On Wall Street, they have a new food-based acronym for Trump’s trade policies – and he doesn’t like it at all. CC-licensed photo by Tim Reckmann on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Mexico isn’t paying for this either. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
There’s more film and television for you to watch than ever before; good luck finding it • Salon.com
Coleman Spilde:
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Not long ago, if you wanted to see a movie at your local theatre, you could pick up the paper and look at the daily advertisements to find showtimes. That lasted even through the brief Moviefone boom, where users could dial a number to get automated showtimes, which was still a low-tech way to find out what was playing nearby. But then came the internet, and every piece of useful technology exploded, with the shrapnel extending to the far recesses of the digital Rubicon.
Some theatres featured digital ticketing, others did not, causing services like Fandango to prioritize movie houses with digital tickets, allowing the platform to earn a service fee on top of a customer’s purchase. For smaller theatres — whether they were independently owned or just a single or few-screen theatre in a corporate chain — the digital revolution spelled disaster. The multiplex boom at the turn of the millennium saw theatres that couldn’t adapt to new, digital revenue streams crushed under the financial pressure. In 2000 alone, Carmike Cinemas, Edwards Theatres and General Cinema all filed for bankruptcy.
The ripples of this roaring tech age are still being felt. There is now such a proliferation of digital media that navigating between apps, emails, videos and texts just to find something to watch feels like a massive undertaking. The window between a movie trailer being released and the film itself being released into theatres has tightened, and the window between a film’s theatrical release and its streaming release is sometimes even shorter. With the expansion of streaming, there are more titles at our disposal than ever. But when it comes to finding something you want to watch, good luck fighting against the algorithms, shoddy user interfaces and glitchy applications. In trying to make media-watching “easier,” tech has slowed the process to a maddening plod.
“If I ever try scrolling through endless titles on a specific streamer’s landing page, it can feel like a Herculean task,” says Cameron Nudleman, an avid film-lover based in Austin, Texas. Nudleman prefers to use his Amazon Fire Stick’s voice search feature to look for specific titles he’s interested in, but that experience is its own can of worms. “I chose a Fire Stick because, as an existing Prime customer, it felt like the easiest and cheapest way to host all of my streaming services in one place. While the experience isn’t entirely awful, I would rate it a six at best.”
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Well, I do know that the new Mission: Impossible film is out now, and that I’m going to watch it on Thursday evening in IMAX. So some of it works. (Side note: Americans spell it “theater” – I changed all the spellings to the English “theatre” – but then use “theatrical” as the adjective, rather than “theaterical”. Howcome?)
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This film was made entirely with Runway AI and Google’s Veo. It nearly broke us • WSJ
Joanna Stern and Jarrard Cole:
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Welcome to the premiere of “My Robot & Me.” Please silence your phones, chew your popcorn quietly and remember: Every visual you’re about to see was generated with AI. Most of the audio too, except my voice.
Some of it’s totally wild. You won’t believe that no real cameras were used. Some of it, you’ll laugh at, because it’s clearly not real. I promise you, I did not have facial reconstructive surgery between scenes. But enough from me. Hopefully by now you’ve watched the film [in the story], complete with its behind-the-scenes look. Just come back—we’ve got some lessons to share.
Yes, we. To make this film, I teamed up with Jarrard Cole, a real human producer. We met over a decade ago here at WSJ, experimenting with helmet cams and new video formats like VR. These days, he’s become obsessed with AI video tools. So I challenged him to make a totally AI video. How hard could it be?
Very hard. Over a thousand clips, days of work and who knows how much data-center computing power later, we ended up with a three-minute film—about my life with a new kind of efficiency robot. Even if you don’t care about camera angles or storyboards, you might care about what this says about using AI in any job.
…Think you can paste in a script and out pops a Netflix hit? Cute. Every shot of ours was the result of many prompts and generation attempts. And to keep characters and sets consistent from scene to scene, Jarrard invented a whole production pipeline.
The quick version: We used AI image generator Midjourney to generate our sets (a suburban neighborhood, a newsroom) and to design our robot star. Then we used photos of real me to create AI me. We uploaded those to Runway or Veo, where we wrote prompts. Here’s a short one: Low angle shot: Joanna does push-ups at a brisk pace, maintaining a straight line from head to heel. The robot stands above, monitoring and guiding.
That careful, specific wording made a huge difference. As a filmmaker, Jarrard could break down scenes beat by beat, specifying camera angles, lighting styles and movement. That nail-biter ending? Every shot was carefully described to build suspense. And it still took us over 1,000 clips. Some were complete disasters, with anatomical nightmares and random new characters. Even in “good” scenes, my face looks different in almost every shot.
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Free to read, and to view. The question is always: will it be like this all the time, or will it get easier and faster?
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Five ways to stop cheating with AI • The Honest Broker
Ted Gioia:
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How would the Oxford [University] system kill AI?
Once again, where do I begin?
There were so many oddities in Oxford education. Medical students complained to me that they were forced to draw every organ in the human body. I came here to be a doctor, not a bloody artist.
When they griped to their teachers, they were given the usual response: this is how we’ve always done things.
I knew a woman who wanted to study modern drama, but she was forced to decipher handwriting from 13th century manuscripts as preparatory training.
This is how we’ve always done things.
Americans who studied modern history were dismayed to learn that the modern world at Oxford begins in the year 284 A.D. But I guess that makes sense when you consider that Oxford was founded two centuries before the rise of the Aztec Empire.
My experience was less extreme. But every aspect of it was impervious to automation and digitization—let alone AI (which didn’t exist back then). When I got my exam results from the college, the grades were handwritten in ancient Greek characters.
If implemented today, the Oxford system would totally elminate AI cheating—in these five ways…
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I’ll let you consider them yourself, although: some of the solutions (such as personal tutor sessions) really wouldn’t work at universities bigger than Oxford or Cambridge.
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Trump’s not happy about Wall Street’s name for his tariff flip-flops • POLITICO
Ali Bianco:
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Wall Street has a new shorthand about President Donald Trump — and he’s not happy about it.
Traders have reportedly come up with the acronym TACO, which stands for “Trump always chickens out,” to take advantage of the trade environment created by the president’s habit of threatening to impose tariffs on countries, and then backing off at the last moment.
He bristled when asked about it Wednesday in an Oval Office press conference.
“Don’t ever say what you say, that’s a nasty question,” Trump told a journalist who asked for his response to the acronym. “To me that’s the nastiest question.”
Trump rejected the idea that his reversals on tariffs amounted to him backing down, saying that usually receives a different critique.
“They will say oh he was chicken, he was chicken, that’s so unbelievable,” Trump said about the EU tariff extension, adding, “I usually have the opposite problem — they say you’re too tough!”
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This is extremely funny, and extremely telling. First, that it’s being used on Wall Street (it was coined by the Financial Times, observing how Wall Street traded around his tariff threats). Second, that his reaction is to call such a perfect description “nasty”. It is absolutely going to stick, this one. Trump Always Chickens Out. He’s stuck with that now. (There’s also a writeup of what the “TACO Trade” is at Business Insider.)
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Getty CEO: Stability AI lawsuit doesn’t cover industry mass theft • CNBC
Ryan Browne:
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Getty Images is spending millions of dollars to take on a “world of rhetoric” through its Stability AI suit, the photo licensing company’s boss Craig Peters says.
Peters told CNBC in an interview that both Stability AI — the U.K.-based startup best known for its text-to-image model Stable Diffusion — and other AI labs are stealing copyright-protected material to train their AI models for commercial gain.
These firms, he said, are taking copyrighted material to develop their powerful AI models under the guise of innovation and then “just turning those services right back on existing commercial markets.”
“That’s disruption under the notion of ‘move fast and break things,’ and we believe that’s unfair competition,” Peters added. “We’re not against competition. There’s constant new competition coming in all the time from new technologies or just new companies. But that’s just unfair competition, that’s theft.” Peters said the AI industry is making the argument that if developers are forced to pay for access to creative works, this will “kill innovation.”
“We’re battling a world of rhetoric,” the CEO told CNBC.
Getty is suing Stability AI in both the U.K. and U.S. over allegations that the company copied 12 million images without permission or compensation “to benefit Stability AI’s commercial interests and to the detriment of the content creators.” Stability AI has contested the legal action, saying it doesn’t consider Getty’s claims to have merit.
…Part of the reason Getty Images is pursuing legal action specifically against Stability AI and not other firms is because such legal pursuits are “extraordinarily expensive,” Peters added. “Even for a company like Getty Images, we can’t pursue all the infringements that happen in one week.”
“We can’t pursue it because the courts are just prohibitively expensive,” he said. “We are spending millions and millions of dollars in one court case.”
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Generative AI’s adoption puzzle • Benedict Evans
Evans points to the data showing that chatbots’ “weekly active” users are about far bigger than their “daily active” users in the US:
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Something between 5% and 15% of [all] people are finding a use for this every day, but at least twice as many people are familiar with it, and know how it works, and know how to use it… and yet only find it useful once a week. Again, you didn’t have to buy a thousand dollar device, so you’re not committed – but if this is THE THING – why do most people shrug?
It’s also worth noting that when social media was a new thing we quickly realised that ‘weekly active’ and ‘monthly active’ numbers were bullshit. If someone was only using WhatsApp or Instagram once a month, it really wasn’t working for them. DAU is everything. Sam Altman knows this – he was trying to build a social media app at the time, and yet the traction number he always gives is, well, ‘weekly active users’. That’s a big number (the latest is 1bn globally)… but then, why is he giving us that number instead of DAUs? If you’re only using ChatGPT once a week, is it really working for you?
It might be that this gap is just a matter of time: the models will mature, people will break old habits and form new ones, and the WAUs and the ‘looked once six months ago’ cohorts will convert to DAUS. The S-Curve will curve upwards. But it might also be that we’re in the part of the S-Curve that came before the iPhone: the latent possibility is there, it all seems to be working and we can all see it’s going to be huge, but we need something to crystallise. So, this might be a time problem, or it might be a product problem. Paging Jony Ive?
It might also be that the chatbot as chatbot is the right UX only for some people and some use-cases, and most people will experience this technology as features and capabilities wrapped inside other things. I don’t think we can know that.
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Put that together with Getty’s spending on legal fees and you have to wonder whether this is all really paying back.
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‘Catastrophe’: one person missing after Swiss glacier collapse destroys village • The Guardian
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A huge section of a glacier in the Swiss Alps has broken off, causing a deluge of ice, mud and rock to bury most of a village evacuated earlier this month due to the risk of a rockslide.
Drone footage broadcast by Swiss national broadcaster SRF showed a vast plain of mud and soil completely covering part of the village of Blatten, the river running through it and the wooded sides of the surrounding valley.
“What I can tell you at the moment is that about 90% of the village is covered or destroyed, so it’s a major catastrophe that has happened here in Blatten,” Stephane Ganzer, the head of security in the southern Valais region, told local TV channel Canal9.
The regional government said in a statement that a large chunk of the Birch Glacier located above the village had broken off, causing the landslide which as well as covering the village had also buried the nearby Lonza riverbed, raising the possibility of dammed water flows.
“There’s a risk that the situation could get worse,” Ganzer said.
“We’ve lost our village,” Matthias Bellwald, the mayor of Blatten told a press conference after the slide. “The village is under rubble. We will rebuild.”
Matthias Ebener, a spokesperson for local authorities in the southwestern canton of Valais, said one person was missing, adding: “An unbelievable amount of material thundered down into the valley.”
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There have been lots of videos showing this happening – and you know the glacier will never come back. Global warming is a ratchet.
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Congestion Charge to hike 20% with revised EV discounts in shake-up plans • Fleet News
Natalie Middleton:
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Transport for London (TfL) is planning a major shake-up of the Congestion Charge with a steep rise in the daily charge and revised rules for electric cars and vans from 2026.
The proposals, set out in a new public consultation and effective from January 2026, include a 20% hike in the daily charge from £15 to £18; marking the first increase in five years.
TfL is also consulting on some proposed changes to the Mayor’s road user charging guidance, which would allow the Congestion Charge to increase each year in line with Tube fares, inflation plus 1%, or a lower amount. These increases would only apply to the Congestion Charge and not the ULEZ, and are intended to ensure that public transport does not become proportionately more expensive than driving in central London.
There’s also big changes for electric vehicles – including proposals for a new Cleaner Vehicle Discount (CVD), replacing the scheme that ends on 25 December 2025. Currently, electric vehicles are entitled to a 100% discount under the CVD, subject to registration with TfL.
Transport for London has previously said that ending the CVD from 25 December 2025 would maintain the effectiveness of the Congestion Charge, but has now proposed new rules, set out in two phases.
From 2 January 2026, electric vans, HGVs, light quadricycles and heavy quadricycles registered for Auto Pay will get a 50% discount, while electric cars registered for Auto Pay will get 25%.
From 4 March 2030, these fall to 25% and 12.5% respectively.
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The shift for EVs from 100% – basically, you can drive into the congestion charge zone and pay nothing – to 50% or 25% is going to be quite dramatic. It will take a lot of the benefit of buying EVs, which are a bigger capital layout, away for those living in London.
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A fungus that can ‘eat you from the inside out’ could spread as the world heats up • CNN
Laura Paddison:
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Infection-causing fungi responsible for millions of deaths a year will spread significantly to new regions as the planet heats up, new research predicts — and the world is not prepared.
Fungi are absolutely everywhere. A vast kingdom of organisms, from mold to mushrooms, they grow in environments such as soil, compost and water. They play an important role in ecosystems but can have a devastating impact on human health: Fungal infections kill an estimated 2.5 million people a year, and a lack of data means that number could be far higher.
Yet we are still very far from understanding them, especially how these incredibly adaptable organisms will respond to a warming climate.
A team of scientists from Manchester University used computer simulations and forecasts to map the potential future spread of Aspergillus, a common group of fungi found all over the world that can cause aspergillosis, a life-threatening disease primarily affecting the lungs.
They found certain Aspergillus species will expand their range as the climate crisis intensifies, pushing into new parts of North America, Europe, China and Russia. The study, published this month, is currently being peer reviewed.
“Fungi are relatively under-researched compared to viruses and parasites, but these maps show that fungal pathogens will likely impact most areas of the world in the future,” said Norman van Rijn, one of the study’s authors and a climate change and infectious diseases researcher at the University of Manchester.
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It would be great if people would stop trying to make The Last Of Us happen, or even predicting it.
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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 
it takes about a day to assemble a plex/usenet/sonarr/radarr setup, after which point you’ll never again struggle to find any show or movie you’re looking for. Piracy isn’t simply cheaper than paid streaming — it’s an impossibly better experience in every way, free of dark patterns and algorithms. My conscience is completely clear because those apps did this to themselves.