Prices of PC system builders may rise by 20% or more due to new tariffs on imported parts imposed by the US, companies say. CC-licensed photo by Vasile Cotovanu 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.

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. I apologise in advance.

A selection of 9 links for you. Well put together. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Trump’s tariffs put the iPhone in a tough spot • The Verge

Allison Johnson:

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Gerrit Schneemann, a senior analyst at Counterpoint Research, doesn’t necessarily believe we’ll see an immediate price increase.

“I don’t foresee them… on a short-term basis just raising prices unnecessarily,” Schneemann told The Verge.

He points out that Apple’s margins (historically about 38%) give it more wiggle room to absorb the costs of the tariffs, at least in the short term. “But I think if this sticks, then probably with the 17 we could see a price hike,” he said, referring to the iPhone 17 expected in the fall.

If the goal with these tariffs is to get Apple to start making iPhones in the US, that’s not going to happen anytime soon, either. The company would face some massive challenges doing so.

“I don’t think we see a real path to a meaningful US smartphone industry production hub,” says Schneemann. Apple does some manufacturing in the US, but is largely limited to small-scale production. The iPhone and its network of specialized component suppliers are a different beast. Even if Apple established supply chains, a workforce, and manufacturing facilities for the iPhone in the US, the costs would be prohibitively high, likely more than the impact of the tariffs. These tariffs are being carried out through an executive order rather than Congress, so a new incoming president could change them in four years.

Apple will keep making iPhones overseas and finding ways to deal with the extra taxes to import them to the US. “There’s already been reports of [Apple] trying to get the supply chain to absorb some of that additional cost, which is something Apple is good at anyway,” says Schneemann. And if Apple raises prices with the iPhone 17 series, our tendency to buy phones through carrier subsidies could cushion the blow through slightly higher monthly payments.

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Sonos is also trying to figure out what happens next; it shifted manufacturing out of China to Malaysia and Vietnam a few years ago to avoid tariffs being levied on US imports from China (hooray!) only to find out that those are being hit with 24% and 46% tariffs respectively (boo).
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PC prices up at least 20%: Trump tariffs may hurt U.S. system integrators most • Tom’s Hardware

Avram Piltch:

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PCs, particularly those built by smaller, boutique vendors may be hit hardest of all, makers and resellers tell Tom’s Hardware.

Large OEMs such as Dell and HP may be able to limit their exposure by moving production to less-tariffed countries. U.S. brands such as Maingear, iBuyPower and Falcon Northwest assemble their products in America — using parts that come almost exclusively from Asia.

“Tariffs have a direct impact on our cost structure… which we have to pass down to our customers,” Wallace Santos, CEO of Maingear, told us a few minutes before Trump released his latest round of tariffs. “Some of our suppliers are stopping their production lines to move out of China, causing scarcity, which ultimately causes FOMO, which causes even more scarcity.

After yesterday’s announcements, Santos said he expects prices for his PCs to go up 20 to 25% as a result of the tariffs.

On Wednesday, Trump announced his full suite of new tariffs, which include rates of 54% on China (+34% on top of the 20% already announced), 32% on Taiwan, 26% on South Korea and 46% on Vietnam. Those are all countries where a lot of PC components such as SSDs, RAM, PC cases and graphics cards are sourced. That 15% number could rise, in other words.

“Some of our GPU suppliers had to stop their Chinese lines to move to Taiwan or Vietnam, causing additional shortages,” Santos told us.

The tariffs had already worsened GPU shortages as manufacturers tried to move from China to less-taxed countries such as Vietnam. Now that those countries have tariffs of their own, there’s no place to go. These suppliers are less likely to move operations from China now that Vietnam and Taiwan also have huge tariffs applied to them.

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Doesn’t matter if you move – do more trade from a country, you’ll up the trade deficit with the US and the Trump Tariff will rise, because it’s tied to the trade deficit (in defiance of economic theory).
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UK seeks business views on response to US tariffs • GOV.UK

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Following the 10% reciprocal tariffs on a range of products announced by the Trump administration yesterday, UK companies are being invited to give their views on what any future UK response should look like by providing feedback to questions asking them the average value of their US imports, the impact of any possible UK tariffs and how they would adjust to them. 

The Business and Trade Secretary has also today [Thursday] published an indicative list of goods imported from the US that may be considered in a future UK response. This makes it clear to businesses that the Government would not consider products in the wider public interest issues such as medical supplies and military equipment. It marks the next stage in the government’s ongoing preparations and negotiations with the US on our economic relationship.

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The full list is 419 pages. Lots of elements (as in hydrogen, helium, etc) are on there. Lots of makeup and cosmetics, print film, tyres, animal hides… printers too, and literally kitchen sinks.

There are thousands of categories. Only one problem: the PDF isn’t searchable, either on the web or when downloaded. (At least, for me – take any item eg vodka, which is in there.) I think it’s going to get fed into a lot of chatbots and queried.
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Meta is now the UFC technology partner, including for Quest • UploadVR

David Heaney:

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The companies say the partnership will see Meta “leverage its leading technologies to deliver unprecedented engagement with hundreds of millions of UFC fans around the world” and “immerse fans deeper into UFC content than ever before”.

The partnership will include Meta AI, smart glasses, Quest, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads.

“I’ve had a lot of great partners over the years that have helped us grow this sport, but Mark and his team at Meta are going to do things that will blow away UFC fans,” said UFC President and CEO Dana White. “Meta has the greatest minds in tech and they are going to take fan engagement to the next level. We’ve already started to work on some innovations with Meta around a new fighter rankings system that I’ll be sharing soon. The next few years will be an absolute game changer for fans of this sport.”

White joined Meta’s board of directors back in January, and has reportedly been Mark Zuckerberg’s intermediary to the Trump administration, currying favour for Meta with the US president.

Currently, the app Xtadium already lets Quest owners in the US watch select UFC fights in 2D immersive 180º for free, and for UFC Fight Pass subscribers to watch any fight on a large virtual screen.

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Aside from the currying favour bit, this is exactly what Apple should have been doing already with the Vision Pro. It’s as though the company can’t walk and chew gum – lots and lots of content is what the device needs to sell itself to people. Everyone keeps on making this point, yet nothing happens.
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Man catches Hertfordshire hawk that attacked villagers for weeks • The Guardian

Esther Addley:

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A hawk that has been terrorising male residents of a Hertfordshire village for weeks has been captured by a local man after it stalked him through the village while he was jogging.

Dozens of villagers in Flamstead, near Luton, have reported being attacked from behind by the bird, identified as a Harris’s hawk. Some have been left bleeding and in at least one case requiring hospital treatment.

Tall men in particular have reported being swooped at and clawed for more than a month, leading many to wear hats or even cycling helmets when outside. Villagers became more concerned when the bird attacked an 11-year-old boy this week, and someone reported it swooping at other children walking home from school.

Steve Harris, 40, said he caught the hawk on Thursday after it followed him on his daily jog before landing in his garden.

Determined to stop the attacks after weeks of being forced to wear a cycling helmet while out running, he had finally managed it, he said, by clambering on to his shed and throwing a cage over the bird. He had previously tried to lure it into a cage with some chicken, but without success.

“I had just been out on a run. It was following me for a mile, hopping along all the telegraph poles,” he said. “It came into the garden, and I was holding the cage above my head. Eventually it sat in the shed, squawking at me.”

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Could have been worse – could have been dropping tortoises on bald peoples’ heads.
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Everything TV taught you about autopsies is wrong • The Atlantic

Samuel Ashworth:

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Most Americans will never see a real autopsy, so our impressions of them are formed by TV portrayals. That’s how it was for me, until I spent two weeks observing autopsies in a hospital in Pittsburgh as part of research for a novel. In real life, autopsies are performed in brightly lit rooms. (Forensic autopsies must sometimes be completed in the field if, for example, a body cannot be safely moved.)

The autopsist begins with a Y-shaped incision into the sternum and works methodically through the body. Sometimes the internal organs are inspected in situ, but more typically they are removed, washed down, and dissected on a water table. The autopsist doesn’t just pick up an organ, look at it, make a diagnosis, and plop it back in; rather, they catalog as many of the body’s pathologies as possible, whether or not they’re suspected of causing death. They also take care to make sure that none of the evidence of this inspection would be visible in an open-casket funeral. It’s slow, comprehensive work that rarely involves fancy electronics.

Perhaps the most subtly ridiculous aspect of TV autopsies is the lack of personal protective equipment. In real autopsies, the people involved wear head-to-toe PPE—surgical scrubs, armguards, booties, an apron, a face mask, a splash shield, and a cap—because, when you open a human body up, all the blood, bile, and other fluids that a person had in life are still in there. Blood can still ooze from a wound, even when it’s not being pumped through the body.

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Seems like they haven’t seen Silent Witness? But TV drama needs to be able to show faces, for emotion. It may be shocking to learn that TV sometimes (often?) fudges reality in order to create space for drama, but it’s possible that the Greek attack on Troy didn’t play out exactly as described in The Iliad either.
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AI bots strain Wikimedia as bandwidth surges 50% • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

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On Tuesday, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that relentless AI scraping is putting strain on Wikipedia’s servers. Automated bots seeking AI model training data for LLMs have been vacuuming up terabytes of data, growing the foundation’s bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content by 50% since January 2024. It’s a scenario familiar across the free and open source software (FOSS) community, as we’ve previously detailed.

The Foundation hosts not only Wikipedia but also platforms like Wikimedia Commons, which offers 144 million media files under open licenses. For decades, this content has powered everything from search results to school projects. But since early 2024, AI companies have dramatically increased automated scraping through direct crawling, APIs, and bulk downloads to feed their hungry AI models. This exponential growth in non-human traffic has imposed steep technical and financial costs—often without the attribution that helps sustain Wikimedia’s volunteer ecosystem.

The impact isn’t theoretical. The foundation says that when former US President Jimmy Carter died in December 2024, his Wikipedia page predictably drew millions of views. But the real stress came when users simultaneously streamed a 1.5-hour video of a 1980 debate from Wikimedia Commons. The surge doubled Wikimedia’s normal network traffic, temporarily maxing out several of its Internet connections. Wikimedia engineers quickly rerouted traffic to reduce congestion, but the event revealed a deeper problem: the baseline bandwidth had already been consumed largely by bots scraping media at scale.

This behavior is increasingly familiar across the FOSS world. Fedora’s Pagure repository blocked all traffic from Brazil after similar scraping incidents covered by Ars Technica. GNOME’s GitLab instance implemented proof-of-work challenges to filter excessive bot access. Read the Docs dramatically cut its bandwidth costs after blocking AI crawlers.

Wikimedia’s internal data explains why this kind of traffic is so costly for open projects. Unlike humans, who tend to view popular and frequently cached articles, bots crawl obscure and less-accessed pages, forcing Wikimedia’s core datacenters to serve them directly. Caching systems designed for predictable, human browsing behavior don’t work when bots are reading the entire archive indiscriminately.

As a result, Wikimedia found that bots account for 65% of the most expensive requests to its core infrastructure despite making up just 35% of total pageviews. This asymmetry is a key technical insight: The cost of a bot request is far higher than a human one, and it adds up fast.

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A strange new arms race: sites like Wikimedia don’t want to block AI bots, but they’d like them to behave a lot better.
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Amazon said to make a bid to buy TikTok in the U.S. • The New York Times

Lauren Hirsch, Maggie Haberman, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Karen Weise and Sapna Maheshwari:

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Amazon has put in a last-minute bid to acquire all of TikTok, the popular video app, as it approaches an April deadline to be separated from its Chinese owner or face a ban in the United States, according to three people familiar with the bid.

Various parties who have been involved in the talks do not appear to be taking Amazon’s bid seriously, the people said. The bid came via an offer letter addressed to Vice President JD Vance and Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, according to a person briefed on the matter.

Amazon’s bid highlights the 11th-hour maneuvering in Washington over TikTok’s ownership. Policymakers in both parties have expressed deep national security concerns over the app’s Chinese ownership, and passed a law last year to force a sale of TikTok that was set to take effect in January.

President Trump, who has pledged repeatedly to save the app despite the national security concerns, delayed the enforcement of that law until Saturday, even after it was unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court.
Amazon declined to comment. TikTok didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Trump met with top White House officials Wednesday to discuss TikTok’s fate. People familiar with the talks have outlined a potential deal that could involve bringing on a number of new U.S. investors, including Oracle, the technology giant; and Blackstone, the private equity firm, while sidestepping a formal sale. But it isn’t clear that such a structure would satisfy the conditions of the federal law.

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Satisfy the conditions of the law? That’s crazy talk!
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The crisis of zombie social science • The Garden of Forking Paths

Brian Klaas:

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Many social phenomena can be sorted into two categories: “strong link problems” and “weak link problems.”

As the always insightful Adam Mastroianni points out, food safety is an example of a weak link problem, in which you have to worry about the weakest link. Even if 99.9% of a country’s food supply is free of toxic bacteria, the 0.1% can imperil everyone. A rowing crew is also a weak link problem: if seven rowers are Olympians but one scrawny rower is out of sync, the boat will slow to a crawl.

Strong link problems are the opposite: everything will be fine as long as the strongest link is really strong. Basketball, unlike rowing, is a strong link problem. LeBron James is good enough that even if there’s a really weak player on the bench, the Lakers are still going to win a lot. And, as Mastroianni convincingly argues, science is a strong link problem. It’s okay if there’s a lot of junk science out there being published in pseudoscience journals, because the strongest discoveries that change the world are what matter most. Pay attention to the best science, ignore the worst.

I see an exception to Mastroianni’s argument. Zombie Theories in social science short-circuit these dynamics. For the reasons mentioned above, it’s rarely universally agreed what the strongest links actually are in economics, political science, psychology, or sociology. Without being able to kill off the bad but influential theories through falsification, what should be a strong-link problem ends up just being a bit of a mess, with bad ideas lingering on, often obscuring better ones.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s a lot of astonishingly good social science research. I’m often in awe of colleagues across disciplines who have devoted their lives to solving problems in the most innovative ways. My critique is not that social science is useless, but that it could be better.

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Klaas is associate professor of global politics at UCL, so has seen a lot of the good and the bad in social science research. This is a particularly interesting post on the “reproducibility problem” in that field.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new study finds that Thursday is the new Friday where post-work drinks are concerned. CC-licensed photo by chas B 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 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.

«

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:

»

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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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Baseball has finally started to make technological shifts, with the NY Yankees using bats shaped to improve hitting. CC-licensed photo by terren in Virginia 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 10 links for you. Based. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Open-source genetic database shuts down to protect users from “authoritarian governments” • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

The creator of an open source genetic database is shutting it down and deleting all of its data because he has come to believe that its existence is dangerous with “a rise in far-right and other authoritarian governments” in the United States and elsewhere.

“The largest use case for DTC genetic data was not biomedical research or research in big pharma,” Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, the founder of OpenSNP, wrote in a blog post. “Instead, the transformative impact of the data came to fruition among law enforcement agencies, who have put the genealogical properties of genetic data to use.”

OpenSNP has collected roughly 7,500 genomes over the last 14 years, primarily by allowing people to voluntarily submit their own genetic information they have downloaded from 23andMe. With the bankruptcy of 23andMe, increased interest in genetic data by law enforcement, and the return of Donald Trump and rise of authoritarian governments worldwide, Greshake Tzovaras told 404 Media he no longer believes it is ethical to run the database.
 
“I’ve been thinking about it since 23andMe was on the verge of bankruptcy and been really considering it since the U.S. election. It definitely is really bad over there [in the United States],” Greshake Tzovaras told 404 Media. “I am quite relieved to have made the decision and come to a conclusion. It’s been weighing on my mind for a long time.” 

…OpenSNP has been used for various scientific papers, most notably to show that an earlier paper about chronic fatigue syndrome pulled from 23andMe data could not be replicated and was based on erroneous science.

«

As a reminder, 23andMe had about 15 million genomes stored, so it’s impressive on its own that this dataset could refute work done there. But the world is really changing, and this seems like a very sensible move. Even if it won’t make much difference if the US government “acquires” the 23andMe dataset by some means.
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Cheap TVs’ incessant advertising reaches troubling new lows • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

TVs offer us an escape from the real world. After a long day, sometimes there’s nothing more relaxing than turning on your TV, tuning into your favourite program, and unplugging from the realities around you.

But what happens when divisive, potentially offensive messaging infiltrates that escape? Even with streaming services making it easy to watch TV commercial-free, it can still be difficult for TV viewers to avoid ads with these sorts of messages.

That’s especially the case with budget brands, which may even force controversial ads onto TVs when they’re idle, making users pay for low-priced TVs in unexpected, and sometimes troubling, ways.

An experience recently shared by an apparent Vizio TV owner illustrates how ads delivered via TV operating systems (OSes) can take ads from annoying to intrusive and offensive.

Reddit user DoubleJumps claimed last week that when their Vizio TV is idle, “it plays calming nature video, calming music, and then loops a message from the [T]rump admin[istration] telling illegal immigrants to gtfo over and over and over again.”

…what DoubleJumps detailed is completely within the scope of Vizio’s advertising efforts. Vizio TVs have something called Scenic Mode, which has the sets show, per Vizio, “relaxing, ambient content when your TV is idle for a period of time,” along with ads. Scenic Mode can be disabled, but if it’s enabled, the ads cannot be turned off. Vizio says the ads help it pay for things like the TVs’ free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channels and help keep Vizio TV prices low.

Vizio also has ties to political ads. It has previously boasted about its work with “a political candidate on an ad campaign that combined CTV ads with our Household Connect omnichannel feature to reach potential voters both on their TV sets and on other opted in devices.” The company says it can play a “powerful role… in helping political campaigns reach their intended audiences.”

«

I’d love to say I’m sympathetic, but if you live in a culture suffused with advertising and never try to erase it, this really is what you’ll get. Apparently the owner is going to get rid of the TV. That’s a start.
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Earth AI’s algorithms found critical minerals in places everyone else ignored • TechCrunch

Tim De Chant:

»

Earth AI emerged from Teslyuk’s graduate studies. Teslyuk, a native of Ukraine, was working toward a doctorate at the University of Sydney, where he became familiar with the mining industry in Australia. There, the government owns the rights to mineral deposits, and it leases them in six-year terms. Since the 1970s, he said, exploration companies are required to submit their data to a national archive.

“For some reason, nobody’s using them,” he said. “If I could build an algorithm that can absorb all that knowledge and learn from the failures and successes of millions of geologists in the past, I can make much better predictions about where to find minerals in the future.”

Teslyuk started Earth AI as a software company focused on making predictions about potential deposits, then approaching customers who might be interested in exploring sites further. But the customers were hesitant to invest, in part because they didn’t want to bet millions on the predictions of an unproven technology.

“Mining is a very conservative industry,” Teslyuk said. “Everything outside of the approved dogma is considered heresy.”
So Earth AI decided to develop its own drilling equipment to prove that the sites it identified were as promising as its software suggested. The company was accepted to Y Combinator’s spring 2019 cohort, and it spent the next few years refining its hardware and software. In January, Earth AI raised a $20m Series B.

«

Slight correction on the optimistic headline: Earth AI’s algorithms claimed to have found critical minerals. Without digging there, nobody knows. The company’s website doesn’t show any proof of discovery, though it’s an interesting idea – why not apply ML to all that data?
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The Yankees’ ‘Torpedo’ bats that are breaking baseball, explained • SBNation.com

James Dator:

»

The New York Yankees have cracked the code when it comes to hitting dingers, and it’s raising massive questions about whether they’re simply leveraging existing rules, or bending them entirely too much. This year the club introduced a new bat featuring what they call a “Torpedo Barrel,” and it’s quite literally breaking the game of baseball.

This was most apparent on Saturday night in a 20-9 win over the Milwaukee Brewers in which the Yankees hit an astonishing nine home runs across seven players. Even if we take that game as an outlier, New York is still crushing the ball at an unseen rate — more than tripling the competition.

In 2024 Major League Baseball (MLB) teams averaged 182 home runs across the season for an average of 1.12 homers a game. Thus far in 2025 the Yankees already have 15 in three games, on pace for a record-breaking 810. The sample size is small, and obviously that won’t hold — but the result is still staggering as New York leads MLB in home runs, hitting three more than the Dodgers, despite playing two fewer games. That’s largely in part to the Torpedo Barrel.

At the most basic level it’s a new shape of bat. Rather than having an even taper from tip to grip, the Torpedo has a pronounced bulge in the barrel designed to redistribute the center of mass in the bat from the end, moving it down and where players most often make contact. The difference in bats is astonishing when seen side-by-side with a standard MLB bat.

Essentially what this change means is that the hitting of Yankees players is fundamentally altered. They are making contact with the sweet spot far more often, and plays which would normally be tip balls or flares are now converting into home runs.

«

It’s astonishing that it has taken this long – professional baseball has existed in the US since 1876. But these bats, which do what larger rackets did for tennis in the 1970s (enlarge the sweet spot/move it to where you actually make contact) have only been around since 2022. US pro baseball seems to be very resistant to change – right down to the use of a specific sort of mud that is rubbed into baseballs before they’re put into play.
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Anthropic can now track the bizarre inner workings of a large language model • MIT Technology Review

Will Douglas Heaven:

»

The AI firm Anthropic has developed a way to peer inside a large language model and watch what it does as it comes up with a response, revealing key new insights into how the technology works. The takeaway: LLMs are even stranger than we thought.

The Anthropic team was surprised by some of the counterintuitive workarounds that large language models appear to use to complete sentences, solve simple math problems, suppress hallucinations, and more, says Joshua Batson, a research scientist at the company.

It’s no secret that large language models work in mysterious ways. Few—if any—mass-market technologies have ever been so little understood. That makes figuring out what makes them tick one of the biggest open challenges in science.

But it’s not just about curiosity. Shedding some light on how these models work exposes their weaknesses, revealing why they make stuff up and why they can be tricked into going off the rails. It helps resolve deep disputes about exactly what these models can and can’t do. And it shows how trustworthy (or not) they really are.

Batson and his colleagues describe their new work in two reports published at the end of March. The first presents Anthropic’s use of a technique called circuit tracing, which lets researchers track the decision-making processes inside a large language model step by step. Anthropic used circuit tracing to watch its LLM Claude 3.5 Haiku carry out various tasks. The second (titled “On the Biology of a Large Language Model”) details what the team discovered when it looked at ten tasks in particular.

“I think this is really cool work,” says Jack Merullo, who studies large language models at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and was not involved in the research. “It’s a really nice step forward in terms of methods.”

Circuit tracing is not itself new. Last year Merullo and his colleagues analyzed a specific circuit in a version of OpenAI’s GPT-2, an older large language model that OpenAI released in 2019. But Anthropic has now analyzed a number of different circuits inside a far larger and far more complex model as it carries out multiple tasks. “Anthropic is very capable at applying scale to a problem,” says Merullo.

Eden Biran, who studies large language models at Tel Aviv University, agrees. “Finding circuits in a large state-of-the-art model such as Claude is a nontrivial engineering feat,” he says. “And it shows that circuits scale up and might be a good way forward for interpreting language models.”

«

Fun! But also: does that actually help us? At all?
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As AI takes his readers, a leading history publisher wonders what’s next • Big Technology

Alex Kantrowitz:

»

Late last year, Jan van der Crabben’s AI fears materialized. His World History Encyclopedia — the world’s second most visited history website — showed up in Google’s AI Overviews, synthesized and presented alongside other history sites. Then, its traffic cratered, dropping 25% in November.

Van der Crabben, the website’s CEO and founder, knew he was getting a preview of what many online publishers may soon experience. His site built a sizable audience with plenty of help from Google, which still accounts for 80% of its traffic. But as AI search and bots like ChatGPT ingest and summarize the web’s content, that traffic is starting to disappear. Now, his path forward is beginning to look murky.

“There used to be this implicit agreement between publishers and Google that basically, Google could scrape, analyze, process, and do whatever they wanted with publishers’ content and in return, they would send traffic to the publishers, send them readers,” he told me. “Now, this unspoken contract is kind of breaking.”

World History Encyclopedia is just one site and Van der Crabben’s anecdote is just one story, but the migration of readers from the web to AI summaries will likely continue. The internet has always favored ease. And using generative AI to find the most valuable parts of the web’s evergreen content — like recipes, personal finance, and history content — can be a better experience than poking through sites one by one.

…Van der Crabben is well aware that Google has helped him scale in the first place, but what’s different now, he said, is that the arrangement is no longer mutually beneficial. “Now it’s just Google that benefits,” he said. “And the same is true, let’s be honest, for ChatGPT, for Anthropic, for many of the AI chatbots that gobble up the content. And, for most of them, unless you sue them — which only a big corporation like Reuters can do — they are not going to pay you for it.”

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Why does Britain feel so poor? • The Value of Nothing

Martin Robbins:

»

Speaking at a rail conference last year, HS2 Chair Sir Jon Thompson said: “To build a railway between Euston and Curzon Street in Birmingham, I need 8,276 consents from other public bodies, planning, transport, the Environment Agency or Natural England. They don’t care whether parliament did or didn’t approve building a railway.”

Imagine for a moment the sheer human effort, the cost, the entire lives consumed by the gigantic national project of ticking each of those 8,276 checkboxes. It is absolutely correct that we have additional checks and balances, but this is an organically-grown system operating with no overall oversight or coherent strategy, spawning busy-work for thousands of people, much of it duplicated, unnecessary or redundant, much of it – like the infamous bat tunnel – having little provable benefit for things like environmental protection in the first place.

Indeed, improving things like the environment is not the de facto goal of this system, it is not what it was ‘designed’ or incentivised to accomplish. If it were, much of the money would be far better spent. I cannot stress this enough: this is not a battle between, say, infrastructure and the environment. It’s a battle between people who think we can do both, better; and people who seriously believe that a bat tunnel is the best way to spend £120m to support wildlife, a proposition for which no compelling evidence has ever been provided.

Meanwhile, local government veers towards bankruptcy, in large part because they’re mandated to write blank cheques for social care with no support or strategy from central government.

«

Robbins puts his finger on what feels wrong in this post. The box-ticking is certainly a big thing. The inability of anyone to cut through the Gordian knots is becoming destructive.
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Waltz and staff used Gmail for government communications, officials say • The Washington Post

John Hudson:

»

Members of President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, including White House national security adviser Michael Waltz, have conducted government business over personal Gmail accounts, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post and interviews with three U.S. officials.

The use of Gmail, a far less secure method of communication than the encrypted messaging app Signal, is the latest example of questionable data security practices by top national security officials already under fire for the mistaken inclusion of a journalist in a group chat about high-level planning for military operations in Yemen.

A senior Waltz aide used the commercial email service for highly technical conversations with colleagues at other government agencies involving sensitive military positions and powerful weapons systems relating to an ongoing conflict, according to emails reviewed by The Post. While the NSC official used his Gmail account, his interagency colleagues used government-issued accounts, headers from the email correspondence show.

Waltz has had less sensitive, but potentially exploitable information sent to his Gmail, such as his schedule and other work documents, said officials, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe what they viewed as problematic handling of information.

«

As a reminder, it was the hacking of Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s Gmail account in 2016 which led to a raft of insane stories. Here we aren’t even starting with the hacking.
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Elon Musk says his AI business xAI has acquired X • Axios

Dan Primack:

»

Elon Musk said on Friday that xAI has acquired X, the social media app previously known as Twitter.

This is Musk trying to prevent his Twitter investors from losing money, and highlights his eagerness to meld different parts of his corporate empire.

Musk said that the all-stock merger valued xAI at $80bn and X at $45bn (including $12bn of debt). A source familiar with the situation says that the combined company would be valued at xAI plus X, absent some small adjustments.

For context, Musk paid $44bn to buy Twitter in late 2022, and some of its investors had marked the shares down by more than 70%. xAI was most recently valued at $50bn, in a late 2024 fundraising round.

The two companies have many shareholders in common, including venture firm Sequoia Capital and mutual fund manager Fidelity.

«

This is just transparent nonsense. There’s no way in the world that X is worth that amount of money compared to when it was sold: not in terms of users, not in terms of advertising it can attract, not in terms of revenue, not in terms of profit. So the number is totally made up, which makes the purchase a misuse of the xAI funds. But the investors won’t care because they’re getting shares in an AI company, and everyone knows they’re the New Fabulous Thing, at least until they turn out to be about as unique and sought-after as NFTs.
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The Signal chat leak and the NSA • Schneier on Security

Bruce Schneier:

»

It’s common knowledge that the NSA’s mission is breaking into and eavesdropping on other countries’ networks. (During President George W. Bush’s administration, the NSA conducted warrantless taps into domestic communications as well—surveillance that several district courts ruled to be illegal before those decisions were later overturned by appeals courts. To this day, many legal experts maintain that the program violated federal privacy protections.) But the organization has a secondary, complementary responsibility: to protect US communications from others who want to spy on them. That is to say: While one part of the NSA is listening into foreign communications, another part is stopping foreigners from doing the same to Americans.

Those missions never contradicted during the Cold War, when allied and enemy communications were wholly separate. Today, though, everyone uses the same computers, the same software, and the same networks. That creates a tension.

When the NSA discovers a technological vulnerability in a service such as Signal (or buys one on the thriving clandestine vulnerability market), does it exploit it in secret, or reveal it so that it can be fixed? Since at least 2014, a US government interagency “equities” process has been used to decide whether it is in the national interest to take advantage of a particular security flaw, or to fix it. The trade-offs are often complicated and hard.

Waltz—along with Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and the other officials in the Signal group—have just made the trade-offs much tougher to resolve. Signal is both widely available and widely used. Smaller governments that can’t afford their own military-grade encryption use it. Journalists, human rights workers, persecuted minorities, dissidents, corporate executives, and criminals around the world use it. Many of these populations are of great interest to the NSA.

At the same time, as we have now discovered, the app is being used for operational US military traffic. So, what does the NSA do if it finds a security flaw in Signal?

Previously, it might have preferred to keep the flaw quiet and use it to listen to adversaries. Now, if the agency does that, it risks someone else finding the same vulnerability and using it against the US government. And if it was later disclosed that the NSA could have fixed the problem and didn’t, then the results might be catastrophic for the agency.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Might the beautiful people in New York go to the restaurants with the best reviews? Perhaps! CC-licensed photo by Michele Ursino 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. Just desert, thanks. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Things you should never do, part I • Joel on Software

Joel Spolsky:

»

We’re programmers. Programmers are, in their hearts, architects, and the first thing they want to do when they get to a site is to bulldoze the place flat and build something grand. We’re not excited by incremental renovation: tinkering, improving, planting flower beds.

There’s a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: they are probably wrong. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: it’s harder to read code than to write it.

This is why code reuse is so hard. This is why everybody on your team has a different function they like to use for splitting strings into arrays of strings. They write their own function because it’s easier and more fun than figuring out how the old function works.

As a corollary of this axiom, you can ask almost any programmer today about the code they are working on. “It’s a big hairy mess,” they will tell you. “I’d like nothing better than to throw it out and start over.”

Why is it a mess?

“Well,” they say, “look at this function. It is two pages long! None of this stuff belongs in there! I don’t know what half of these API calls are for.”

Before Borland’s new spreadsheet for Windows shipped, Philippe Kahn, the colourful founder of Borland, was quoted a lot in the press bragging about how Quattro Pro would be much better than Microsoft Excel, because it was written from scratch. All new source code! As if source code rusted.

The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it. It doesn’t acquire bugs just by sitting around on your hard drive. Au contraire, baby! Is software supposed to be like an old Dodge Dart, that rusts just sitting in the garage? Is software like a teddy bear that’s kind of gross if it’s not made out of all new material?

«

This is in the context of the Musk project to rewrite the code of the Social Security Agency (SSA) from COBOL to Java. And sure, you can use AI to help! (It won’t help. You’ll need to check everything. And that’s before we get to the subsystems that rely on it.)

One commenter yesterday pointed out that this is essentially a ruse to make SSA collapse because the code doesn’t work, and make people use private means instead. Of course it won’t work, for the reasons Spolsky explains above. The US is about to enter a very dark time.
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Twitter (X) hit by 2.8 billion profile data leak in alleged insider job • Hackread

“Waqas”:

»

ThinkingOne, a well-known figure on Breach Forums for their skill in analyzing data leaks, decided to combine the 2025 leak with the 2023 one, producing a single 34GB CSV file (9GB compressed) containing 201 million merged entries. To be clear, the merged data only includes users that appeared in both incidents, creating a confusion of public and semi-public data.

This messy combination led many to believe that the 2025 leak also contained email addresses, but that’s not the case. The emails shown in the merged file are from the 2023 breach. The presence of emails in the merged dataset has given the wrong impression that the contents of the 2025 leak also include email addresses.

As of Jan 2025, X (formerly Twitter) had around 335.7 million users, so how is it possible that data from 2.8 billion users has been leaked? One possible explanation is that the dataset includes aggregated or historical data, such as bot accounts that were created and later banned, inactive or deleted accounts that still lingered in historical records, or old data that was merged with newer data, increasing the total number of records.

Additionally, some entries might not even represent real users but could include non-user entities like API accounts, developer bots, deleted or banned profiles that remained logged somewhere, or organization and brand accounts that aren’t tied to individual users.

Another possibility is that the leaked data wasn’t exclusively obtained from Twitter itself but rather scraped from multiple public sources and merged together, including archived data from older leaks or information from third-party services linked to Twitter accounts.

«

Or, how about this for a third possibility, it’s mostly junk. It’s just about possible that there have, historically, been more than a billion entries in the Twitter (now X) database, but this all feels fanciful. And also: unimportant, for the most part.
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LooksMapping

Riley Walz:

»

I scraped millions of Google Maps restaurant reviews, and gave each reviewer’s profile picture to an AI model that rates how hot they are out of 10. This map shows how attractive each restaurant’s clientele is. Red means hot, blue means not.

The model is certainly biased. It’s certainly flawed. But we judge places by the people who go there. We always have. And are we not also flawed? This website just puts reductive numbers on the superficial calculations we make every day. A mirror held up to our collective vanity.

«

There’s a paper explaining the methodology of the website. Which has a wonderfully retro 2005 “look we discovered the Google Maps API!” appearance. Walz has form for doing interesting little projects like this.
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Can an interstellar generation ship maintain a population on a 250-year trip to a habitable exoplanet? • Centauri Dreams

Paul Gilster:

»

One issue is not mentioned, despite the journey duration. Over the quarter millennium voyage, there will be evolution as the organisms adapt to the ship’s environment. Data from the ISS has shown that bacteria may mutate into more virulent pathogens. A population living in close quarters will encourage pandemics. Ionizing radiation from the sun and secondaries from the hull of a structure damages cells including their DNA. 250 years of exposure to residual GCR and secondaries will damage DNA of all life on the starship.

However, even without this direct effect on DNA, the conditions will result in organisms evolving as they adapt to the conditions on the starship, especially the small populations, increasing genetic drift. This evolution, even of complex life, can be quite fast, as the continuing monitoring of the Galápagos island finches observed by Darwin attests. Of particular concern is the creation of pathogens that will impact both humans and the food supply.

In the 1970s, the concept of a microbiome in humans, animals, and some plants was unknown, although bacteria were part of nutrient cycling. Now we know much more about the need for humans to maintain a microbiome, as well as some food crops. This could become a source of pathogens. While a space habitat can just flush out the agricultural infrastructure and replace it, no such possibility exists for the starship. Crops would need to be kept in isolated compartments to prevent a disease outbreak from destroying all the crops in the ECLSS [Environmental Control and. Life Support System].

If all this wasn’t difficult enough, the competition asks that the target generation population find a ready-made terrestrial habitat/terraformed environment to slip into on arrival. This presumably was prebuilt by a robotic system that arrived ahead of the crewed starship to build the infrastructure and create the environment ready for the human crew. It is the Mars agricultural problem writ large, with no supervision from humans to correct mistakes. If robots could do this on an exoplanet, couldn’t they make terrestrial habitats throughout the solar system?

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It’s a long post, but this part stood out to me.
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The tech fantasy that powers AI is running on fumes • The New York Times

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

»

Behold the decade of mid tech!

That is what I want to say every time someone asks me, “What about A.I.?” with the breathless anticipation of a boy who thinks this is the summer he finally gets to touch a boob.

…Most of us aren’t using A.I. to save lives faster and better. We are using A.I. to make mediocre improvements, such as emailing more. Even the most enthusiastic papers about A.I.’s power to augment white-collar work have struggled to come up with something more exciting than “A brief that once took two days to write will now take two hours!”

Mid tech’s best innovation is a threat.

A.I. is one of many technologies that promise transformation through iteration rather than disruption. Consumer automation once promised seamless checkout experiences that empowered customers to bag our own groceries. It turns out that checkout automation is pretty mid — cashiers are still better at managing points of sale. A.I.-based facial recognition similarly promised a smoother, faster way to verify who you are at places like the airport. But the T.S.A.’s adoption of the technology (complete with unresolved privacy concerns) hasn’t particularly revolutionized the airport experience or made security screening lines shorter. I’ll just say, it all feels pretty mid to me.

The economists Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo call these kinds of technological fizzles “so-so” technologies. They change some jobs. They’re kind of nifty for a while. Eventually they become background noise or are flat-out annoying, say, when you’re bagging two weeks’ worth of your own groceries.

Artificial intelligence is supposedly more radical than automation. Tech billionaires promise us that workers who can’t or won’t use A.I. will be left behind. Politicians promise to make policy that unleashes the power of A.I. to do … something, though many of them aren’t exactly sure what. Consumers who fancy themselves early adopters get a lot of mileage out of A.I.’s predictive power, but they accept a lot of bugginess and poor performance to live in the future before everyone else.

The rest of us are using this technology for far more mundane purposes. A.I. spits out meal plans with the right amount of macros, tells us when our calendars are overscheduled and helps write emails that no one wants. That’s a mid revolution of mid tasks.

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These days, it’s quite easy to be an AI sceptic. But also: it’s hard to find the things that most of us find really useful.
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Careless People book review: Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Facebook memoir reveals Meta’s global problems • Rest of World

Sabhanaz Rashid Diya:

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In recounting events, the author glosses over her own indifference to repeated warnings from policymakers, civil society, and internal teams outside the U.S. that ultimately led to serious harm to communities. She briefly mentions how Facebook’s local staff was held at gunpoint to give access to data or remove content in various countries — something that had been happening since as early as 2012. Yet, she failed to grasp the gravity of these risks until the possibility of her facing jail time arises in South Korea — or even more starkly in March 2016, when Facebook’s vice president for Latin America, Diego Dzodan, was arrested in Brazil.

Her delayed reckoning underscores how Facebook’s leadership remains largely detached from real-world consequences of their decisions until they become impossible to ignore. Perhaps because everyone wants to be a hero of their own story, Wynn-Williams frames her opposition to leadership decisions as isolated; in reality, powerful resistance had long existed within what Wynn-Williams describes as Facebook’s “lower-level employees.”

…Throughout her recollections, Wynn-Williams describes extravagant off-sites, high-profile meetings, and grandiose visions to “sell” Facebook to world leaders. But the truth is, policy outside the U.S. took unglamorous and thankless grunt work, deep contextual and political expertise, and years of trust-building with communities — all faced with the routine risk of arrests and illegal detention. By trying to be the Everyman, she undermines experts, civil society, and local teams who informed her work. These glaring omissions speak to both Facebook’s indifference and moral superiority toward the rest of the world — even from its most well-meaning leaders.

Despite telling an incomplete story, Careless People is a book that took enormous courage to write. This is Wynn-Williams’ story to tell, and it is an important one. It goes to show that we need many stories — especially from those who still can’t be heard — if we are to meaningfully piece together the complex puzzle of one of the world’s most powerful technology companies.

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Enzyme engineering: new method selectively destroys disease-causing proteins • Phys.org

Scripps Research Institute:

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Scientists have long struggled to target proteins that lack defined structure and are involved in cancer, neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson’s disease, and other serious illnesses. Now, a new study from Scripps Research demonstrates a proof of concept for a new strategy: engineering proteases—enzymes that cut proteins at specific sites—to selectively degrade these elusive targets with high precision in the proteome of human cells.

Published on March 24, 2025, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study shows how to reprogram a protease from botulinum toxin to target α-Synuclein—a protein with unstructured regions used here as a model. The study marks one proof point in a broader approach that could be applied to a wide range of targets across the proteome.

“This work highlights how we can use the power of laboratory evolution to engineer proteases that offer a new way to treat diseases caused by hard-to-target proteins,” says senior author Pete Schultz, the President and CEO of Scripps Research, where he also holds the L.S. “Sam” Skaggs Presidential Chair. “It’s an exciting step toward developing new therapeutic strategies for diseases that lack effective treatments.”

The research builds on botulinum toxin, a bacterial protein best known for its use in Botox, a medication utilized for cosmetic purposes and certain medical conditions. This toxin naturally contains a protease. In its original form, the protease only targets SNAP-25—a protein essential for transmitting signals between nerve cells. By degrading SNAP-25, botulinum toxin disrupts nerve signaling, leading to the temporary paralysis effect seen after Botox treatments.

To reprogram this precision for α-Synuclein, the research team modified the enzyme using directed evolution, a laboratory process that involves introducing mutations and selecting variants with improved function over multiple cycles. The result: Protease 5.

…When tested in human cells, Protease 5 nearly eliminated all α-Synuclein proteins, suggesting it could help prevent the harmful buildup seen in Parkinson’s disease. And because the enzyme was designed to precisely target α-Synuclein, it didn’t cause toxicity or disrupt essential cellular functions.

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Only a proof of concept, but a really interesting one. You can imagine that they have their eyes on Alzheimer’s disease, which also involves malformed protein deposits.
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The Gen X career meltdown • The New York Times

Steven Kurutz:

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Gen X-ers [born between the mid-1960s and late 1970s] grew up as the younger siblings of the baby boomers, but the media landscape of their early adult years closely resembled that of the 1950s: a tactile analog environment of landline telephones, tube TV sets, vinyl records, glossy magazines and newspapers that left ink on your hands.

When digital technology began seeping into their lives, with its AOL email accounts, Myspace pages and Napster downloads, it didn’t seem like a threat. But by the time they entered the primes of their careers, much of their expertise had become all but obsolete.

More than a dozen members of Generation X interviewed for this article said they now find themselves shut out, economically and culturally, from their chosen fields.

“My peers, friends and I continue to navigate the unforeseen obsolescence of the career paths we chose in our early 20s,” Mr. Wilcha said. “The skills you cultivated, the craft you honed — it’s just gone. It’s startling.”

Every generation has its burdens. The particular plight of Gen X is to have grown up in one world only to hit middle age in a strange new land. It’s as if they were making candlesticks when electricity came in. The market value of their skills plummeted.

Karen McKinley, 55, an advertising executive in Minneapolis, has seen talented colleagues “thrown away,” she said, as agencies have merged, trimmed staff and focused on fast, cheap social media content over elaborate photo shoots.

“Twenty years ago, you would actually have a shoot,” Ms. McKinley said. “Now, you may use influencers who have no advertising background.”

In the wake of the influencers comes another threat, artificial intelligence, which seems likely to replace many of the remaining Gen X copywriters, photographers and designers. By 2030, ad agencies in the United States will lose 32,000 jobs, or 7.5% of the industry’s work force, to the technology, according to the research firm Forrester.

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Apple might buy $1bn worth of Nvidia servers • Quartz

Ece Yildrim:

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The tech giant is reportedly placing roughly $1bn worth of orders of Nvidia’s GB300 NVL72 server platform, including the company’s next-generation Blackwell Ultra chips, built by Super Micro and Dell. With each server costing around $3.7m to $4m, Baruah estimates that Apple is buying approximately 250 servers. Apple didn’t immediately respond to Quartz’s request for comment.

Baruah expects Apple to use these servers to run or train generative AI large language models. The move could have stemmed from the intense backlash Apple received in response to its decision to delay a much-anticipated generative AI upgrade of its voice assistant Siri.

Apple began working on integrating advanced AI technology into its products as part of its Apple Intelligence initiative, which the company introduced last June at its annual developer conference, WWDC.

The tech giant first teased a so-called “LLM Siri” based on advanced large language models last year, in an effort to scale its generative AI capabilities and catch up to industry rivals like OpenAI and Amazon.

Although an arrival date was never publicly set, LLM Siri was widely anticipated to come in an iOS 18.4 upgrade expected next month. Now, the AI-infused Siri will likely be unveiled next year. Apple pulled its previous ads featuring the capability.

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If this is Apple’s response, then.. it’s a little late? Unless they really think they can train these models up that quickly and make a difference, in which case the new Siri leadership has lit a fire under the staff.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified