A team in China has developed contact lenses with nanotechnology which lets people see infrared light. CC-licensed photo by Arlo Ringsmuth on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. With glasses darkly. 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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Chinese team makes contact lenses let you see in the dark, even with eyes closed • The Times

Rhys Blakely:

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In a development worthy of a Bond film, Chinese scientists have invented contact lenses that allow a wearer to see in the dark — even when their eyes are shut.

The lenses have enabled users to detect infrared light, a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum usually invisible to the human eye.

Unlike bulky night-vision goggles, which also pick up infrared, they do not require power from batteries. Instead, tiny nanoparticles are embedded into a type of flexible, transparent polymer material already used for conventional contact lenses.

The particles absorb infrared light and convert it to red, blue and green wavelengths, which the human eye can see.

“Our research opens up the potential for non-invasive wearable devices to give people super-vision,” said Professor Tian Xue of the University of Science and Technology of China.

In a paper published in the journal Cell, he and his colleagues suggest that the contact lenses could, with further refinement, be useful not only for night vision but also in foggy or dusty conditions, because infrared penetrates to a greater degree than visible light.

In trials, the lenses were sensitive to low intensity infrared emitted by LEDs. The light they detect sits just beyond the range of human vision, in what’s known as the near-infrared spectrum. Anything that reflects near-infrared, such as landscapes or people, could potentially be made visible.

For now, however, image sharpness limits their usefulness for night vision. Because the lenses sit so close to the retina, fine detail is blurred. To compensate, the team has also made a pair of glasses that harness the same technique, offering a crisper view.

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An amazing achievement. You can read the Cell paper.
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Why Silicon Valley’s most powerful people are so obsessed with Tolkien and hobbits • The New York Times

Michiko Kakutani:

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Literary classics, of course, can support myriad interpretations, and we live in an age when the points of view of readers are increasingly prioritized over authorial intentions. At the same time, it’s astonishing how many contemporary takes on classic works of fantasy and science fiction fly in the face of both common sense and authors’ known views of the world.

Consider Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to rebrand Facebook as “Meta” — a reference to the so-called metaverse, a term coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash,” which depicts an alarming dystopian future where corporate power has replaced government institutions and a dangerous virus is on the loose.

Or take Stargate, the name of OpenAI’s new artificial intelligence initiative with SoftBank and Oracle, announced in conjunction with the Trump administration. Its name, weirdly, is the title of a campy 1994 sci-fi movie in which a stargate device opens a portal to a faraway planet, where a despotic alien vows to destroy Earth with a supercharged atomic bomb. Not exactly the sort of magical portal most people would want to open.

Tolkien himself regarded “machine worshippers” with suspicion, even aversion. His experiences as a soldier who survived the gruesome World War I Battle of the Somme left him with a lasting horror of mechanized warfare; on returning home, he was dismayed as well by the factories and roadways that were transforming England’s landscape. This is why Mordor is depicted as a hellish, industrial wasteland, ravaged by war and environmental destruction, in contrast to the green, edenic Shire that the hobbits call home.

…Given these views, Tolkien would have been confounded by Silicon Valley’s penchant for naming tech companies after objects in “Lord of the Rings” — particularly firms with Pentagon and national security ties. And yet two Thiel-backed companies with Tolkien-inspired names are becoming cornerstones of today’s military-industrial complex: The data analytics firm Palantir gets its name from the magical “seeing stones” in “Lord of the Rings,” while the artificial intelligence military startup Anduril refers to Aragorn’s reforged sword.

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Give me SF over the fantasy stuff any day. But especially, never ever give me Lord of the Rings. (Neatly, Kakutani is a former book critic for the NY Times.)

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Authors are accidentally leaving AI prompts in their novels • 404 Media

Matthew Gault:

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Fans reading through the romance novel Darkhollow Academy: Year 2 got a nasty surprise last week in chapter 3. In the middle of steamy scene between the book’s heroine and the dragon prince Ash there’s this: “I’ve rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree’s style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements:”.

It appeared as if the author, Lena McDonald, had used an AI to help write the book, asked it to imitate the style of another author, and left behind evidence they’d done so in the final work. As of this writing, Darkhollow Academy: Year 2 is hard to find on Amazon. Searching for it on the site won’t show the book, but a Google search will. 404 Media was able to purchase a copy and confirm that the book no longer contains the reference to copying Bree’s style. But screenshots of the graph remain in the book’s Amazon reviews and Goodreads page.

This is not the first time an author has left behind evidence of AI-generation in a book. It’s not even the first one this year. 

In January, author K.C. Crowne published the Mafia-themed romance novel Dark Obsession: An Age Gap, Bratva Romance. Like McDonald’s, Crowne’s book had a weird paragraph in the middle of the book: “Here’s an enhanced version of your passage, making Elena more relatable and injecting additional humor while providing a brief, sexy, description of Grigori. Changes are highlighted in bold for clarity,” it said.

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A book called “Darkhollow Academy: Year 2” sounds a bit, well, derivative to me. Some of the writers are blaming proofreaders (those books have proofreaders?). Some just aren’t contactable. The tide of AI slop keeps rising.
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The true costs of being on YouTube • Food Processing

Carla Lalli Music is a cook who writes cookbooks and until recently had a YouTube channel. However:

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Back to the rough stuff. Until recently, I put out a video every week, costing me $14,000 per month, plus groceries. (My time is not included in that figure.) Average monthly earnings from Google Adsense, the program that matches ads to content on YouTube? Brace yourself.

My top grossing months were October 2022, $7544, and May 2024, $7028. My two worst months were December 2023, $1799, and July 2022, $3689.

That means that on my best month, income fell short of expenses by about $6500. My crappiest month put me more than $12,000 in the hole. On average though, I grossed about $4000/month in ad revenue; my sales partner takes 8% of that off the top.

If we roll with the average Adsense income, here’s the bottom line: $14k going out. $4k coming in. Net loss, month over month: TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS. That’s a lot to sink into a channel that is barely moving book sales and not getting me a TV deal. Simply put, it’s completely unsustainable from a business perspective.

…The most significant metric for earnings on YouTube is CPM, or the cost per thousand views that advertisers must pay to run spots against a channel’s content. To advertise on my channel, that number is about $29 per thousand views.

The other metric is RPM, revenue per thousand views, which is what the creator is paid. My RPM is around $10. Easy math: For a video with 30,000 views, I earn $300. People tend to assume that my take is much higher, in particular the viewers who can’t believe I have the audacity to put my recipes behind a paywall.

Again: It costs $29 per thousand to run an ad in my videos, and I get $10 per thousand. Where does the other $19 go? To YouTube, of course. That’s a 2:1 split in favor of the platform. Lord, give me strength.

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In other words: it only works if you don’t need the money, or if you’re absolutely gigantic, or you can get amazing CPM/RPMs.
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Pakistan allocates 2,000MW of electricity to bitcoin mining and AI data centres • Reuters

Asif Shahzad:

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Pakistan will allocate 2,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity in the first phase of a national initiative to power bitcoin mining and AI data centres, its finance ministry said on Sunday.

The allocation is part of Islamabad’s plans to use its surplus electricity to bitcoin mining and AI data centres.

Pakistan’s energy sector is grappling with challenges, including high electricity tariffs and surplus generation capacity.

The rapid expansion of solar energy has further complicated the landscape, as more consumers turn to alternative energy sources to mitigate high costs.

The initiative is spearheaded by the Pakistan Crypto Council (PCC), a government-backed body, which is part of a broader strategy to monetize surplus electricity, create high-tech jobs, and attract foreign investment, the ministry said.

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Pakistan has very strange power usage pattern: in the winter it collapses by 60%, because people use natural gas canisters and burn wood for heating. Those of course won’t power air conditioning in the summer. But the expansion of solar microgeneration means that demand isn’t coming at that time either.

So, surplus energy, what to do? Bitcoin and AI, of course.
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Was Meta failing at the job it’s hired for? The FTC wraps up case-in-chief • Big Tech on Trial

Brendan Benedict has been following the FTC’s trial against Meta. This is an extract from his writeup of some of the testimony:

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[Head of Facebook, Tom] Alison said the “diminishing friend content in feed is less a function of our decision and more a function of the fact that people just don’t want to post to their friends anymore at increasing rates. [It’s] been true for many years.” The court asked if that was because of declining posting or consumption or both. Alison said this is mainly due to declining posting.

According to Alison, there’s a “supply and demand imbalance”: people want to see more posts from friends, but they don’t want to post. “The world is moving to private spaces . . . posting a piece of content in feed might mean you get in an argument about politics with your brother-in-law,” or that you “said something and somebody screenshotted it and you get in trouble at work.” Chief Judge Boasberg said that sounded like “negative network effects,” which Zuckerberg talked about earlier in the trial. The court also asked if we’d know more in six months to a year if time spent on the friends tab suggests that friends and family sharing is the core interest, and Alison answered that there’s not enough data yet to know.

On cross, Kellogg Hansen’s Aaron Panner put up a chart showing an increase in the percentage of MAUs in the United States without a single Facebook friend on day 90 after account creation: the percentages increased from around 10% in 2012 to close to 50% in more recent years. Alison said he would show that slide at an “all-hands” Facebook meeting the next day. The chart sought “to illustrate that Facebook is going through a fundamental transformation” as people increasingly go to Facebook for reasons besides finding friends. On re-direct, though, Matheson pointed out that that data could include professional accounts, content creators, or fake accounts.

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“People want to see more posts from friends, but they don’t want to post.” It’s a fascinating commentary on how the social media landscape has changed. Now they’re probably posting in.. WhatsApp groups.
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Cracking the Dave & Buster’s iOS anomaly • Rambo Codes

Guilherme Rambo:

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I was listening to an episode of one of my favorite podcasts this weekend. The show is called Search Engine, and every episode tries to answer a question that can’t be easily answered through an actual search engine (or even AI).

This episode grabbed my attention because it was about an iOS bug, and a really weird one.

The bug is that, if you try to send an audio message using the Messages app to someone who’s also using the Messages app, and that message happens to include the name “Dave and Buster’s”, the message will never be received.

In case you’re wondering, “Dave and Buster’s” is the name of a sports bar and restaurant in the United States.

At the time I’m writing this post, this bug is still happening, so you should be able to reproduce it. I reproduced it using two iPhones running iOS 18.5 RC. As long as your audio message contains the phrase “Dave and Buster’s”, the recipient will only see the “dot dot dot” animation for several seconds, and it will then eventually disappear. They will never get the audio message.

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As with so many of these bugs, the question of how it was discovered is almost more interesting than why it happens. Though the latter is pretty interesting too.
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John Young, co-founder of web archive Cryptome, is dead at 89 • The Register

Iain Thomson:

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John Young, the co-founder of the legendary internet archive Cryptome, died at the age of 89 on March 28. The Register talked to friends and peers who gave tribute to a bright, pugnacious man who was devoted to the public’s right to know.

Before WikiLeaks, OpenLeaks, BayFiles, or Transparency Toolkit, there was Cryptome – an open internet archive that inspired them all, helped ignite the first digital crypto war, and even gave Julian Assange his start before falling out with him on principle.

Cryptome was set up by Young and his partner Deborah Natsios, who were architects living in New York at the time. They had similar backgrounds – Young had grown up with a “nomadic, hardscrabble Texas childhood,” Natsios told The Register, while she spent her early life bouncing from country to country as her father, a CIA operative, rotated through assignments.

The 1968 student protests at Columbia University radicalized Young, she said. The protesters demonstrated most famously against the Vietnam War, but also against the university building a segregated gym on campus – the students called it “Gym Crow.” Young was one of the protesters who occupied Avery Hall before the police moved in, arresting 700 people and injuring 100.

“My family had spent four years in Saigon in the years leading up to the war, where my father was CIA Chief of Station,” Natsios recounted. “John and I both found our shared defiance of government secrecy had sprung from intensely lived experience.”

A quarter of a century later, the idea of Cryptome was born. Young was an early adopter of computer-aided design and was watching the birth of the internet firsthand in the early 1990s.

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One wonders whether the Trump administration is going to radicalise people in the same way, or if we’ve gone too far past that in a world of short-form video content which can be clipped to tear them out of context.
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‘Pay here’: the QR code ‘quishing’ scam targeting drivers • The Guardian

Hilary Osborne:

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You park the car and look for somewhere to pay. A large QR code on the machine offers to take you directly to the right website where you put in your card details before going on with your day. Only much later are you hit with the double whammy: money gone from your account, and a fine for not paying the genuine parking company.

The rise in app- and phone-based parking payment has opened a new frontier for fraudsters: quishing – so called because they are phishing attacks that start with a QR code. The fraudsters stick the codes in places where you would expect to see details of how to pay to park. When you scan one, it takes you to a site where you are asked for your payment details – as you would expect when booking parking.

One victim who scanned a code in a station car park told the BBC that the fraudsters tried to take payments then posed as her bank to get more information from her, before running up £13,000 worth of debt in her name.

Last year, the UK’s Action Fraud received 1,386 reports of scams involving QR codes – a small number, but more than double that in the previous year. In just the first three months of 2025 there were 502, suggesting the problem is growing.

Chris Ainsley, the head of fraud risk management at Santander UK, says it is hard to get a full picture of the scale of the fraud. “Unless drivers receive a parking ticket, a lot of people are unaware that their personal or card details were compromised in this way,” he says. “When it comes to reporting the eventual scam, often the fact that it originated through quishing goes undocumented.”

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This is absolutely the worst thing about the proliferation of parking apps: people aren’t surprised to be told they have to “scan here” to get Yet Another Parking App, so these catch them out.
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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: none notified