After World War 2, Japan’s shipbuilding industry was wrecked. So how did it rebuild to become a world leader? CC-licensed photo by North East Museums on Flickr.
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It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.
A selection of 10 links for you. Diving for pearls? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Jony Ive’s AI gadget rumored to be “slightly larger” than Humane’s AI pin • The Verge
Emma Roth:
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More details are trickling out about Jony Ive and Sam Altman’s new AI device. In a post on Thursday, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says his research indicates that the device could be larger than Humane’s AI pin, but with a “form factor as compact and elegant as an iPod Shuffle.”
Kuo adds that “one of the intended use cases” is wearing the device around your neck. It also may not come with a display, Kuo says, featuring just built-in cameras and microphones for “environmental detection.” The device could also connect to smartphones and PCs to use their computing and display capabilities.
This latest leak aligns with a report from The Wall Street Journal, which says the device will be aware of a user’s life and surroundings, but probably won’t be a pair of glasses.
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Kuo talks about mass production in 2027 (which doesn’t give OpenAI much time to get prototyping and factories sorted out), with assembly and shipping done outside China “to reduce geopolitical risks” (gives even less time).
He thinks people will wear it around their neck? Has he met people?
Even so, if it could do what the Humane Pin wanted to do, but do it really well, then that could be interesting.
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Apple smart glasses launching in 2026, says Bloomberg • MacRumors
Juli Clover:
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Apple is planning to launch a set of smart glasses by the end of 2026, reports Bloomberg. The glasses will be comparable to the Meta Ray-Bans and the Android XR glasses that Google showed off earlier this week.
Apple’s smart glasses are expected to include cameras, microphones, and AI capabilities, much like the Meta Ray-Bans. The glasses will be able to take photos, record video, provide translations, give turn-by-turn directions, play music, facilitate phone calls, offer feedback on what the wearer is seeing, and answer queries, but there won’t be augmented reality capabilities included. Siri will be a key part of the glasses experience, with Apple planning to improve the personal assistant ahead of when the product launches.
With Apple targeting a late 2026 launch, work on the smart glasses has ramped up. Apple plans to produce “large quantities” of prototypes by the end of this year, giving the company time to test before mass production and a public unveiling.
According to Bloomberg, an Apple employee said that the glasses are similar to Meta’s glasses, “but better made.” The Meta Ray-Bans use Meta Llama and Google Gemini, but Apple will rely on its own AI models.
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Better made had better not just mean “a lot heavier”. Apple has certainly done well when it comes to miniaturisation – the AirPods and Watch pack a lot in. The Vision Pro shows that when size isn’t a constraint, Apple can screw it up badly. Will the right people win the design battle?
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“How you design the beep is important”: behind the movement for calmer gadgets • Ars Technica
Scharon Harding:
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Do you miss the feel of tactile buttons on your kitchen appliances or lament car manufacturers’ insistence on touchscreens? Have you ever found yourself clumsily fumbling with the door handles of a vehicle or distracted by the bright blue light beaming from your vacuum or Wi-Fi router?
If so, you’re not alone. The way technology gadgets are designed largely relies on things like blue, often LED, lights, flat resistive or capacitive touch input, and software. Some, like Amber Case, founder of the Calm Tech Institute, believe that these design choices distract from devices’ purpose and functionality and are calling for a new approach to product design.
“Calm Tech Institute is kind of a consumer advocacy body that’s collecting stories and research from neuroscientists that says, look at how the mind wants texture, and look at how it wants physical buttons, and there’s a part of your mind that needs [those],” Case told Ars Technica. “When we don’t have it and we replace it with glass, we’re not only losing something about human experience, but we’re actually causing the mind stress.”
The Calm Tech Institute, founded in May 2024, provides workshops, speaking engagements, and certification for products that “enhance human life without causing stress or distraction,” its website says.
Speaking to Ars, Case pointed to user frustrations, such as software updates hindering car usage and “Why is there no button on the back of the television when I go into the hotel room late at night, and I have to turn on my flashlight on my iPhone to find the button to turn it off?”
These experiences are the antithesis of the Calm Tech philosophy, Case explained: “Once we learn [how to ride a bike], we never have to learn it again. Whereas, with how a lot of software … and physical objects are made now, you have to relearn it. It gets changed or the buttons aren’t in the right place, and you can feel your mind wanting the button to be in a certain place. And it’s not.”
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Roger that. See also: showers in hotels; coffee machines; taps in public toilets (do you touch it? Wave your hand underneath it?).
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Japan and the birth of modern shipbuilding • Construction Physics
Brian Potter:
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During WWII, the US constructed an unprecedented shipbuilding machine. By assembling ships from welded, prefabricated blocks, the US built a huge number of cargo ships incredibly quickly, overwhelming Germany’s u-boats and helping to win the war. But when the war was over, this shipbuilding machine was dismantled. Industrialists like Henry Kaiser and Stephen Bechtel, who operated some of the US’s most efficient wartime shipyards, left the shipbuilding business.
Prior to the war, the US had been an uncompetitive commercial shipbuilder producing a small fraction of commercial oceangoing ships, and that’s what it became again. At the height of the war the US was producing nearly 90% of the world’s ships. By the 1950s, it produced just over 2%.
But the lessons from the US’s shipbuilding machine weren’t forgotten. After the war, practitioners brought them to Japan, where they would continue to evolve, eventually allowing Japan to build ships faster and cheaper than almost anyone else in the world.
…The third strategy that formed the core of modern shipbuilding methods was statistical process control. The basic idea behind process control is that it’s impossible to make an industrial process perfectly reliable. There will always be some variation in what it produces: differences in part dimensions, material strength, chemical composition, and so on. But while some variation is inherent to the process (and must be accepted), much of the variation is from specific causes that can be hunted down and eliminated. By analyzing the variation in a process, undesirable sources of variation can be removed. This makes a process work more reliably and predictably, reducing waste and rework from parts that are outside acceptable tolerances.
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Absorbing read if you want to know how the Japanese became the primary place for doing this – until others (such as South Korea) took over.
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Spanish grid operator faults big power plants in blackout blame game • Financial Times
Barney Jopson:
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Spain’s grid operator has accused some large power plants of not doing their job to help regulate the country’s electricity system in the moments before last month’s catastrophic blackout across the Iberian peninsula.
Beatriz Corredor, chair of grid operator Red Eléctrica’s parent company, said power plants fell short in controlling the voltage of the electricity system. However, the heads of Spain’s biggest plant owners linked the blackout to a lack of grid investment and insufficient efforts to boost electricity demand.
The public blame game over the outage is intensifying as more than three weeks after 60m people were left without power, Spanish government investigators insisted they needed more time to establish the root cause.
The revelations on Thursday from Corredor, chair of Redeia, open up a new front after the spotlight fell initially on Spain’s high dependence on wind and solar energy as a possible cause of the blackout.
Corredor did not say large power plants were the root cause, but she said the functioning of certain gas, nuclear or hydroelectric facilities in south-west Spain was “below [the levels] required by current voltage control regulations”.
Their role is potentially significant because experts have identified the proximate cause of the blackout as a surge in voltage on the grid, together with a drop in the frequency at which the electrical current alternates, which triggered the disconnection of multiple generation plants.
Corredor insisted that moments before the failure on April 28, the part of the system controlled by Red Eléctrica, including grid substations, was operating within the voltage ranges established by regulatory norms.
“So we have to consider what was happening with voltage in the rest of the system,” she said. “Because [Red Eléctrica] are the brain, the spine. But this system obviously has arms, legs, and it has a heart, which is the plants that generate electricity.” Voltage surges on the grid cause power plants to disconnect automatically for safety reasons to protect equipment from damage.
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So it seems like we still don’t know? That seems bad because it implies that the same thing could happen again.
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The Ammortal chamber: what it’s like in the $160k biohacking device • Robb Report
Justin Fenner:
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At a passing glance, you might think the Ammortal Chamber was a set piece made for the Dune cinematic universe. The brutalist look of its two halves, which are bisected by a lightning bolt-shaped sheet of acrylic that glows red when activated, has the air of a concrete relic from the distant future.
But the growing class of champions for this machine—which combines photobiomodulation, pulsed electromagnetic frequency, molecular hydrogen, guided meditation, and vibroacoustic therapies into a single treatment—claims it has myriad real-life benefits.
“Very quickly, I started regrowing hair,” says Jonathan Krieger, cofounder of Padel United Sports Club, a high-end racquet facility in Cresskill, N.J., that houses the only Ammortal Chamber near New York City, of his experience using it. He credits the red-light component of his three or four weekly sessions with improving the appearance of his skin, too.
The other benefits he’s seen are even more impressive. “Inflammation? Down 70 percent,” he estimates. “My sleeping, which was always a little whatever, just became much more consistent. My energy and my general state of stress, I would say, just shifted.”
And while, in my experience, one session can be uniquely calming, restorative, and even fun, Ammortal’s CEO Brian Le Gette has observed that regular use has compounding benefits.
“This is a wellness product, not a clinical, medical device,” he says as a caveat before sharing anecdotes about user feedback. “We have hundreds and thousands of people who’ve had tremendous pain reduction. We’ve had people who’ve had trauma releases inside this thing, and they’re weeping afterwards,” he says. One collegiate lacrosse player used the chamber before a game and scored five of her team’s six goals. Before that, Le Gette adds, “She’d never come remotely close to two.”
So what is it like to use? The device dispenses all of its treatments simultaneously, in 15-, 25-, or 50-minute sessions. It’s recommended that you use it in your underwear so that most of your skin is exposed to the red light, and so that the near-infrared light can help treat your joints. (Some people use it in the nude.) Covers are provided to shield your eyes from the light, and a sterile cannula is attached to a tank so that you can breathe in the hydrogen during the session.
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I’m not sure that goals scored is a very rigorous comparison, but anyway, it looks pretty amazing. Also – hydrogen?
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Virginia reports first mammal with bird flu • Daily Progress
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Virginia has reported its first case of bird flu in a mammal, as the disease continues to ravage the U.S. poultry industry sending the price of eggs skyrocketing.
The Blue Ridge Wildlife Center in Clarke County recently admitted an adult female red fox found in Loudoun County that tested positive for H5N1, highly pathogenic avian influenza.
Upon intake on March 31, the animal was not responding to handling, according to the center.
“She was also exhibiting tremors and nystagmus, a rhythmic, involuntary eye movement that is often seen with brain trauma or disease,” the center said in a statement. “Given these severe neurological signs without any indication of trauma, our top differentials were rabies, distemper, and HPAI.”
…Rabies testing later came back negative, and brain tissue samples confirmed bird flu was the primary cause of the symptoms, according to an April 8 update from the center.
Though a first for Virginia, other states have reported many bird flu cases in mammals, especially dairy cows and free-roaming domestic cats.
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Only a watching brief! (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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‘A billion streams and no fans’: inside a $10m AI music fraud case • WIRED
Kate Knibbs:
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Jazz (Deluxe) came out in January 2018. Right away, it shot up the Billboard chart and hit No. 1. [Jonathan] Hay was elated. At last, real, measurable success had arrived.
Then, just as suddenly, the album disappeared from the ranking. “Nobody drops off the next week to zero,” says Hay, remembering his confusion. He called other artists to ask if they’d ever seen this before. They hadn’t. Questions piled up. If so many people had listened, why did they suddenly stop? He scanned the internet for chatter. Even a single freaking tweet would have been nice. Nada. Where were the fans? “No one’s talking about the music,” Hay realized.
Pulling up Spotify’s dashboard for artists, Hay scrutinized the analytics for the pair’s work. Listeners appeared concentrated in far-flung places like Vietnam. Things only got stranger from there. Here’s how Hay remembers it: He started receiving notices from distributors, the companies that handle the licensing of indie artists’ music. The distributors were flagging [fellow bandmate Mike] Smith and Hay’s music, from Jazz and from other projects, for streaming fraud and pulling it down. Smith told Hay it was a mistake and that Hay had messed up securing the proper rights for samples. Hay frantically tried to correct the issue, but the flagging persisted.
Hay, panicking, badgered Smith to help him figure out what was happening. Finally, Hay says, Smith offered some answers: Smith had instructed his staff at the medical clinics to stream their songs. It didn’t sound like the full story.
Then, last September, Smith turned up at the heart of another music streaming incident, this one rather epic. The FBI arrested him and charged him in the first AI streaming fraud case in the United States. The government claims that between 2017 and 2024, Smith made over $10m in royalties by using bot armies to continuously play AI-generated tracks on streaming platforms. Smith pleaded not guilty to all charges. (Through his lawyer, Smith declined to be interviewed, so this is very much Hay’s side of the story, corroborated by numerous interviews with people who worked with the two men.)
When Hay found out, he marveled at the idea of his former collaborator managing to get richer than nearly all working musicians without being a household name. “He had a billion streams,” Hay claims, “and no fans.”
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Diseases are spreading. The CDC isn’t warning the public like it was months ago • NPR
Chiara Eisner:
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To accomplish its mission of increasing the health security of the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that it “conducts critical science and provides health information” to protect the nation. But since President Trump’s administration assumed power in January, many of the platforms the CDC used to communicate with the public have gone silent, an NPR analysis found.
Many of the CDC’s newsletters have stopped being distributed, workers at the CDC say. Health alerts about disease outbreaks, previously sent to health professionals subscribed to the CDC’s Health Alert Network, haven’t been dispatched since March. The agency’s main social media channels have come under new ownership of the Department of Health and Human Services, emails reviewed by NPR show, and most have gone more than a month without posting their own new content.
“Public health functions best when its experts are allowed to communicate the work that they do in real time, and that’s not happening,” said Kevin Griffis, who served as the director of communications at the CDC until March. “That could put people’s lives at risk.”
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Under the new Trump regime, that might count as “mission accomplished”.
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Stories have very simple shapes • The Memory Hole
This is a seven-minute video. I rarely link to videos.
But this one is of Kurt Vonnegut, talking about how the stories we tell have “shapes”. Stay to the end.
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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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