Trying to get a $42bn rural broadband program working in the US exposed how its government has become bogged down in rules and processes. CC-licensed photo by Gavin St. Ours on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Hooked up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s failed negotiations with the FTC to end Meta’s antitrust case • WSJ
Dana Mattioli, Rebecca Ballhaus and Josh Dawsey:
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Mark Zuckerberg called the head of the Federal Trade Commission in late March with an offer: Meta would pay $450m to settle a long-running antitrust case that was about to go to trial.
The offer was far from the $30bn that the FTC had demanded. It was also a fraction of the value of Instagram and WhatsApp, the two apps Meta had bought and were at the heart of the government’s case.
On the call, Zuckerberg sounded confident that President Trump would back him up with the FTC, said people familiar with the matter. The billionaire Facebook co-founder had been developing closer ties to Trump—his company donated $1m to Trump’s inauguration and settled a $25m lawsuit—and had been pressing the president in recent weeks to intervene in the monopoly lawsuit.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson found the offer not credible, and wasn’t ready to settle for anything less than $18bn and a consent decree. As the trial approached, Meta upped its offer to close to $1bn, the people said, and Zuckerberg led a frenzied lobbying effort to avoid the FTC trial.
…Former FTC Chair Lina Khan told the Journal that the company’s $450m settlement offer was “delusional.”
“Mark bought his way out of competing, so I’m not surprised that he thinks he can buy his way out of law enforcement, too,” said Khan, who was nominated by former President Joe Biden. “His proposed remedy, like his market strategy, is: ‘let my illegal monopoly keep monopolizing.’”
Meta spokeswoman Dani Lever said the company is prepared to win at trial. “We haven’t been shy about explaining why it doesn’t make sense for the FTC to bring a case to trial that requires it to prove something every 17-year-old in America knows is absurd—that Instagram doesn’t compete with TikTok,” she said.
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Incredible lowball effort combined with overweening confidence on the part of Zuckerberg that a little bit of tossing money to Trump would end it all. Khan gets it perfectly. And the trial is underway.
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Startup founder claims Elon Musk is stealing the name ‘Grok’ • WIRED
Zoë Schiffer:
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Elon Musk’s XAI is facing a potential trademark dispute over the name of its chatbot, Grok. The company’s trademark application with the US Patent and Trademark Office has been suspended after the agency argued the name could be confused with that of two other companies, AI chipmaker Groq and software provider Grokstream. Now, a third tech startup called Bizly is claiming it owns the rights to “Grok.”
This isn’t the first time Musk has chosen a name for one of his products that other companies say they trademarked first. Last month, Musk’s social media platform settled a lawsuit brought by a marketing firm that claimed it owns exclusive rights to the name X.
Bizly and xAI appear to have arrived at the name Grok independently. Bizly founder Ron Shah says he came up with it during a brainstorming session with a colleague who used the word as a verb. (The phrase “to grok” is frequently used in tech circles to mean “to understand.”) “I was like, that’s exactly the name,” Shah tells WIRED. “We got excited, high-fived, it was the name!”
Musk has said he named his chatbot after a term used in the 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, according to The Times of India. Author Robert A. Heinlein imagined “grok” as a word in a Martian lexicon that also meant “to understand.”
Shah says he applied to trademark the name Grok in 2021. Two years later, he was in the midst of launching an AI-powered app for asynchronous meetings called Grok when Musk announced his chatbot with the same name. “It was a day I’ll never forget,” Shah says. “I woke up and looked at my phone, and there were so many messages from friends saying ‘did you get acquired by Elon? Congrats!’ It was a complete shock to me.”
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There’s also a LinkedIn post by Shah from last year making the same points. How very unlike Musk to ride roughshod over other people’s rights.
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Revealed: Chinese researchers can access half a million UK GP records • The Guardian
Tom Burgis:
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Researchers from China are to be allowed access to half a million UK GP records despite western intelligence agencies’ fears about the authoritarian regime amassing health data, the Guardian can reveal.
Preparations are under way to transfer the records to UK Biobank, a research hub that holds detailed medical information donated by 500,000 volunteers. One of the world’s largest troves of health data, the facility makes its information available to universities, scientific institutes and private companies. A Guardian analysis shows one in five successful applications for access come from China.
For the past year, health officials had been assessing whether extra safeguards were needed for patient records when added to the genomes, tissue samples and questionnaire responses held by UK Biobank. Personal details such as names and dates of birth are stripped from UK Biobank data before it is shared but experts say that in some cases individuals can still be identified.
MI5, the UK Security Service, has warned that Chinese organisations and individuals granted access to UK data can be ordered by Chinese intelligence agencies “to carry out work on their behalf”. But UK Biobank told the Guardian that the NHS unit responsible for health data had in recent weeks cleared it to grant Chinese researchers access to GP records.
…Of the 1,375 successful applications for access to UK Biobank data, 265 came from China, or almost 20%, second only to the US, according to a Guardian analysis of its published records. Chinese scientists have used UK Biobank data to understand the effects of air pollution and to spot biological markers that could predict dementia.
Last year, UK Biobank approved access for a research project on ageing by a unit of the Chinese genetics company BGI. The US, by contrast, has blacklisted BGI subsidiaries, barring Americans from exporting to them.
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Perhaps I’m very naive, but I don’t see the harm in this. How does it help the Chinese to know that lots of people in Norfolk have ulcers?
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tobi lutke on X: “Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify” • X
Tobi Lutke is CEO of Shopify, and posted an internal memo which had started leaking onto X:
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Our task here at Shopify is to make our software unquestionably the best canvas on which to develop the best businesses of the future. We do this by keeping everyone cutting edge and bringing all the best tools to bear so our merchants can be more successful than they themselves used to imagine. For that we need to be absolutely ahead.
Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify.
Maybe you are already there and find this memo puzzling. In that case you already use AI as a thought partner, deep researcher, critic, tutor, or pair programmer. I use it all the time, but even I feel I’m only scratching the surface. It’s the most rapid shift to how work is done that I’ve seen in my career and I’ve been pretty clear about my enthusiasm for it: you’ve heard me talk about AI in weekly videos, podcasts, town halls, and… Summit! Last summer I used agents to create my talk, and presented about that. I did this as a call to action and invitation for everyone to tinker with AI, to dispel any scepticism or confusion that this matters at all levels. Many of you took up the call, and all of us who did have been in absolute awe of the new capabilities and tools that AI can deliver to augment our skills, crafts, and fill in our gaps.
What we have learned so far is that using AI well is a skill that needs to be carefully learned by… using it a lot. It’s just too unlike everything else. The call to tinker with it was the right one, but it was too much of a suggestion. This is what I want to change here today. We also learned that, as opposed to most tools, AI acts as a multiplier. We are all lucky to work with some amazing colleagues, the kind who contribute 10X of what was previously thought possible. It’s my favorite thing about this company. And what’s even more amazing is that, for the first time, we see the tools become 10X themselves.
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Only the paranoid survive. And clearly using AI is a marker for the paranoid now.
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Memory FAQ • OpenAI Help Center
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ChatGPT can now remember useful details between chats, making its responses more personalized and relevant. As you chat with ChatGPT – whether you’re typing, talking, or asking it to generate an image – it will remember helpful context from previous conversations, like your preferences and interests, and use that to tailor its responses. The more you use ChatGPT, the more useful it becomes. You’ll start to notice improvements over time as it builds a better understanding of what works best for you. You can also teach ChatGPT something new by saying it in a chat — for example: “Remember that I am vegetarian when you recommend a recipe.” To check what ChatGPT remembers, just ask: “What do you remember about me?”
You’re in control of what ChatGPT remembers. You can delete individual memories, clear specific or all saved memories, or turn memory off entirely in your settings. If you’d like to have a chat without using or updating memory, use Temporary Chat. Temporary Chats won’t reference memories and won’t create new memories.
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Oh, it’s Google search history, but for AI prompts and responses. People are pretty impressed by this. If you’re using ChatGPT a lot, that makes sense.
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“You try to build anything, and you’re stepping into quicksand” • The New York Times
Ezra Klein:
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I’ve spent the last month or so on tour for “Abundance,” the book I wrote with The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson. “Abundance” is in no small part about the consequences of delay in Democratic governance. One example I’ve come back to repeatedly in events and interviews is the rural broadband program that passed as part of that 2021 infrastructure law: $42bn to connect tens of millions of Americans to broadband. By the end of Biden’s term, the administration had nothing to show for it. Was it really impossible for a signature program begun in Biden’s first year to have delivered its benefits by the end of his fourth year?
In March, Sarah Morris, a former deputy administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, testified before Congress in a bid to save the project. She laid out the 14-phase process that the broadband program was following — a 14-phase process that, by March of 2025, only three of the 56 states and territories that had applied for the money had completed.
…what I found, as I talked to various people who’d been part of the broadband program, was that much of the process was worse than I’d known — one participant estimated he’d wasted 40% to 50% of his time on internal government requirements he judged irrelevant to the project — and they were desperate to see some lessons learned.
Bharat Ramamurti, who served as deputy director of the National Economic Council under Biden, was among those irked by my comments. So when we talked, I was surprised by how much frustration poured out of him.
“We had too much legacy and too little immediacy in our policy approach,” Ramamurti told me. “Look at everything after the American Rescue Plan — infrastructure, CHIPS, I.R.A. — all of it was long-term focused. The most off-the-charts popular thing we did was cap out-of-pocket costs on Medicare prescription drugs. We passed that in 2022, and it went into effect in 2025! It frustrated me to no end.”
In the Trump administration’s view of politics, the “deep state” serves Democrats and obstructs Republicans. But I am struck by how often I hear Democrats describe their own fights with the bureaucracies they supposedly control.
…When I asked [president Biden’s national security adviser, Jake] Sullivan a version of this question — where is all this resistance to speed coming from in a government you supposedly control? — he put it like this: “It takes a couple dozen people to say yes to make something happen, and it only takes one person to say no to stop that thing from happening. The bias is always toward no. And you might ask: why can’t the president just override the no? That’s where we as an administration were intensely scrupulous about process, propriety, mindful of the role of the agencies, and so there was a degree of self-deterrence that was almost culturally built in.”
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Late-stage capitalism meets end-stage democracy.
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What I’ve learned after 40 years as the Observer’s science editor • The Guardian
Robin McKie:
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Melting ice caps, flooding coastal plains, droughts, severe storms and heatwaves threaten to displace hundreds of millions of people from their homelands as large chunks of our planet become uninhabitable. “In such a future, we will bring about nothing less than the collapse of the living world – the very thing that our civilisation relies upon,” states Sir David Attenborough in A Life on our Planet.
Our scientific creativity and ingenuity could surely help us face down the coming devastation, it might be expected. We certainly have the intellectual capacity to halt the changes that lie ahead. Sadly, my experiences as science editor suggest otherwise – for just as I have watched breathtaking advances in science unfold, I have witnessed large parts of society turn their heads and deliberately reject the truths that have been presented to them. The rise of unreason has been the unwelcome partner to our growing scientific sophistication.
My first serious encounter with anti-science denial came with the arrival of Aids in the 80s. Scientists traced the cause: a virus now known as HIV which, they pointed out, is sexually transmitted. This point was disputed by many individuals who claimed it was caused by “flawed” lifestyles and denied that Aids was caused by a virus. This was to have a devastating international impact after South Africa’s president Thabo Mbeki asked several Aids deniers to join his presidential advisory panel on the disease. Widespread withholding of treatments for Aids ensued in South Africa, where the death toll from the disease reached hundreds of thousands of people.
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The latter shows that anti-science in the face of modern science is not, sadly, a new thing. Also – this piece is the one that journalists write when they’re waving farewell. The Observer has been sold to Tortoise Media. What happens next isn’t clear. Whether McKie still has (or wants) a job there also isn’t clear. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Doctor Who is taking on dangerous AI because ‘this is what’s happening’ • The Verge
Charles Pulliam-Moore:
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The newest season of Doctor Who opens as the series often does — with an unsuspecting human stumbling into some alien strangeness that doesn’t make any sense until an odd yet charming Time Lord shows up in a police box ready to save the day. The premiere episode, “The Robot Revolution,” feels like classic Doctor Who as it pits the Doctor and his new companion against an army of killer machines from another planet.
Of course, the Doctor has fought squads of goofy-looking automatons countless times during Doctor Who’s 61-yearlong run. But what makes “The Robot Revolution” feel somewhat distinct is what it has to say about where these particular robots and their twisted ideology come from. When I recently sat down with showrunner Russell T. Davies, he told me that, in 2025, machines powered by artificial intelligence are exactly the kind of villains the Doctor should be tackling because Doctor Who has always been a show that uses fiction to say things about the state of our reality.
“Doctor Who always speaks of the modern world, and if I simply look out of my window at the city below me, this is what’s happening,” Davies says of AI’s increasing prevalence. ”The Doctor has always fought robots, but now, if you’re putting a robot into the show now, you can’t not use the words ‘artificial intelligence.’ It’s absolutely impossible.”
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I feel that this is like a children’s colouring book when compared to the genius of the latest Black Mirror series – each of whose six episodes is utterly marvellous in its imagination and storytelling.
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Here’s how a satellite ended up as a ghostly apparition on Google Earth • Ars Technica
Stephen Clark:
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Dig deep on Google Earth and you’ll inevitably find a surprise or two. Maybe you’re looking at far-flung islands in the middle of an ocean or checking in on something closer to home.
A few years ago, online sleuths found an image of a B-2 stealth bomber in flight over Missouri. The aircraft is smeared in the image because it was in motion, while the farm fields below appear as crisp as any other view on Google Earth.
There’s something else that now appears on Google Earth. Zoom in over rural North Texas, and you’ll find a satellite. It appears five times in different colors, each projected over wooded bottomlands in a remote wildlife refuge about 60 miles (100km) north of Dallas.
Satellites in low-Earth orbit soar up to 40 times higher than a B-2 bomber and travel about 30 times faster. But there are more than 9,300 active satellites currently in orbit, and thousands more space debris objects, compared to 19 operational B-2 bombers in the Air Force’s inventory.
Someone first shared Google Earth’s satellite capture last week on Reddit. The identity of the satellite hasn’t been confirmed, but its appearance is similar to that of a SpaceX Starlink satellite, specifically a Starlink V2 Mini, with two solar panels spanning some 100 feet (30 meters) end to end. There are more than 7,000 Starlink satellites in space today, more than all other satellite constellations combined, so it wouldn’t be surprising that the first Google Earth capture of another spacecraft in orbit would show a Starlink.
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Moving at about 5 miles per second relative to the ground. Not too shabby!
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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 
But IG is not a monopoly and monopolies are not even illegal.
Khan and other regulators fail to understand that monopolies, or at best duopolies, are the only possible result when we are talking about similar social media platforms.
People end up in one or two “instagrams”or “facebooks” because that’s simply how social media works. Nothing will ever change that.
In reality more services compete for our attention and time than ever before.
Sure, Meta’s ownership of several popular services might be a problem, but their share of global digital ad spending is nowhere near a monopoly, unless FTC thinks that about 20% is a monopoly.