The job of radiologists was thought to be under threat from AI. Instead, it’s just enhanced it. CC-licensed photo by Navy Medicine on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. See-through. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Judge calls on Apple to resolve Fortnite app submission after ruling • CNBC
Lora Kolodny:
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Apple must work out its latest issues with Epic Games, or head back to court to prove it has a legal basis for delaying the restoration of the popular Fortnite game to its iOS App Store, a judge ordered on Monday.
Fortnite recently re-submitted its game but was blocked by Apple, Epic Games said Friday. The company later filed a motion to enforce the earlier injunction from the court.
US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers wrote in the Monday order that “Apple is fully capable of resolving this issue without further briefing or a hearing.”
If the companies do not resolve the current conflict on their own, the judge wrote, “the Apple official who is personally responsible for ensuring compliance shall personally appear” at a forthcoming hearing in the Northern District of California scheduled for May 27.
Apple said in a statement on Friday that it did not remove Fortnite from alternative distribution marketplaces.
…On Monday, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said in a post on X that “Apple didn’t accept or reject our Fortnite submission. They simply said they were going to ignore it until after the 9th Circuit Court rules on their stay request, which would be in late May or June.”
In the Monday order, Rogers said that after 12 days, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has still not granted Apple a stay of the injunction.
“Briefing shall occur on the schedule listed below and shall include the legal authority upon which Apple contends that it can ignore this Court’s order,” the judge wrote.
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I wonder who that Apple official is? I’d love to know. Because they’re sure taking a beating at the moment.
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In the future, China will be dominant. The US will be irrelevant • The New York Times
Kyle Chan is a researcher at Princeton University:
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It doesn’t matter that Washington and Beijing have reached an inconclusive and temporary truce in Mr. Trump’s trade war. The U.S. president immediately claimed it as a win, but that only underlines the fundamental problem for the Trump administration and America: a shortsighted focus on inconsequential skirmishes as the larger war with China is being decisively lost.
Mr. Trump is taking a wrecking ball to the pillars of American power and innovation. His tariffs are endangering U.S. companies’ access to global markets and supply chains. He is slashing public research funding and gutting our universities, pushing talented researchers to consider leaving for other countries. He wants to roll back programs for technologies like clean energy and semiconductor manufacturing and is wiping out American soft power in large swaths of the globe.
China’s trajectory couldn’t be more different.
It already leads global production in multiple industries — steel, aluminum, shipbuilding, batteries, solar power, electric vehicles, wind turbines, drones, 5G equipment, consumer electronics, active pharmaceutical ingredients and bullet trains. It is projected to account for 45% — nearly half — of global manufacturing by 2030. Beijing is also laser-focused on winning the future: In March it announced a $138bn national venture capital fund that will make long-term investments in cutting-edge technologies such as quantum computing and robotics, and increased its budget for public research and development.
…China faces its own serious challenges. A prolonged real estate slump continues to drag on economic growth, though there are signs that the sector may be finally recovering. Longer-term challenges also loom, such as a shrinking work force and an aging population. But skeptics have been predicting China’s peak and inevitable fall for years, only to be proved wrong each time. The enduring strength of a state-dominated Chinese system that can pivot, change policy and redirect resources at will in service of long-term national strength is now undeniable, regardless of whether free-market advocates like it.
Mr. Trump’s blinkered obsession with short-term Band-Aids like tariffs, while actively undermining what makes America strong, will only hasten the onset of a Chinese-dominated world.
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In November 2016, after Trump was elected, I wrote a piece which argued many of the same points, though China at that point hadn’t achieved the same ascendance in so many industries. Now, it’s even more true.
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Uber to introduce fixed-route shuttles in major US cities designed for commuters • TechCrunch
Rebecca Bellan:
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Ride-hail and delivery giant Uber is introducing cheap, fixed-route rides along busy corridors during weekday commute hours in major U.S. cities — one solution to a world that feels, for most people, more expensive every day.
Starting Wednesday, riders in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, New York City, Philadelphia, and San Francisco will be able to save 50% off the price of an UberX trip by booking with Uber’s new “Route Share” feature.
The company announced Route Share and other new features and discounts designed to help customers save money on rides and deliveries at its annual Go-Get event. The aim is to attract and maintain a loyal customer base that continues to use the Uber app in spite of outside economic pressures.
The commuter shuttles will drive between pre-set stops every 20 minutes, according to Sachin Kansal, Uber’s chief product officer. He noted that there will be dozens of routes in each launch city — like between Williamsburg and Midtown in NYC. The routes, which are selected based on Uber’s extensive data on popular travel patterns, might have one or two additional stops to pick up other passengers. To start, riders will only ever have to share the route with up to two other co-riders.
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Perhaps they could expand it so there are more co-riders – maybe 20 or so? They could work on a snappier name for it, maybe using some of the letters from Uber? Reub? Breus? How about, and just go along with me here – bus?
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My brain finally broke • The New Yorker
Jia Tolentino:
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I was on a walk the other day with another journalist, and I asked her whether she was also experiencing this—a slackening of the usual reflexive fact-checking impulse. She told me that she still researched what she saw on her feeds if it was something important, or something relevant to her work.
I did, too, I told her. (Well, mostly.) But there is now a category of things I see online which I register simply as indications that the world is slipping beyond my comprehension. A video of a giant Pikachu fleeing from the police during demonstrations in Turkey. A clip of former Governor Andrew Cuomo saying, “As a New Yorker, I am Black, I am gay, I am disabled, I am a woman seeking to control her health and her choices.”
I see Temu ads for uncanny products—an inflatable waterslide of inhuman design, for instance, pictured alongside digitally rendered children and toys. I click on a waterslide ad to investigate, and I get a security question asking me to “please click on the type of fruit that appears most frequently.” There are oranges and a pear and a lemon and a basketball and a baguette placed against a swirly backdrop. Sleepily, I think, Appears most frequently in . . . the grocery store?
And then I remember that this question is a purely digital one, and that the answers are probably being used to train A.I.
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Apple is trying to get ‘LLM Siri’ back on track • The Verge
Wes Davis:
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…[Mark] Gurman has reported [at Bloomberg] in the past that Apple is working on what it’s internally calling “LLM Siri” — a reworked, generative AI version of the company’s digital assistant. Apple’s previous approach of merging the assistant with the existing Siri hasn’t been working. Gurman describes in great detail a number of reasons why
Now the company is trying to rejigger its approach. Part of that is a total overhaul of Siri, rather than just trying to make generative AI work in concert with the old Siri. According to Gurman, Apple has its AI team in Zurich working on a new architecture that will “entirely build on an LLM-based engine.” Gurman reported in November last year that the company was working on this, and the idea is that it will make the assistant “more believably conversational and better at synthesizing information.”
Another part of the solution is leveraging iPhones and differential privacy to improve Apple’s synthesized data — comparing fake training data with language from iPhone users’ emails, but doing so on-device and sending only the synthesized data back to Apple for AI training. And one way the company is discussing improving Siri is letting the LLM version loose on the web to “grab and synthesize data from multiple sources.” Basically, Siri as an AI web search tool not unlike Perplexity, which is one of the companies Apple has approached about partnering for AI search in Safari.
Whatever the outcome, apparently Giannandrea won’t be a direct part of it, having been taken off of product development, Siri, and robotics projects in the spring. According to Gurman, Apple execs have talked about putting him “on a path to retirement,” but are concerned that some of the research and engineering folks he brought with him would leave with him, too.
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Apple has been late to this, and is showing a lack of ruthlessness in getting things done. Let’s all be nice to Giannandrea!
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AI was coming for radiologists’ jobs. So far, they’re just more efficient • The New York Times
Steve Lohr:
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Nine years ago, one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence scientists singled out an endangered occupational species.
“People should stop training radiologists now,” Geoffrey Hinton said, adding that it was “just completely obvious” that within five years A.I. would outperform humans in that field.
Today, radiologists — the physician specialists in medical imaging who look inside the body to diagnose and treat disease — are still in high demand. A recent study from the American College of Radiology projected a steadily growing work force through 2055.
Dr. Hinton, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics last year for pioneering research in A.I., was broadly correct that the technology would have a significant impact — just not as a job killer.
That’s true for radiologists at the Mayo Clinic, one of the nation’s premier medical systems, whose main campus is in Rochester, Minn. There, in recent years, they have begun using A.I. to sharpen images, automate routine tasks, identify medical abnormalities and predict disease. A.I. can also serve as “a second set of eyes.”
“But would it replace radiologists? We didn’t think so,” said Dr. Matthew Callstrom, the Mayo Clinic’s chair of radiology, recalling the 2016 prediction. “We knew how hard it is and all that is involved.”
…The predicted extinction of radiologists provides a telling case study. So far, A.I. is proving to be a powerful medical tool to increase efficiency and magnify human abilities, rather than take anyone’s job.
When it comes to developing and deploying A.I. in medicine, radiology has been a prime target. Of the more than 1,000 A.I. applications approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in medicine, about three-fourths are in radiology. A.I. typically excels at identifying and measuring a specific abnormality, like a lung lesion or a breast lump.
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An $8.4bn money launderer has been operating for years on US soil • Wired via Ars Technica
Andy Greenberg:
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As the underground industry of crypto investment scams has grown into one of the world’s most lucrative forms of cybercrime, the secondary market of money launderers for those scammers has grown to match it. Amid that black market, one such Chinese-language service on the messaging platform Telegram blossomed into an all-purpose underground bazaar: It has offered not only cash-out services to scammers but also money laundering for North Korean hackers, stolen data, targeted harassment-for-hire, and even what appears to be sex trafficking. And somehow, it’s all overseen by a company legally registered in the United States.
According to new research released by crypto-tracing firm Elliptic, a company called Xinbi Guarantee has since 2022 facilitated no less than $8.4bn in transactions via its Telegram-based marketplace, prior to Telegram’s actions in recent days to remove its accounts from the platform.
Money stolen from scam victims likely represents the “vast majority” of that sum, according to Elliptic’s cofounder Tom Robinson. Yet even as the market serves Chinese-speaking scammers, it also boasts on the top of its website—in Mandarin—that it’s registered in Colorado.
“Xinbi Guarantee has served as a giant, purportedly US-incorporated illicit online marketplace for online scams that primarily offers money laundering services,” says Robinson. He adds, though, that Elliptic has also found a remarkable variety of other criminal offerings on the market: child-bearing surrogacy and egg donors, harassment services that offer to threaten or throw feces at any chosen victim, and even sex workers in their teens who are likely trafficking victims.
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Crypto, the gift that just keeps on giving.
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A personality test said I was Darth Vader. I’m so proud • The Times
Harry Wallop:
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Last week a judge at an employment tribunal ruled that Lorna Rooke, an NHS worker, had suffered a workplace “detriment” after she was compared to Darth Vader in an online personality test that someone had taken on her behalf. Although Rooke lost various aspects of her employment tribunal, including unfair dismissal and disability discrimination, she won nearly £29,000 in compensation for the “detriment”.
“Darth Vader is a legendary villain of the Star Wars series and being aligned with his personality is insulting,” Judge Kathryn Ramsden said.
Really? Out of curiosity I tracked down a “What Star Wars Character Are You?” test online. There are many of them and the tribunal ruling does not make it clear which one it was. I also came out as Darth Vader. “You’re the leader of your friend group and everyone always wants to hear what you have to say. Just remember to go easy on your loved ones — they’re trying their best!”
And then I took another one. This time I was Princess Leia, which hints at the central problem with these personality tests: they are just not very reliable.
The employment tribunal said Rooke and her colleagues took a Myers-Briggs type indicator (MBTI) test. This is not correct, according to Myers-Briggs itself, which wants to distance itself from people thinking that its tests encourage people to engage in workplace bullying.
…As Adam Grant, professor of organisational psychology at Wharton business school, said: “When it comes to accuracy, if you put a horoscope on one end and a heart monitor on the other, the MBTI falls about half way in between.”
He has many objections but his main one is that it presents various traits as black and white in order to ensure that the 16 different personality types are discrete. Thinking and feeling, for instance, are, in the Myers-Briggs world, two separate entities. You are a thinker or a feeler; you cannot be both, which is clearly nonsense.
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Still booting after all these years: the people stuck using ancient Windows computers • BBC Future
Thomas Germain:
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The trains in San Francisco’s Muni Metro light railway, for example, won’t start up in the morning until someone sticks a floppy disk into the computer that loads DOS software on the railway’s Automatic Train Control System (ATCS). Last year, the San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority (SFMTA) announced its plans to retire this system over the coming decade, but today the floppy disks live on. (The SFMTA did not respond to a request for comment.)
In a brightly lit room in San Diego, California, you’ll find two of the biggest printers you’ve ever seen, each hooked up to servers running Windows 2000, an operating system named for the year it was released. “We call ’em boat anchors,” says John Watts, who handles high-end printing and post-processing for fine art photographers. The printers are LightJets, gigantic machines that use light, rather than ink, to print on large-format photographic paper. Watts says the result is an image of unparalleled quality.
Long out of production, the few remaining LightJets rely on the Windows operating systems that were around when these printers were sold. “A while back we looked into upgrading one of the computers to Windows Vista. By the time we added up the money it would take to buy new licenses for all the software it was going to cost $50,000 or $60,000 [£38,000 to £45,000],” Watts says. “I can’t stand Windows machines,” he says, “but I’m stuck with them.”
It’s a common predicament with specialised hardware. Scott Carlson, a woodworker in Los Angeles, is steeped in the world of Microsoft thanks to CNC machines, robotic tools that cut or shape wood and other materials based on computer instructions.
“Our workhorse machine runs on Windows XP because it’s older. That thing is a tank,” Carlson says. But the same can’t be said for the operating system. “We actually had to send the computer back to get completely rebuilt a few years ago because XP was getting more and more errors,” he says “It was practically a brick.”
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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 
This sounds wrong, in the XP article: “But the same can’t be said for the operating system. “We actually had to send the computer back to get completely rebuilt a few years ago because XP was getting more and more errors”.” The writer may have got it backwards. Just speculating, I suspect the computer’s hard disk was wearing out and throwing read and write errors, which is a common thing to happen with old hardware. Or possibly the motherboard’s capacitors were degrading, another often-seen issue. But something like that is not the fault of any operating system.