briefing looks at the impact of hybrid working on spending patterns by workers in both city centres and their local neighbourhoods.
While life today looks much closer to what it did in 2019 than many predicted, it is certainly the case that home working is higher on Mondays and Fridays than it was pre-pandemic. And this has affected patterns of worker spending in several ways:
Workers now do a smaller share of their spending in city centres than they did in 2019.
But counter to predictions, this has not led to a boom in local spending. And the shift in spending that has happened has been led by a shift in grocery spending rather than by independent cafes, with suburban supermarkets appearing to have been the biggest winners.
Thursday has become the new Friday for the post-work drink in central London. But after-work socialising appears to have become less common post-pandemic in other large city centres.
Thursdays are now the most popular day for an after-work drink in London, but after-work socialising appears to be less popular post-pandemic in other large city centres outside of London.
A key reason why large city centres had vibrant high streets pre-pandemic was due to the volume of workers who commuted into them each day, creating a market for shops, bars and restaurants to sell to. Therefore, a reduction in worker footfall reduces this source of sales for city centres. The current picture is far better than those 2020 predictions suggested for city centre high streets, but is less positive than what it was in 2019.
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It’s weird that Friday has ceased to be the “let’s go out for a drink” night. The graphs suggest that outside London, people now go out on Saturday rather than Friday. (Via Jim Waterson’s London Centric.)
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BYD car sales soar as Tesla struggles in Europe • Financial Times
Kana Inagaki:
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Vehicle sales at China’s BYD soared 58% in the first quarter in a stark contrast to an expected fall in demand for Tesla’s electric cars, as European consumers shun Elon Musk’s brand.
The Shenzhen-based group on Tuesday said it delivered 986,098 passenger vehicles in the first quarter, of which 416,388 were pure EVs, up 39%.
The strong start to the year came after BYD’s latest annual sales figures recently topped $100bn for the first time, propelled by resurgent demand for hybrid vehicles in its home market.
BYD has benefited from strong domestic demand for its hybrid cars, and has also been making aggressive inroads into overseas markets.
By contrast, analysts warned figures set to be released on Wednesday for Tesla’s first-quarter sales were likely to show a drop of more than 10%, as demand in France and other European markets slumped in March despite a key model upgrade.
Tesla sales have plummeted in Europe since the start of the year, but analysts have been divided over whether the decline has mainly been driven by a backlash to chief executive Musk’s interventions in regional politics or an ageing product portfolio and increasing competition.
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This article was written on Tuesday; on Wednesday Tesla announced a sales fall of 12.9%, delivering 336,681 cars while making 362,615.
Saw a BYD car the other day. They’re probably going to focus a lot on the UK and EU, given the fat new tariffs imposed on Wednesday night by Trump.
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Shingles vaccine can decrease risk of dementia, study finds • The New York Times
Pam Belluck:
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Getting vaccinated against shingles can reduce the risk of developing dementia, a large new study finds.
The results provide some of the strongest evidence yet that some viral infections can have effects on brain function years later and that preventing them can help stave off cognitive decline.
The study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, found that people who received the shingles vaccine were 20% less likely to develop dementia in the seven years afterward than those who were not vaccinated.
“If you’re reducing the risk of dementia by 20%, that’s quite important in a public health context, given that we don’t really have much else at the moment that slows down the onset of dementia,” said Dr. Paul Harrison, a professor of psychiatry at Oxford. Dr. Harrison was not involved in the new study, but has done other research indicating that shingles vaccines lower dementia risk.
Whether the protection can last beyond seven years can only be determined with further research. But with few currently effective treatments or preventions, Dr. Harrison said, shingles vaccines appear to have “some of the strongest potential protective effects against dementia that we know of that are potentially usable in practice.”
…In the United States, about one in three people develop at least one case of shingles, also called herpes zoster, in their lifetime, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates. About a third of eligible adults have received the vaccine in recent years, according to the C.D.C.
Several previous studies have suggested that shingles vaccinations might reduce dementia risk, but most could not exclude the possibility that people who get vaccinated might have other dementia-protective characteristics, like healthier lifestyles, better diets or more years of education.
The new study ruled out many of those factors.
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The results emerged from vaccination in Wales – where a one-year cutoff at the age of 80 created two cohorts of nearly identical age who could be compared. The implication seems to be that having a shingles vaccination late in life has protective effects.
Anyhoooooow, the US can presumably kiss goodbye to the benefits of this since its health secretary doesn’t put any trust in this “vaccine” stuff.
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Glacier melt threatens water supplies for two billion people, UN warns • Carbon Brief
Ayesha Tandon:
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Climate change and “unsustainable human activities” are driving “unprecedented changes” to mountains and glaciers, threatening access to fresh water for more than two billion people, a UN report warns.
The 2025 UN world water development report finds that receding snow and ice cover in mountain regions could have “severe” consequences for people and nature.
Up to 60% of the world’s freshwater originates in mountain regions, which are home to 1.1bn people and 85% of species of birds, amphibians and mammals.
The report highlights a wide range of impacts, including reduced water for drinking and agriculture, stress on local ecosystems and increased risk of “devastating” glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs).
It also notes the deep spiritual and cultural connections that mountain-dwelling communities around the world have with mountains and glaciers, from India’s Hindu Kush Himalaya to Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.
One expert tells Carbon Brief that glacier loss is already causing “loss of life, loss of livelihood and most importantly of all, the loss of a place that many communities have called home for generations”.
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I think the loss of the water is more important, to be honest.
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EU and UK fine carmakers millions over recycling cartel • DW
Matt Ford and agencies:
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The European Commission on Tuesday fined the Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA) and 15 of its members a total of €458m ($494.5m) for engaging in cartel-like behavior regarding the recycling of used cars.
German giant Volkswagen was handed the heftiest fine of €127m, followed by Renault/Nissan (€81.5 million), Opel parent company Stellantis (€75m), Ford (€41.5m), BMW (€25m), Opel itself (€25m) and Toyota (around €24m). The ACEA must pay €500,000.
Mercedes-Benz would have been liable for a €35m fine but avoided a penalty after reporting the long-running cartel in which it conspired with its rivals between 2002 and 2017.
The Commission found that the carmakers had entered into anti-competitive agreements and had exchanged confidential information to prevent competition on the stripping, scrapping and recycling of old cars.
One key finding was that the manufacturers had agreed not to advertise their recycling efforts, thus preventing consumers from factoring in environmental impact when choosing a vehicle and reducing any potential pressure on the companies to go beyond minimum legal requirements.
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The EC decision says that this was going on for 15 years. That’s a lot of cartel-ing.
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Something bizarre is happening to people who use ChatGPT a lot • Futurism
Noor Al-Sibai:
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Researchers have found that ChatGPT “power users,” or those who use it the most and at the longest durations, are becoming dependent upon — or even addicted to — the chatbot.
In a new joint study, researchers with OpenAI and the MIT Media Lab found that this small subset of ChatGPT users engaged in more “problematic use,” defined in the paper as “indicators of addiction… including preoccupation, withdrawal symptoms, loss of control, and mood modification.”
To get there, the MIT and OpenAI team surveyed thousands of ChatGPT users to glean not only how they felt about the chatbot, but also to study what kinds of “affective cues,” which was defined in a joint summary of the research as “aspects of interactions that indicate empathy, affection, or support,” they used when chatting with it.
Though the vast majority of people surveyed didn’t engage emotionally with ChatGPT, those who used the chatbot for longer periods of time seemed to start considering it to be a “friend.” The survey participants who chatted with ChatGPT the longest tended to be lonelier and get more stressed out over subtle changes in the model’s behavior, too.
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It’s the addiction more than the chatbot, though, isn’t it? If this were just Eliza, the original chatbot, they’d be on it in the same way too.
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Researchers suggest OpenAI trained AI models on paywalled O’Reilly books • TechCrunch
Kyle Wiggers:
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OpenAI has been accused by many parties of training its AI on copyrighted content sans permission. Now a new paper by an AI watchdog organization makes the serious accusation that the company increasingly relied on non-public books it didn’t license to train more sophisticated AI models.
AI models are essentially complex prediction engines. Trained on a lot of data — books, movies, TV shows, and so on — they learn patterns and novel ways to extrapolate from a simple prompt. When a model “writes” an essay on a Greek tragedy or “draws” Ghibli-style images, it’s simply pulling from its vast knowledge to approximate. It isn’t arriving at anything new.
While a number of AI labs, including OpenAI, have begun embracing AI-generated data to train AI as they exhaust real-world sources (mainly the public web), few have eschewed real-world data entirely. That’s likely because training on purely synthetic data comes with risks, like worsening a model’s performance.
The new paper, out of the AI Disclosures Project, a nonprofit co-founded in 2024 by media mogul Tim O’Reilly and economist Ilan Strauss, draws the conclusion that OpenAI likely trained its GPT-4o model on paywalled books from O’Reilly Media. (O’Reilly is the CEO of O’Reilly Media.)
In ChatGPT, GPT-4o is the default model. O’Reilly doesn’t have a licensing agreement with OpenAI, the paper says.
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Oh but come on, OpenAI was down to its last ten billion dollars. Coincidentally, there’s a big protest today (Thursday 3 April) about Meta’s use of the pirated LibGen database of books and articles (my books are in there, plus an article I wrote for Nature). The ALCS (Society of Authors) is writing an open letter to the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, who has offered pretty much zero response on this. Perhaps if we told her it’s a four-part Netflix drama?
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Lithium-ion battery waste fires are increasing, and vapes are a big part of it • Ars Technica
Kevin Purdy:
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2024 was “a year of growth,” according to fire-suppression company Fire Rover, but that’s not an entirely good thing.
The company, which offers fire detection and suppression systems based on thermal and optical imaging, smoke analytics, and human verification, releases annual reports on waste and recycling facility fires in the US and Canada to select industry and media. In 2024, Fire Rover, based on its fire identifications, saw 2,910 incidents, a 60% increase from the 1,809 in 2023, and more than double the 1,409 fires confirmed in 2022.
Publicly reported fire incidents at waste and recycling facilities also hit 398, a new high since Fire Rover began compiling its report eight years ago, when that number was closer to 275.
Lots of things could cause fires in the waste stream, long before lithium-ion batteries became common: “Fireworks, pool chemicals, hot (barbecue) briquettes,” writes Ryan Fogelman, CEO of Fire Rover, in an email to Ars. But lithium-ion batteries pose a growing problem, as the number of devices with batteries increases, consumer education and disposal choices remain limited, and batteries remain a very easy-to-miss, troublesome occupant of the waste stream.
All batteries that make it into waste streams are potentially hazardous, as they have so many ways of being set off: puncturing, vibration, overheating, short-circuiting, crushing, internal cell failure, overcharging, or inherent manufacturing flaws, among others. Fire Rover’s report notes that the media often portrays batteries as “spontaneously” catching fire. In reality, the very nature of waste handling makes it almost impossible to ensure that no battery will face hazards in handling, the report notes. Tiny batteries can be packed into the most disposable of items—even paper marketing materials handed out at conferences.
Fogelman estimates, based on his experience and some assumptions, that about half of the fires he’s tracking originate with batteries. Roughly $2.5bn of loss to facilities and infrastructure came from fires last year, divided between traditional hazards and batteries, he writes.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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