On Saturday the Soviet-era Kosmos 482 satellite will crash to Earth – with luck, into an ocean. CC-licensed photo by Milosz1 on Flickr.
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No post today at the Social Warming Substack. Maybe next week?
A selection of 10 links for you. Don’t look 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.
Bill Gates accuses Elon Musk of ‘killing’ children with USAID cuts • Financial Times
David Pilling:
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[Bill] Gates said [Elon] Musk had cancelled grants to a hospital in Gaza Province, Mozambique, that prevents women transmitting HIV to their babies, in the mistaken belief that the US was supplying condoms to Hamas in Gaza in the Middle East. “I’d love for him to go in and meet the children that have now been infected with HIV because he cut that money,” he said.
Gates, 69, on Thursday announced plans to spend virtually his entire fortune over the next 20 years, during which time he estimates his foundation will spend more than $200bn on global health, development and education against $100bn over the previous 25 years. The Gates Foundation will close its doors in 2045, decades earlier than previously envisaged.
Gates said the rationale for accelerated spending was to have maximum impact, with the potential for finding once-and-for all solutions such as eradicating polio and curing HIV.
“It gives us clarity,” he said. “We’ll have a lot more money because we’re spending down over the 20 years, as opposed to making an effort to be a perpetual foundation.”
The foundation will continue to spend the bulk of its budget, which will rise to about $10bn a year, on global health, with vaccines, maternal and child health continuing to be a focus. But Gates said that private philanthropy could not make up the shortfall from the cuts to USAID, whose budget was $44bn last year.
The philanthropist intends to spend his fortune over the next 20 years. But government budget cuts threaten his ambitions in global health
Gates intends to pass on less than 1% of his wealth to his children. He said he was a supporter of a strong estate tax to prevent “dynastic wealth” and of “much more progressive taxation”.
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I’ve always enjoyed the fact that Gates’s wealth, which he has largely distributed to the less developed countries, came from Microsoft’s excess pricing of Windows. That’s what I call redistribution of wealth.
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Trying to solve the Apple Safari Google search riddle • Spyglass
MG Siegler:
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Given that Google’s stock fell 7.5% yesterday on the testimony of Apple exec Eddy Cue at the remedies portion of Google’s search antitrust trial, the company probably had to respond. And so here it is, in full. Google responding to one very specific, particularly damning data point from Cue:
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We continue to see overall query growth in Search. That includes an increase in total queries coming from Apple’s devices and platforms. More generally, as we enhance Search with new features, people are seeing that Google Search is more useful for more of their queries — and they’re accessing it for new things and in new ways, whether from browsers or the Google app, using their voice or Google Lens. We’re excited to continue this innovation and look forward to sharing more at Google I/O.
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While there is no transcript of what Cue actually said, reading dozens of reports on the matter would seem to paint a pretty clear picture that he noted that search queries fell in the Safari browser for the first time ever last month. “That has never happened in 22 years,” is his direct quote many publications are citing.
So how do we square that with Google’s response above? In particular, the notion that: “We continue to see overall query growth in Search. That includes an increase in total queries coming from Apple’s devices and platforms.”
As I noted yesterday, it seemed entirely possible that Google’s search query health was fine overall – something the company keeps insisting, which already isn’t a great sign if you have to keep reaffirming that – while Apple’s was falling. Apple could be some sort of outlier, or, more likely, perhaps a harbinger of what’s to come, thanks to their younger and more affluent user base.
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Siegler goes to great lengths to try to figure out how both Apple and Google can be telling the truth here – Cue because he was on oath (but perhaps choosing his words carefully), Google because putting out a press release which materially misleads the market would be, as Matt Levine of Bloomberg likes to say, securities fraud (basically, everything is securities fraud in US finance).
It’s just about possible that both are telling the truth, but it feels like it’s either at the margin, or the start of something big and bad for Google – and, perhaps, Apple.
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A Soviet-era spacecraft built to land on Venus is falling to Earth instead • Ars Technica
Stephen Clark:
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Kosmos 482, a Soviet-era spacecraft shrouded in Cold War secrecy, will reenter the Earth’s atmosphere in the next few days after misfiring on a journey to Venus more than 50 years ago.
On average, a piece of space junk the size of Kosmos 482, with a mass of about a half-ton, falls into the atmosphere about once per week. What’s different this time is that Kosmos 482 was designed to land on Venus, with a titanium heat shield built to withstand scorching temperatures, and structures engineered to survive atmospheric pressures nearly 100 times higher than Earth’s.
So, there’s a good chance the spacecraft will survive the extreme forces it encounters during its plunge through the atmosphere. Typically, space debris breaks apart and burns up during reentry, with only a small fraction of material reaching the Earth’s surface. The European Space Agency, one of several institutions that track space debris, says Kosmos 482 is “highly likely” to reach Earth’s surface in one piece.
…The Aerospace Corporation’s experts predict Kosmos 482 will fall to Earth some time nine hours before or after 1:54 am EDT (05:54 UTC) Saturday. The European Space Agency’s forecast is centered on 3:12 am EDT (07:12 UTC) Saturday, plus or minus 13.7 hours.
The reentry windows will narrow over the next couple of days, but experts won’t be able to pinpoint an exact time or location before the spherical spacecraft makes its final plunge.
“As we approach the reentry, the uncertainty in the prediction decreases,” the European Space Agency wrote on a website tracking Kosmos 482. “The remaining uncertainty is caused by the difficulty of modeling the atmosphere, the influence of space weather, and the unknowns about the object itself, such as which way it is facing.”
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At the time of writing, the forecast is for it to land somewhere south of Australia. But don’t worry, plenty of time for that to shift to walloping chunks of the US, Europe, Asia or Africa. Of course, the Pacific ocean is very big: that’s the most likely grave. But watch the skies (or website) on Saturday.
Argentina hopes to attract Big Tech with nuclear-powered AI data centers – Rest of World
Catherine Cartier and Facundo Iglesia:
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Argentine President Javier Milei has an ambitious plan to transform Argentina into a global hub for nuclear energy. Nuclear energy, in turn, is the key to his goal of making the country a center for artificial intelligence, powered by investments that he hopes to draw from big tech firms.
At the heart of the energy plan is the construction of a small modular reactor, a type of transportable nuclear reactor assembled on site, which can power a wide range of applications, including AI data centers. If successful, Argentina could be the first country in the world to have a commercially available SMR, and only the third after China and Russia to have an operational one.
“AI is going to drive an exponential growth in energy demand. We don’t have it; there’s no way to supply it,” Demian Reidel, Argentina’s chief presidential adviser, told Rest of World.
The answer, he said, is SMRs. “What’s going to happen in nuclear [energy] is so important strategically that it can put Argentina at the front of this energy revolution for the world.”
…Invap, an Argentine state-owned tech company, patented an SMR called the ACR-300 in the U.S. last year. The project, which aims to produce four ACR-300 reactors to begin with, is backed by an unnamed American investor, Reidel said. Argentina, he added, will not invest any money into the reactor but will be a stakeholder instead, though he did not disclose what percentage the state will own or how this new structure would work.
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Ambitious strategy, Cotter, let’s see how it works out for them. If SMRs can be made to work, and built rapidly, everyone is going to be utterly delighted.
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Drought conditions already hitting UK crop production, farmers say • The Guardian
Helena Horton:
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Crops are already failing in England because of drought conditions this spring, farmers have said.
People should start to ration their water use, the Environment Agency said, as water companies prepare for a summer of drought. The government has also asked the water CEOs to do more to avert water shortages, and the EA said hosepipe bans are on the horizon if a significant amount of rain does not fall.
Members of the National Drought Group, who met on Wednesday to discuss their plans, told the Guardian that there is “no slack” in the system, that water companies are “woefully underprepared” for drought and the plan for many is “simply praying for rain”.
It has been the driest start to spring in 69 years. England saw its driest March since 1961 and in April the country received just half its normal rainfall. Farmers have had to start irrigating crops earlier, and reservoir levels are either notably or exceptionally low across thenorth-east and north-west of England.
According to the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) some crops are already failing, and significant rainfall in early May will be essential to avoid significant yield penalties and further losses. Livestock yields could also be at risk; grazing is not yet short, but farmers point out that fields will need a decent amount of rain to get animals through the summer.
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Are we living in a time of cultural collapse? • The Honest Broker
Ted Gioia was asked to explain whether we’re seeing “the death of civilisation”, so he blogged about it:
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cultural reversals do not happen according to logic or math. They follow different rules—driven by emotion, psychology, and group dynamics.
The process unfolds in five steps.
1: All trends accelerate (because of mimetic desire—essentially people imitating other people).
2: The trend always goes on for longer than is reasonable—because it’s driven by emotion, not logic. It feeds on itself.
3: It reaches an extreme point, where the trend is now ridiculous. (How many reboots and sequels can we digest?)
4: At this ridiculous extreme, the public becomes disgusted with the trend. (I’m sick of all these lookalike superhero movies. Gimme a break!)
5: This lays the foundation for a sharp reversal. The old trend is now mocked, and something new takes its place. This is the moment when cultural innovation can happen.Let me emphasize these final two steps—because they are essential and poorly understood:
Major trends do not end because they reach a logical conclusion—or run out of steam or lose momentum. They climax in absurdity because trendsetters push too far—and embrace crazy extremes. This is what creates momentum for the reversal.
We are living through this (steps four and five) right now.
The absurdity is everywhere. You see it in music, where record labels prefer to invest in 50-year-old songs—instead of new hits. You see it in film, where a studio dumps 36 Marvel superhero movies on the market—and then acts surprised because audiences sicken of them.
These ridiculous actions tell us that a reversal is at hand. We don’t measure that by anything logical. We measure it by the absurdity.
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Can’t wait for the superhero movies to go away. I thought that ironic takes like The Boys would quench it, but apparently not. You can certainly apply his analysis to the way that punk and then the New Romantics and rap and hip-hop occurred in music. Gioia thinks that the new cultural flourishing will come from YouTube and Substack – though he warns that algorithms militate against the new over the familiar.
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Small-time Trump coin buyers have seen their investments collapse • The Washington Post
Drew Harwell and Jeremy Merrill:
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Rebecca Davis bought President Donald Trump’s meme coin while lying in bed one January morning in Little Rock, scrolling through photos of a glitzy Trump inauguration gala called the “Crypto Ball.” The host of a local conservative radio show, she knew nothing about cryptocurrency but believed in Trump’s business savvy. He “kind of knows how to make money,” she said.
Her $TRUMP coin’s value climbed for a few days but has since plunged 85% from its peak. Though some coin holders, including Trump’s allies, have profited handsomely on paper from the coin, she is not one of them; her $32 investment is now worth about $11.
“There was definitely a lot of influential people that had posted online about it that got me hyped up,” she said. “Then when it tanked, I was like, ‘Whoa, what the hell?’”
At least 67,000 new or small-time crypto investors like Davis have bet on Trump’s meme coin, pouring $15m into the volatile venture endorsed by Trump and benefiting his personal wealth, a Washington Post analysis found.
But virtually all of them bought near the coin’s peak, just before the inauguration, and 80% of them have seen the value of their holdings nosedive, The Post’s analysis shows. One buyer who spent $10,000 has already lost, on paper, more than $8,000.
…Of the debit-card crypto buyers analyzed by The Post, the typical buyer spent $100 and has lost $62 — at least on paper, given that about half have yet to sell. Roughly 80% of buyers have seen their investment value drop substantially, the analysis found. Only about 3% of buyers have a gain, while the rest are about even.
Almost all of the winners bought their coins on the project’s launch day, Jan. 18, two days before the inauguration, when trading began at about 18 cents. But most people bought in the days after, when the price spiked to as high as $75 before its months-long slump.
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Crypto has a very special talent for finding people with far more money than sense.
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A weird phrase is plaguing scientific papers – and we traced it back to a glitch in AI training data • The Conversation
Aaron Snoswell, Kevin Witzenberger and Rayane el Masri:
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Earlier this year, scientists discovered a peculiar term appearing in published papers: “vegetative electron microscopy”.
This phrase, which sounds technical but is actually nonsense, has become a “digital fossil” – an error preserved and reinforced in artificial intelligence (AI) systems that is nearly impossible to remove from our knowledge repositories.
Like biological fossils trapped in rock, these digital artefacts may become permanent fixtures in our information ecosystem.
The case of vegetative electron microscopy offers a troubling glimpse into how AI systems can perpetuate and amplify errors throughout our collective knowledge.
“Vegetative electron microscopy” appears to have originated through a remarkable coincidence of unrelated errors. First, two papers from the 1950s, published in the journal Bacteriological Reviews, were scanned and digitised. However, the digitising process erroneously combined “vegetative” from one column of text with “electron” from another. As a result, the phantom term was created.
Decades later, “vegetative electron microscopy” turned up in some Iranian scientific papers. In 2017 and 2019, two papers used the term in English captions and abstracts.
This appears to be due to a translation error. In Farsi, the words for “vegetative” and “scanning” differ by only a single dot.
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That though is only the seed. Read on to understand how the plant took root. (Thanks Wendy G for the link.)
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Trump admin ends extreme weather database that has tracked cost of disasters since 1980 • CNN
Andrew Freedman:
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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday its well-known “billion-dollar weather and climate disasters” database “will be retired,” a move that will make it next to impossible for the public to track the cost of extreme weather and climate events.
The weather, climate and oceans agency is also ending other products, it has recently announced, due in large part to staffing reductions. NOAA is narrowing the array of services it provides, with climate-related programs scrutinized especially closely.
The disasters database, which will be archived but no longer updated beyond 2024, has allowed taxpayers, media and researchers to track the cost of natural disasters — spanning extreme events from hurricanes to hailstorms — since 1980. Its discontinuation is another Trump-administration blow to the public’s view into how fossil fuel pollution is changing the world around them and making extreme weather more costly.
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The US turns out to be one of the most fragile democracies around. I suspect the insurance industry will pick it up, though, because that’s information it needs. The difference is that access won’t be free.
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AI used to make video of deceased victim deliver impact statement in court • NPR
Juliana Kim:
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[Christopher] Pelkey’s mantra had always been to love God and love others, according to [his sister Stacey] Wales. He was the kind of man who would give the shirt off his back, she said. While she struggled to find the right words for herself, Wales said writing from his perspective came naturally.
“I knew what he stood for and it was just very clear to me what he would say,” she added.
That night, Wales turned to her husband Tim, who has experience using AI for work.
“He doesn’t get a say. He doesn’t get a chance to speak,” Wales said, referring to her brother. “We can’t let that happen. We have to give him a voice.”
Tim and their business partner Scott Yentzer had only a few days to produce the video. The challenge: there’s no single program built for a project like this. They also needed a long, clear audio clip of Pelkey’s voice and a photo of him looking straight to the camera — neither of which Wales had.
Still, using several AI tools, Wales’ husband and Yentzer managed to create a convincing video using about a 4.5-minute-video of Pelkey, his funeral photo and a script that Wales prepared. They digitally removed the sunglasses on top of Pelkey’s hat and trimmed his beard — which had been causing technological issues.
Wales, who was heavily involved in making sure the video felt true to life, said recreating her brother’s laugh was especially tough because most clips of Pelkey were filled with background noise.
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This is, again, straight out of Black Mirror – the latest series, in which someone recreates the life of someone for their funeral. I’d hate to be writing SF for the screen at the moment. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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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 
I’d contend that it’s great time now to be writing SF for the screen, that we’ll likely see a trend of AI movies in the near future. There’s easy ripped-from-the-headline plots to be had – dramatic, emotion-tugging, stories (testimony from beyond the grave!). It’s dialogue-focused as opposed to action scenes, and there’s no elaborate special effects, so the budget can be quite small. The themes can be a perfect fit for a type of material which the chattering class just adores: What Does It Mean To Be Human, And How Is Technology Bad Bad Bad, And People Who Build It Are Unfeeling And Immoral, etc etc.
It may not feel like it to you, but I think we’re still very much in the “Early Adopter” phase of this wave of AI technology. It’s distorted because writers and artists feel very, very threatened (with much justification), so there’s a lot of punditry on the topic. But that’s not the same as mass culture, which comes later.