What has gone wrong in Apple’s current approach to making money versus making products? Some people think they know the answer. CC-licensed photo by Mike Deerkoski on Flickr.

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There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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

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The 15 biggest announcements at Google I/O 2025 • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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Google just wrapped up its big keynote at I/O 2025. As expected, it was full of AI-related announcements, ranging from updates across Google’s image and video generation models to new features in Search and Gmail.

But there were some surprises, too, like a new AI filmmaking app and an update to Project Starline. If you didn’t catch the event live, you can check out everything you missed in the roundup below.

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With the proviso that these things often don’t reach the real world for a couple of years, if at all, there are some interesting things in there. A selection:

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• Google is launching a new AI filmmaking app called Flow. The tool uses Veo, Imagen, and Gemini to create eight-second AI-generated video clips based on text prompts and / or images.

• Xreal and Google are teaming up on Project Aura, a new pair of smart glasses that use the Android XR platform for mixed-reality devices.

• Project Astra could already use your phone’s camera to “see” the objects around you, but the latest prototype will let it complete tasks on your behalf, even if you don’t explicitly ask it to.

• Google is launching Search Live, a feature that incorporates capabilities from the AI assistant. By selecting the new “Live” icon in AI Mode or Lens, you can talk back and forth with Search while showing what’s on your camera.

• Google Meet is launching a new feature that translates your speech into your conversation partner’s preferred language in near real-time. The feature only supports English and Spanish for now.

• Gmail’s smart reply feature, which uses AI to suggest replies to your emails, will now use information from your inbox and Google Drive to prewrite responses that sound more like you.

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Soon the AI will write the email, and the recipient’s AI will read it, and we can get on with creating the great works of art that have been lying immanent for so long.
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Is the US in a “high-level equilibrium trap”? • Noahpinion

Noah Smith:

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The U.S. has been a slow-growing country at the technological frontier for as long as almost all of us have been alive. If your country generally grows at 2%, you can expect to see your living standards quadruple over your lifetime. That’s much better than nothing, but it means that in the shorter term — over a five-year or ten-year period — your economic fortunes will be primarily determined by random shocks, not by the slow and steady march of technological improvement. A spell of unemployment, a medical bankruptcy, a decline in the price of your house, the loss of a government contract or a big customer — any of these could wipe out many years of slow improvement in living standards.

In other words, to most Americans, risks loom larger than opportunities. If everything stays the same, then they’ll continue to be wealthy and comfortable; if something changes, they might not. In an environment like that, it makes sense to be afraid of change, because change means risk.

For most of Americans’ lives, technological progress has been a major source of risk. The advent of the internet put encyclopedia salesmen and term life insurance salesmen out of a job. Hybrid cars from Japan put competitive pressure on traditional carmakers. Flip-phone makers were wiped out by smartphones. Electronic trading made many human “specialists” obsolete. And so on and so forth, throughout the economy. At the aggregate level, these innovations drove growth in living standards. But at an individual level, having the technology in your industry change was generally a source of peril.

By contrast someone who grew up in modern China has experienced something utterly different. Over the course of their lifetime, rapid technological progress has radically transformed their lives and the lives of the people around them, allowing them to experience a level of comfort and security utterly undreamt of by their grandparents.

Meanwhile, the risks from new technology were pretty low. In a fast-growing economy, if your job gets automated, you can often just go get a better one.

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Smith’s post is free to read, and gives a broader view of the one expressed yesterday – that the US is falling behind, while China is surging ahead.
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Millions of consumers could get £70 after unfair fees ruling against Mastercard • BBC News

Vishala Sri-Pathma:

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Millions of shoppers could get up to £70 each after a court ruled historic fees administered by card provider Mastercard were unfair.

The decision comes after a long-running legal case going back almost a decade, brought forward by a former financial ombudsman.

Walter Merricks argued that shoppers were charged higher prices after fees were wrongly levied on transactions made over a 15-year period between 1992 and 2008.

It is not necessary to have owned a Mastercard at any point to be eligible for compensation. Mastercard declined to comment on the court ruling.

Consumers are eligible to claim compensation if they lived in England, Wales or Northern Ireland for at least three months between June 1997 and June 2008, and bought goods or services from UK businesses that accepted Mastercard credit cards.

For those who live in Scotland, the starting point is May 1992.

The entire settlement is for £200m, with £100m ringfenced for consumers who have until the end of this year to claim and if the expected 5% of claimants – 2.5 million people – come forward, then each will receive £45.
If fewer people apply, payments will be capped at £70 per claimant.

Mr Merricks said consumers would soon be able to register to receive a payout by completing an online form.

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(Un)Helpfully the BBC didn’t link to the page where one could find how to make a claim. You’ll find that here.
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Task estimation: conquering Hofstadter’s Law • These Are Systems

Jacob Bayless:

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This is a true story: an experienced team of developers was tasked with a full ground-up, from-scratch rewrite of a mature software stack that had been built over many years of development. The legacy architecture had been stretched to its limits and was now restricting the company’s growth. A complete redesign was needed; backwards-compatible on the surface, but entirely different under the hood. Everyone knew this would be a difficult undertaking, but the team had thoroughly considered all the alternatives, and decided this was the best way forward.

Marketing wanted to know when the new software would be ready to ship. The dev team put together a roadmap to deliver a minimum viable product, planned out the workload, and estimated how long it would take to get to the MVP: six months.

It shipped two years later.

It would be an understatement to say this was a huge problem. But the problem wasn’t the two years of development time; this company had healthy revenue to go on, and the long-term payoff from the technology leap would eventually be worth that incubation period.

The damage was caused by the estimate itself. You see, the marketing team interpreted this estimate as a commitment, and began informing customers about when the product would be ready. Sales inquiries came streaming in. Some of those customers had customers of their own, and they had started making their own plans and timelines based on this information. When the deadline rolled around and the product was nowhere near ready, there was a lot of damage control needed.

Customers were not happy. The marketing team was not happy. The company was not happy. And the dev team found themselves in the crosshairs.

So what went wrong?

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What he discovered was that in a hierarchical project – A depends on the completion of B depends on the completion of C – the time taken for each stage follows a lognormal distribution relative to its estimated completion time. The “educated guess” is actually the median completion time; the real mean is 1.6x that; the 95th percentile (ie in 95% of cases it finishes by then) is 5x the median. The 99th percentile? 10x.

Which explains why a lot of software – and other! – projects overrun. [(Douglas) Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.]
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Chicago Sun-Times prints summer reading list full of fake books • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

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On Sunday, the Chicago Sun-Times published an advertorial summer reading list containing at least 10 fake books attributed to real authors, according to multiple reports on social media. The newspaper’s uncredited “Summer reading list for 2025” supplement recommended titles including “Tidewater Dreams” by Isabel Allende and “The Last Algorithm” by Andy Weir—books that don’t exist and were created out of thin air by an AI system.

The creator of the list, Marco Buscaglia, confirmed to 404 Media that he used AI to generate the content. “I do use AI for background at times but always check out the material first. This time, I did not and I can’t believe I missed it because it’s so obvious. No excuses,” Buscaglia said. “On me 100% and I’m completely embarrassed.”

A check by Ars Technica shows that only five of the 15 recommended books in the list actually exist, with the remainder being fabricated titles falsely attributed to well-known authors. AI assistants such as ChatGPT are well-known for creating plausible-sounding errors known as confabulations, especially when lacking detailed information on a particular topic. The problem affects everything from AI search results to lawyers citing fake cases.

On Tuesday morning, the Chicago Sun-Times addressed the controversy on Bluesky. “We are looking into how this made it into print as we speak,” the official publication account wrote. “It is not editorial content and was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom. We value your trust in our reporting and take this very seriously. More info will be provided soon.”

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According to 404 Media in a followup story (paywalled), the content was generated by “magazine giant Hearst”. Rosebud has the last laugh.

But it was part of a 64-page promotional supplement. Journalists – anyone, in fact – hates writing those things, because they’re utter filler. If they’d checked the book titles and put real ones in, I seriously doubt anyone would have been any the wiser.
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The US hasn’t seen a human bird flu case in three months. Experts wonder why • The Boston Globe

Mike Stobbe and Jonel Aleccia:

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Health officials are making a renewed call for vigilance against bird flu, but some experts are puzzling over why reports of new human cases have stopped.

Has the search for cases been weakened by government cuts? Are immigrant farm workers, who have accounted for many of the U.S. cases, more afraid to come forward for testing amid the Trump administration’s deportation push? Is it just a natural ebb in infections?

“We just don’t know why there haven’t been cases,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University. “I think we should assume there are infections that are occurring in farmworkers that just aren’t being detected.”

The H5N1 bird flu has been spreading widely among wild birds, poultry and other animals around the world for several years, and starting early last year became a problem in people and cows in the U.S.

In the last 14 months, infections have been reported in 70 people in the U.S. — most of them workers on dairy and poultry farms. One person died, but most of the infected people had mild illnesses.

The most recent infections confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were in early February in Nevada, Ohio and Wyoming. California had been a hotspot, with three-quarters of the nation’s infections in dairy cattle. But testing and cases among people have fallen off. At least 50 people were tested each month in late 2024, but just three people were tested in March, one in April and none in May so far, state records show. Overall, the state has confirmed H5N1 infections in 38 people, none after Jan. 14.

During a call with U.S. doctors this month, one CDC official noted that there is a seasonality to bird flu: Cases peak in the fall and early winter, possibly due to the migration patterns of wild birds that are primary spreaders of the virus.

That could mean the U.S. is experiencing a natural — maybe temporary — decline in cases.

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Well done, Sherlock Holmes. Let’s just hope that it doesn’t mean it’s having a summer spent producing a version that’s more infectious to humans. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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‘Significant amount’ of private data stolen in Legal Aid hack – BBC News

Aoife Walsh and Graeme Baker:

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A “significant amount” of private data including details of domestic abuse victims has been hacked from Legal Aid’s online system.

The Ministry of Justice said the agency’s services were hacked in April and data dating back to 2010 was downloaded. The BBC understands that more than two million pieces of information were taken.

The breach covers all areas of the aid system – including domestic abuse victims, those in family cases and others facing criminal prosecution.

“This data may have included… addresses of applicants, dates of birth, national ID numbers, criminal history, employment and financial data such as… debts and payments,” the MoJ said. The agency’s chief executive Jane Harbottle apologised, saying she understood the news “will be shocking and upsetting for people”.

Justice minister Sarah Sackman told the House of Commons that there was no indication as yet that any other government systems had been affected by the breach. The MoJ said that while the initial cyber-attack was detected in April, it has since become apparent that the incident was “more extensive than originally understood”.

It also warned the public to be alert for any suspicious activity, including unknown messages or phone calls, and to update any potentially exposed passwords. “If you are in doubt about anyone you are communicating with online or over the phone you should verify their identity independently before providing any information to them,” it said.

The ministry said it was working with the National Crime Agency and the National Cyber Security Centre, and has informed the Information Commissioner.

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There seems to be a spate of these attacks hitting British organisations at the moment. Hard to figure out if we’re just noticing it more, or whether this is some sort of concentrated assault.
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Apple turnover • Hypercritical

John Siracusa:

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Try to make great things, and the money will surely follow. It’s a strategy that’s simple to explain, but almost impossible for any company to follow.

…As far as I’m concerned, the only truly mortal sin for Apple’s leadership is losing sight of the proper relationship between product virtue and financial success—and not just momentarily, but constitutionally, intransigently, for years. Sadly, I believe this has happened.

The preponderance of the evidence is undeniable. Too many times, in too many ways, over too many years, Apple has made decisions that do not make its products better, all in service of control, leverage, protection, profits—all in service of money.

To be clear, I don’t mean things like charging exorbitant prices for RAM and SSD upgrades on Macs or taking too high a percentage of in-app purchases in the App Store. Those are venial sins. It’s the apparently unshakable core beliefs that motivate these and other poor decisions that run counter to the virtuous cycle that led Apple out of the darkness all those years ago.

Apple, as embodied by its leadership’s decisions over the past decade or more, no longer seems primarily motivated by the creation of great products. Time and time again, its policies have made its products worse for customers in exchange for more power, control, and, yes, money for Apple.

The iPhone is a better product when people can buy ebooks within the Kindle app. And yet Apple has fought this feature for the past 14 years, to the tune of millions of dollars in legal fees, and has only relented due to a recent court order (which they continue to appeal).

…The best leaders can change their minds in response to new information. The best leaders can be persuaded. But we’ve had decades of strife, lawsuits, and regulations, and Apple has stubbornly dug in its heels even further at every turn. It seems clear that there’s only one way to get a different result.

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Quietly but certainly, the calls are multiplying for Tim Cook to leave or be thrown out. And I agree with Siracusa.
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Huawei’s first trifold is a great phone that you shouldn’t buy • The Verge

Dominic Preston:

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this isn’t a phone you’re meant to buy, at least not outside China. It’s a phone you’re meant to gawk at on the internet, to marvel at Huawei’s technological prowess, to ooh and ahh about its many and varied folds. This is Huawei showing off, proving to the world that it’s still got it. And in fairness, it has.

As I sit and write this — more than six months after Huawei first released the Mate XT in China — it’s still the only one of its kind. Rumor has it that Samsung has a trifold ready to show off this year, but it hasn’t yet. And by the time it does, odds are Huawei will have spent a full year as the only player in the game.

That might ring alarm bells in your head. This must be undercooked tech, you think, rushed out the door to beat everyone else to market. But the most surprising thing about the Mate XT is that it only occasionally feels first-gen.

There’s a hint of it in the multitasking, which refuses to allow you to fully open three apps at a time, pinning each to one of the three screen segments. Or when the fully open screen often doesn’t quite go entirely flat, which is more annoying than any crease will ever be. And you notice it when you open the phone, or close it, and the app you’re using seems to briefly reboot itself, losing your spot in a long article or (once, infuriatingly) discarding a Letterboxd review that was almost entirely finished. I’ve learned not to change the configuration while doing something, just to be safe.

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The tri-fold part means it can all be one continuous screen, but two-thirds close in when you, well, fold it. So there’s an outside screen when it’s in your pocket, like any phone. Except thicker. And heavier. If someone can really crack the weight point, then this might be a viable product.
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016?Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: an addendum about the mystery from the other day of “who uses correction fluid?” TEACHERS. They use it for correcting homework and class handouts and posters and similar, because mistakes in printing often aren’t spotted before committing to hard copy, and would be too expensive/time-consuming to correct.