What happens if you put an LLM in charge of running a vending machine, including pricing and restocking? CC-licensed photo by travel oriented on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Sorry, last one’s gone. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Project Vend: can Claude run a small shop? (And why does that matter?) • Anthropic

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Anthropic partnered with Andon Labs, an AI safety evaluation company, to have Claude Sonnet 3.7 operate a small, automated store in the Anthropic office in San Francisco.

…far from being just a vending machine, Claude had to complete many of the far more complex tasks associated with running a profitable shop: maintaining the inventory, setting prices, avoiding bankruptcy, and so on. Below is what the “shop” looked like: a small refrigerator, some stackable baskets on top, and an iPad for self-checkout.

The shopkeeping AI agent—nicknamed “Claudius” for no particular reason other than to distinguish it from more normal uses of Claude—was an instance of Claude Sonnet 3.7, running for a long period of time. It had the following tools and abilities:

• A real web search tool for researching products to sell
• An email tool for requesting physical labor help (Andon Labs employees would periodically come to the Anthropic office to restock the shop) and contacting wholesalers (for the purposes of the experiment, Andon Labs served as the wholesaler, although this was not made apparent to the AI). Note that this tool couldn’t send real emails, and was created for the purposes of the experiment
• Tools for keeping notes and preserving important information to be checked later—for example, the current balances and projected cash flow of the shop (this was necessary because the full history of the running of the shop would overwhelm the “context window” that determines what information an LLM can process at any given time)
• The ability to interact with its customers (in this case, Anthropic employees). This interaction occurred over the team communication platform Slack. It allowed people to inquire about items of interest and notify Claudius of delays or other issues
• The ability to change prices on the automated checkout system at the store.

Claudius decided what to stock, how to price its inventory, when to restock (or stop selling) items, and how to reply to customers (see Figure 2 for a depiction of the setup). In particular, Claudius was told that it did not have to focus only on traditional in-office snacks and beverages and could feel free to expand to more unusual items.

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Ah, but did it work? Can an LLM take over the business of running a shop? You’ll have to read the article, but let us note that there is a sentence which reads “On the afternoon of March 31st, Claudius hallucinated a conversation about restocking plans with someone named Sarah at Andon Labs—despite there being no such person.” Fun ensues.
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Why the AI revolution needs tollbooths • Crazy Stupid Tech

Fred Vogelstein:

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[Olivia] Joslin, who is 29, was seeing this [enormous wave of AI crawlers hitting websites] happen from the perspective of an AI company doing the crawling, Fairmarkit,. [Toshit] Panigrahi, who is also 29, was seeing it as the head of ads for Toast, the restaurant point of sale company where they’d both worked early in their careers. 

“It felt like we were seeing two sides of the same problem,” Joslin said. It also seemed like there wasn’t yet a good solution. The web wasn’t set up to easily compensate news and information websites for this new structural shift, they said. 

So they created Tollbit. It’s literally an online tollbooth. You sign up. You decide how much, if anything, to charge AI bots to crawl your website. And the next time they show up to crawl they get routed to Tollbit’s subdomain and hit with a paywall. Publishers can choose different prices for crawls to generate article summaries and for displaying the article’s full text. And it allows publishers to exclude some website data entirely. 

“It felt like we were back in the Napster days for the music industry and that maybe we could supply a Spotify-like solution – a recurring revenue model for the publishing industry,” Joslin said. 

Since then – just 18 months – Tollbit, has become one of the most talked about new ventures in the tech/media startup community. More than 2000 publications now use Tollbit’s system including Time, Newsweek,  AdWeek and the Associated Press. That list also includes publications owned by Penske Media, like Rolling Stone; publications owned by Mansueto Ventures, like Inc and Fast Company; publications owned by Lee Enterprises, which includes almost 80 newspapers; and publications owned by Hearst, which include 27 magazines like Elle and 30 newspapers including the San Francisco Chronicle. 

Tollbit processed more than 15 million transactions in the first quarter of this year, up from 5 million in the fourth quarter 2024. That volume is likely to be even higher when second quarter volumes are tallied.  It’s grown just past 20 employees. And it’s raised $31m in two rounds from Lightspeed Venture Partners; Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist and cofounder of Google Brain; and Bill Maris, who started Google Ventures and is now the founding partner of S32.

…Online tolls is such a new business that it’s too soon to predict how meaningful first mover advantage will be. But we’re about to find out how much it matters. Cloudflare, the $60bn content delivery network and cybersecurity giant, is gearing up to launch its own online tollboth on July 1, according to someone who has seen a draft of the press release.

That could quickly disintermediate Tollbit. But it could just as easily be the best thing to happen to the company. The market for online tolls is only as big as the AI companies allow it to be. They’re the ones paying the tolls. And it should be no surprise that right now they are dragging their feet. Cloudflare has the leverage to force more of them to sign on to this concept. That would expand transaction volumes for all players, including Tollbit.

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EU lawmakers vote to bar carry-on luggage fees on planes • France24

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The European Parliament’s transport committee adopted a proposal that would allow travellers to bring a personal item into the cabin, such as a handbag or backpack, and a hand luggage of up to 7kg (15lb) at no extra fee.

The measure sought to spare passengers “unjustified extra costs”, said Matteo Ricci, a centre-left lawmaker and bill’s lead sponsor.

Many low-cost air carriers include only one small on-board item in the ticket, charging extra for other hand baggage.

Airlines for Europe (A4E), an industry association, condemned the proposal, suggesting it would result in higher flight prices, upping costs for those who travel light.

“Forcing a mandatory trolley bag… obliges passengers to pay for services they may not want or need,” A4E managing director Ourania Georgoutsakou said ahead of the vote.

The measure, which would apply to all flights departing or arriving within the 27-nation European Union, was adopted as part of a package of amendments to passenger rights rules put forward by the European Commission.

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Don’t those who “travel light” travel light by having only carry-on luggage? Because hold luggage might be free (though that might vary?) but it’s slower. Nobody I can think of “travels light” by putting stuff in the hold. So the threat that prices will go up for that group is no threat at all – it will be swings and roundabouts.

But we see you, airlines, and your money-grabbing ways. (The proposals aren’t finalised; they have to go to the Parliament.)
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How rogue jumping genes can spur Alzheimer’s, ALS • Knowable Magazine

Amber Dance:

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Back in 2008, neurovirologist Renée Douville observed something weird in the brains of people who’d died of the movement disorder ALS: virus proteins.

But these people hadn’t caught any known virus.

Instead, ancient genes originally from viruses, and still lurking within these patients’ chromosomes, had awakened and started churning out viral proteins.

Our genomes are littered with scraps of long-lost viruses, the descendants of viral infections often from millions of years ago. Most of these once-foreign DNA bits are a type called retrotransposons; they make up more than 40% of the human genome.

Our genomes are riddled with DNA from ancient viral infections known as jumping genes. The majority of these are retrotransposons, which copy themselves via RNA intermediates; a smaller portion are cut-and-paste DNA transposons.
Many retrotransposons seem to be harmless, most of the time. But Douville and others are pursuing the possibility that some reawakened retrotransposons may do serious damage: They can degrade nerve cells and fire up inflammation and may underlie some instances of Alzheimer’s disease and ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease).

The theory linking retrotransposons to neurodegenerative diseases — conditions in which nerve cells decline or die — is still developing; even its proponents, while optimistic, are cautious. “It’s not yet the consensus view,” says Josh Dubnau, a neurobiologist at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University in New York. And retrotransposons can’t explain all cases of neurodegeneration.

Yet evidence is building that they may underlie some cases. Now, after more than a decade of studying this possibility in human brain tissue, fruit flies and mice, researchers are putting their ideas to the ultimate test: clinical trials in people with ALS, Alzheimer’s and related conditions. These trials, which borrow antiretroviral medications from the HIV pharmacopeia, have yielded preliminary but promising results.

Meanwhile, scientists are still exploring how a viral reawakening becomes full-blown disease, a process that may be marked by what Dubnau and others call a “retrotransposon storm.”

A retrotransposon is a kind of “jumping gene.” These pieces of DNA can (or once could) move around in the genome by either copying or removing themselves from one spot and then pasting themselves into a new spot. Retrotransposons are copy-and-pasters.

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You’ll learn a lot (that you maybe didn’t expect to learn!) in this piece. The hypothesis is very interesting.
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Luke Littler may be darts’ first global superstar • The New York Times

Oliver Whang:

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As [18-year-old Luke] Littler warmed up, noise swirling around the arena, it was hard to overlook how much he still resembled the 18-month-old in the video: his body composed, his arm flashing to his side after a throw, his eye turning automatically toward the camera.

At the front of the stadium floor, near the stage, a cluster of teenagers and children wearing darts jerseys looked out of place in the rowdy atmosphere. It was a scene you didn’t see a year and a half ago. Across Britain, the allure of Littler’s success has inspired youngsters to join darts clubs in the hopes of following in his footsteps — what many people are calling the “Luke Littler effect.” Within the crowd were a father and son, the former dressed in a skintight Robin suit and the latter like Batman. The father told me that tickets to the event were the boy’s Christmas present. “If it wasn’t for Littler, no one would be here,” he said, gesturing at the children around him. “This was known as an old-man social club.”

A man in front of us turned and nodded. “He joined the darts league last year because of Littler,” he said, putting a hand on his son’s shoulder. “There’s now a waiting list of 50 or 60 for that league.”

Littler’s first six darts were perfectly placed, the crowd roaring in approval, and he swept aside [world No.6 Stephen] Bunting in less than 11 minutes. “It’s like he can do it when he fancies,” Wayne Mardle, a darts commentator said, a note of awe creeping into his voice. “Obviously you can’t, because it’s not that simple. But it’s like he can.”

The first father adjusted his tights. “He’s like Messi,” he said. “But Messi was then, Littler is now.”

I met Littler in early April, a week after the Newcastle event. He was in Berlin for the next Premier League competition, and we spoke in the back of the Uber Arena, which was sold out. Onstage, Littler is confident, often needling spectators when they root against him, but in person he comes off as the teenager of stereotype. It was a designated media day for the P.D.C., and Littler had hours of back-to-back interviews with German television channels and international outlets. When he entered the room — bare white walls, fluorescently lit — he looked around and, not seeing any cameras, shrugged and pulled out a nicotine vape. “Why not,” he said, sucking at it.

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Whang realises that there’s no way for Littler to articulate how he does it, in the same way that tennis pros can’t tell you how they hit a shot perfectly, because it’s below their threshold of consciousness; they just will it, and it happens. The problems start when it doesn’t happen. So far, that is not a problem Littler has.
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The power and the glory of profanity • Financial Times

Jemima Kelly:

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“You can really assert your dominance by swearing, especially when you’ve got the licence to swear but other people don’t have,” Michael Adams, professor of English language and literature at Indiana University and author of In Praise of Profanity, tells me. “It’s like [Trump’s] use of nicknames — he can only be addressed as Mr President, so it sets up this kind of imbalance of power.”

Other world leaders could in theory, of course, follow Trump by indulging in a good bit of expletive uttering of their own. But it is not easy to think of many who would dare. And even if they did, it might not land: part of the reason Trump can get away with it is that it doesn’t feel like a deviation from his behind-the-scenes vernacular. He doesn’t look awkward when he swears. Much as he might try to put on presidential and “elegant” airs, and despite being born into privilege, Trump is at his core a brash, wheeler-dealer, anything-goes New Yorker. 

He is also a man who knows what’s good for him: swearing provides genuine relief from stress, anger and even physical pain, according to research. In one study from 2020, psychologists at Keele University asked volunteers to repeat the F-word while submerging their hands in ice-cold water, and found that pain tolerance in those participants who did so increased by 33%. Those who repeated the made-up word “fouch”, meanwhile, registered no higher pain threshold. Somehow, uttering obscenities constitutes enough taboo-breaking that it triggers an aggressive fight-or-flight mode in the body, elevating the heart rate and leading to a soothing, pain-numbing effect.

All Trump really wants is the Nobel effing Peace Prize but it seems like others are just not willing to co-operate. So you can understand the man’s frustration. As Capitaine Haddock might say, Mille millions de mille sabords! Excuse my French.

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That Keele study is quite peculiar, but maybe there is something in the taboo-breaking being an effective diversion.
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Scatted Spider cybercriminal gang starts hacking aviation and transportation sectors • Axios

Sam Sabin:

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The notorious Scattered Spider hacking gang is now actively targeting the aviation and transportation sectors, cybersecurity firms warned on Friday.

The group of mostly Western, English-speaking hackers has been on a months-long spree that’s prompted operational disruptions at grocery suppliers, major retail storefronts and insurance companies in the US and UK.

Hawaiian Airlines said Thursday it’s addressing a “cybersecurity incident” that affected some of its IT systems.

Canadian airline WestJet faced a similar incident last week that caused outages for some of its systems and mobile app.
A source familiar with the incidents told Axios that Scattered Spider was likely behind the WestJet incident.

Josh Yeats, a WestJet spokesperson, told Axios that the company has made “significant progress” to resolve the incident, but did not answer questions about Scattered Spider’s possible involvement.

Charles Carmakal, the chief technology officer at Google’s Mandiant Consulting, said in an emailed statement that the company is “aware of multiple incidents in the airline and transportation sector which resemble the operations of UNC3944 or Scattered Spider.”

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Back in 2018 British Airways was hit hard by hackers who diverted credit card data off payment pages. This is potentially worse, though: if an airline’s systems get hit by ransomware, things could be very bad.
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How serious is Google’s ChatGPT problem? • Exponential View

Azeem Azhar:

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Two years ago, I argued that Alphabet, which owns Google, faced a “GPT Tidal Wave” because “the start page of the Internet is shifting further from the browser and Google.com, replacing dozens or more Web searches each day. ChatGPT is preferable to open multiple tabs from a Google search and continuously backtracking.”

I’m an early adopter. Early adopters are either canaries in the coal mine or we’re wrong. Two years on, the data are starting to suggest we’re right. Slides from the investment firm Coatue circulated last week, showing what many of us sense anecdotally: once you adopt ChatGPT, you use Google less.

Across a still-short observation window, heavy ChatGPT users have cut Google’s page views by about 8% a year. That may feel mild, yet if the 800 million ChatGPT users today grow—plausibly—to three billion within three years, and if the search deficit holds, Google’s core business could shrink by a fifth, lopping tens of billions of dollars off annual revenue.

In truth, that is the bullish scenario for Google. ChatGPT is fast becoming the generic verb for “finding stuff,” and its advantage widens on difficult queries—which may be the very ones that anchor Google’s pricing power. The products will only get better at serving users’ needs, so that 8% figure could rise.

Fresh data from Britain’s competition watchdog, the CMA, reinforce the picture. For long-form questions, 17% of Britons already default to ChatGPT; they still turn to Google for simple, local, “tree-surgeon-near-me” look-ups. We do not yet know where the money lies—complex, ad-light queries or transactional, ad-heavy ones—but user behavior rarely plateaus.

I’ve highlighted a couple of important factors in yellow [on the graph in the post]. Once someone becomes an “AI user,” AI starts to eat into complex and shopping queries.

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I can’t access all the post because it’s paywalled, but even this part at the start is dramatic enough.
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More assorted notes on Liquid Glass • Riccardo Mori

Riccardo pours himself a Peroni and considers what, if anything, has improved:

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Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to make sense of Apple’s latest user-interface redesign — Apple calls it Liquid Glass — that will affect all their platforms in the next iteration of their respective OS versions. But it’s hard to make sense of it when, after checking Apple’s own guidance, I’m mostly left with the feeling that at Apple they’re making things up as they go.

If you’ve been following me on Mastodon, you’ll be already familiar with a lot of what follows. I just wanted to gather my posts there in a more organic piece here.

Let’s start with a few notes on Adopting Liquid Glass, part of the Technology Overviews Apple has made available on their Developer site.

[After a section on “Organisation and Layout] …Which is largely unnecessary. It reduces the amount of information displayed on screen, and you’ll have to scroll more as a consequence. Look at the Before and After layouts: the Before layout doesn’t need solutions to increase its clarity. You’re just injecting white space everywhere. It’s also ironic that where more space and ‘breathing room’ are actually necessary, the header (“Single Table Row” in the figure) is pushed even nearer to the status bar.

And don’t get me started on those redesigned, stretched-out switches. They’re the essence of ‘change for change’s sake’.

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It’s a long post, but as with the previous one, worth reading. The whole thing about Liquid Glass is that it’s the ultimate “change for change’s sake”. There was nothing wrong, per se, with the current Apple interface. But it didn’t have that marketing zhush. So everything gets torn up and made incomprehensible in the name of “different”.

I do remember when Steve Jobs introduced Aqua in 2000 (which then became a beta in 2001): the interface was surprising, but you could also do things with it that you couldn’t with the older Mac interface. (The column interface for file navigation in particular.) This… not so much. If “design is how it works, not how it looks”, this is badly designed.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

After 40 years, the Blue Screen of Death on Microsoft Windows is going away – to be replaced by a Black Screen of Death. CC-licensed photo by hdaniel on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

It’s Friday, but there’s no new post at the Social Warming Substack. Perhaps next week?

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

BBC website adds paywall for US users, details subscription prices • Variety

Todd Spangler:

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Online news and programming from the UK’s biggest broadcaster will carry a price for some American fans. BBC Studios and BBC News have launched the “first phase” of a pay model for BBC.com in the US.

US users of BBC.com who choose not to pay will still have access to “select global breaking news stories,” as well as BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service radio livestreams, BBC World Service Languages sites, and a variety of free newsletters and podcasts, the BBC said.

In the initial phase of the BBC’s paywall launch, the subscription will cost $8.99 per month or $49.99 per year. US users who sign for a subscription will get unlimited access to the BBC’s news articles, feature stories and the 24-7 livestream of the BBC News channel. In the coming months “as we test and learn from audience consumption,” the BBC said, ad-free documentary series and films (including the full BBC Select documentary catalogue), ad-free and early release podcasts, and exclusive newsletters and content will be included in the offer.

For those in the UK, there will be no change to the services. All the content available on BBC.com is also available to UK audiences through the BBC’s various channels and services. The BBC also has no current plans to introduce a pay model for the website outside of North America.

Several major US-based news outlets also have paywalls, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. CNN installed a paywall last fall for its website, with heavier users prompted to pay $3.99 per month for access.

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It’s quite a radical move, which had been trailed a fortnight ago. This is going to be quite a test, though the annual subscription is pretty good.
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As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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Google’s AI search features are killing traffic to publishers, so now the company is proposing a possible solution. On Thursday, the tech giant officially launched Offerwall, a new tool that allows publishers to generate revenue beyond the more traffic-dependent options, like ads.

Offerwall lets publishers give their sites’ readers a variety of ways to access their content, including through options like micropayments, taking surveys, watching ads, and more. In addition, Google says that publishers can add their own options to the Offerwall, like signing up for newsletters.

The new feature is available for free in Google Ad Manager after earlier tests with 1,000 publishers that spanned over a year.

Google notes that it’s also using AI to determine when to display the Offerwall to each site visitor to increase engagement and revenue. However, publishers can set their own thresholds before the Offerwall is displayed, if they prefer.

Many of the solutions Offerwall introduces have been tried by publishers before, across a range of products and services. Micropayments, for instance, have repeatedly failed to take off. The economics don’t tend to work, and there’s additional friction in having to pay per article that’s not been worth the payoff for readers or publishers alike, given implementation and maintenance costs.

A Twitter-like social networking startup called Post, backed by a16z, most recently tried to make micropayments work for publishers, but it ultimately shut down due to a lack of traction.

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Wonder if Google can make it work? Of course this will tie publishers more tightly again to Google.
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Fears over weight-loss jabs after ten deaths from pancreatitis • The Times

Harry Goodwin:

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Ten patients have died in the UK after suffering pancreatitis as a side-effect of obesity jabs, the medicines watchdog has said.

Hundreds of people have reported inflammation of the pancreas after injecting weight-loss drugs.

Regulators are now investigating whether genetic factors puts some patients at greater risk of side-effects from jabs like Mounjaro, Wegovy and Ozempic.

The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said it had received more than 560 reports of patients developing an inflamed pancreas since the GLP-1 agonists were launched. It noted that ten of the patients died.

GLP-1 agonists, which suppress patients’ appetites, are frequently used for weight loss. Some are primarily licensed for the treatment of type 2 diabetes.

The MHRA is calling for patients admitted to hospital with pancreatitis to report the illness to the authorities through its Yellow Card scheme. Patients who file a report are asked to take part in a new MHRA study of the drugs. Healthcare workers can also file a report on patients’ behalf.

The study is part of the UK Biobank medical research project, which the MHRA is carrying out jointly with Genomics England. Patients will be asked to give more information and to submit a saliva sample, which will be used to test whether genetics put some people at a higher risk of acute pancreatitis when they take obesity jabs.

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Pancreatitis seems to be a potential side-effect, particularly in self-prescribed use.
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Renewables soar, but fossil fuels continue to rise as global electricity demand hits record levels • Energy Institute

Energy Institute:

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In a year when average air temperatures consistently breached the 1.5°C warming threshold, global CO₂-equivalent emissions from energy rose by 1%, marking yet another record, the fourth in as many years.

Wind and solar energy alone expanded by an impressive 16% in 2024, nine times faster than total energy demand. Yet this growth did not fully counterbalance rising demand elsewhere, with total fossil fuel use growing by just over 1%, highlighting a transition defined as much by disorder as by progress.

Crude oil demand in OECD countries remained flat, following a slight decline in the previous year. In contrast, non-OECD countries, where much of the world’s energy demand growth is concentrated and fossil fuels continue to play a dominant role, saw oil demand rise by 1%. Notably, Chinese crude oil demand fell in 2024 by 1.2%, indicating that 2023 may have reached a peak. Elsewhere, global natural gas demand rebounded, rising by 2.5% as gas markets rebalanced after the 2023 slump. India’s demand for coal rose 4% in 2024 and now equals that of the CIS, Southern and Central America, North America, and Europe combined.

These trends underscore a stark truth: while renewable energy is scaling faster than ever, global demand is rising even faster. Rather than replacing fossil fuels, renewables are adding to the overall energy mix. This pattern, marked by simultaneous growth in clean and conventional energy illustrates the structural, economic, and geopolitical barriers to achieving a truly coordinated global energy transition.

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Encouraging perhaps that the growth in fossil fuel use was small? Though they don’t seem to have made that comparison in the past, so we can’t know.
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Windows is getting rid of the Blue Screen of Death after 40 years • The Verge

Tom Warren:

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The Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) has held strong in Windows for nearly 40 years, but that’s about to change. Microsoft revealed earlier this year that it was overhauling its BSOD error message in Windows 11, and the company has now confirmed that it will soon be known as the Black Screen of Death. The new design drops the traditional blue color, frowning face, and QR code in favor of a simplified black screen.

The simplified BSOD looks a lot more like the black screen you’d see during a Windows update. But it will list the stop code and faulty system driver that you wouldn’t always see during a crash dump. IT admins shouldn’t need to pull crash dumps off PCs and analyze them with tools like WinDbg just to find out what could be causing issues.

“This is really an attempt on clarity and providing better information and allowing us and customers to really get to what the core of the issue is so we can fix it faster,” says David Weston, vice president of enterprise and OS security at Microsoft, in an interview with The Verge. “Part of it just cleaner information on what exactly went wrong, where it’s Windows versus a component.”

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Between this and Apple changing the Finder icon for the next macOS update (they’ve switched the colours back but it’s still not satisfactory), it seems to be “throw all that stuff out for no reason” season.
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Faith not enough as Kipyegon misses four-minute mile barrier by six seconds • The Guardian

Sean Ingle:

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Faith Kipyegon’s dream of following in Sir Roger Bannister’s long footsteps by becoming the first woman to shatter the four-minute barrier for the mile ended with her body soaked in lactic acid and defiance. And, crucially, with the stadium clock at Stade Charléty more than six seconds away from where she had hoped it would be.

The 31-year-old Kenyan arrived in Paris stacked with the latest weapons in track and field’s technological arms race. But having reached the bell in 3mins 1sec, just about on schedule, she found that physiology began to overpower technology.

There was a consolation of sorts as she finished in 4:06.42 – 1.22 faster than her world record. The new time will not count as she was being paced by men, which is against World Athletics rules.

“This was the first trial,” she said. “We are learning many lessons from this race. I will go back to the drawing board to get it right. And I think there is more in the tank.”

Before the race Kipyegon’s 13 pacemakers were introduced to the crowd – 11 men and two women. They included several Olympians, the indoor 5,000m world record-holder in the American Grant Fisher, and three Britons, Elliot Giles, Georgia Hunter Bell and Jemma Reekie.

Then it was Kipyegon’s turn, tiny at 5ft 2in, dressed all in black. There was a wave to the crowd, a short sprint to whirr the legs up to full speed. Then they were off, ready to tackle the 1,609 metres in front of them.

It was Giles who led the way, but to the untrained eye it looked as if he went off a little too fast as it took a while to settle into formation: six athletes in a line in front of Kipyegon, one alongside her, and six behind her. The idea was to allow her to draft and reduce wind resistance.

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Worth mentioning again that Bannister’s run was in 1954; the current men’s record is under 3:44; and this year a 15-year-old boy broke the four-minute barrier. If you ever needed evidence of the difference in physiology, this record is it. But equally I agree with James Smoliga, who writes:

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Kipyegon is already one of the greatest distance runners the history of track and field. She does not need to break four minutes to be seen as an inspiration or as a benchmark of women’s athletic potential. If we create unrealistic expectations, we risk turning an inspiring effort into a story of disappointment. We shouldn’t allow that to happen — not to her, or to women’s sport.

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iPhone users upset about Apple promoting F1 movie with Wallet app notification • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

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An unknown number of iPhone users in the U.S. today received the push notification, which promotes a limited-time Apple Pay discount that movie ticket company Fandango is offering on a pair of tickets to Apple’s new film “F1: The Movie.”

Some of the iPhone users who received the push notification have complained about it across the MacRumors Forums, Reddit, X, and other online discussion platforms.

“As far as I can tell, Apple is now just sending me ads to my screen now as push notifications, something I hate with an absolute passion and disable across the board in every app that tries this,” said one person who received the notification.

Some people are especially upset about receiving a push notification ad through the Wallet app because it is a very important app for personal finances, so simply turning off notifications for the entire app is not a feasible solution.

Worse, Apple seems to be ignoring the guidelines that apply to App Store apps. The company says push notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless users have explicitly opted in to receive them for said purposes.

The full text of Apple’s guideline:

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Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages.

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Apple did not immediately respond to our request for comment.

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F1 is reckoned to have cost, well, please let some people explain that it wasn’t as much as $300m. The reviews are better than lukewarm, but it still seems formulaic. Keep your eye on Box Office Mojo.

But also, this is desperately bad, advertising it to people who are just going to be annoyed by the advert. Whoever had this idea should be fired. And I don’t say that lightly. It’s just against what should be Apple’s ethos of devices you can trust, devices you’re in control of, and privacy.
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Melania Trump’s AI voice is the narrator on her audiobook memoir

Fernando Cervantes:

»

First lady Melania Trump is getting a little help with the release of the audiobook version of her memoir: artificial intelligence.

“I am honored to bring you Melania – The AI Audiobook – narrated entirely using artificial intelligence in my own voice,” Trump wrote in a post on X, along with a futuristic video. “Let the future of publishing begin.”

The English version of the book, titled “Melania,” has a runtime of seven hours and is for sale on the first lady’s personal website for $25. It’s available in other languages like Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, with “other languages coming soon,” according to ElevenLabs.

The first lady’s memoir was published back in October 2024 in the middle of the presidential election. The book covers everything from Melania Trump’s life in Cold War-era Yugoslavia to her marriage to President Donald Trump.

It received major media coverage in the days before its release, as Melania defended a woman’s right to choose in the book.
“It is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government,” she wrote.

Earlier this week, President Donald Trump signed into law the bipartisan Take it Down Act, outlawing and penalizing the publication of nonconsensual real and computer-generated images, known as “deep fakes” that are often used as revenge pornography.

The First Lady was in attendance at the signing and spoke on the potential dangers of artificial intelligence. “Artificial intelligence and social media are the digital candy for the next generation, sweet, addictive, and engineered to have an impact on the connectivity development of our children,” she said.

«

As someone remarked, even she didn’t want to read her book.
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OpenAI charges by the minute, so make the minutes shorter • George Mandis

George Mandis:

»

Want to make OpenAI transcriptions faster and cheaper? Just speed up your audio.

I mean that very literally. Run your audio through ffmpeg at 2x or 3x before transcribing it. You’ll spend fewer tokens and less time waiting with almost no drop in transcription quality.

That’s it!

…A former colleague of mine sent me this talk from Andrej Karpathy about how AI is changing software. I wasn’t familiar with Andrej, but saw he’d worked at Tesla. That coupled with the talk being part of a Y Combinator series and 40 minutes made me think “Ugh. Do I… really want to watch this? Another ‘AI is changing everything’ talk from the usual suspects, to the usual crowds?”

If ever there were a use-case for dumping something into an LLM to get the gist of it and walk away, this felt like it. I respected the person who sent it to me though and wanted to do the noble thing: use AI to summarize the thing for me, blindly trust it and engage with the person pretending I had watched it.

…At first I thought about trimming the audio to fit somehow, but there wasn’t an obvious 14 minutes to cut. Trimming the beginning and end would give me a minute or so at most.

An interesting, weird idea I thought about for a second but never tried was cutting a chunk or two out of the middle. Maybe I would somehow still have enough info for a relevant summary?

Then it crossed my mind—what if I just sped up the audio before sending it over? People listen to podcasts at accelerated 2x speeds all the time.

«

Apparently 2x is the limit; 4x is bonkers. My question is: what is the transcription engine doing? Is it playing the audio and somehow “listening” to it? Can’t be. So it’s processing the waveform. But in that case, why is 2x OK but 4x isn’t? I feel this story isn’t over yet.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

It’s been 71 years since a man broke the four-minute mile record. Tonight the first woman aims to do the same. CC-licensed photo by Owen Massey McKnight on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

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

A.I. is homogenizing our thoughts • The New Yorker

Kyle Chayka:

»

A.I. is a technology of averages: large language models are trained to spot patterns across vast tracts of data; the answers they produce tend toward consensus, both in the quality of the writing, which is often riddled with clichés and banalities, and in the calibre of the ideas. Other, older technologies have aided and perhaps enfeebled writers, of course—one could say the same about, say, SparkNotes or a computer keyboard. But with A.I. we’re so thoroughly able to outsource our thinking that it makes us more average, too.

In a way, anyone who deploys ChatGPT to compose a wedding toast or draw up a contract or write a college paper, as an astonishing number of students are evidently already doing, is in an experiment like M.I.T.’s. According to Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, we are on the verge of what he calls “the gentle singularity.” In a recent blog post with that title, Altman wrote that “ChatGPT is already more powerful than any human who has ever lived. Hundreds of millions of people rely on it every day and for increasingly important tasks.” In his telling, the human is merging with the machine, and his company’s artificial-intelligence tools are improving on the old, soggy system of using our organic brains: they “significantly amplify the output of people using them,” he wrote. But we don’t know the long-term consequences of mass A.I. adoption, and, if these early experiments are any indication, the amplified output that Altman foresees may come at a substantive cost to quality.

In April, researchers at Cornell published the results of another study that found evidence of A.I.-induced homogenization. Two groups of users, one American and one Indian, answered writing prompts that drew on aspects of their cultural backgrounds: “What is your favorite food and why?”; “Which is your favorite festival/holiday and how do you celebrate it?”

One subset of Indian and American participants used a ChatGPT-driven auto-complete tool, which fed them word suggestions whenever they paused, while another subset wrote unaided. The writings of the Indian and American participants who used A.I. “became more similar” to one another, the paper concluded, and more geared toward “Western norms.” A.I. users were most likely to answer that their favorite food was pizza (sushi came in second) and that their favorite holiday was Christmas.

Homogenization happened at a stylistic level, too. An A.I.-generated essay that described chicken biryani as a favorite food, for example, was likely to forgo mentioning specific ingredients such as nutmeg and lemon pickle and instead reference “rich flavors and spices.”

«

*sighs deeply* Though this is why I actually enjoy the earlier AI-generated videos which go into dreamlike combinations of ideas that one would never normally have: the connections they draw are the sort of leaps that sparks creativity.
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It’s the final countdown for Faith Kipyegon’s sub-four minute mile attempt • Outside Online

Alex Hutchinson:

»

How did Keely Hodgkinson, the reigning Olympic 800-meter champion, react when she first heard about Faith Kipyegon’s planned attempt to run a sub-four-minute mile? “Half between ‘Oh my god, that’s absolutely crazy’ and ‘Wow… what if?”

That pretty much sums up the feeling here in Paris with one day left before Kipyegon’s Breaking4 race. Hodgkinson is in town to host the livestream of the race, which will take place Thursday at 8pm Paris time, [7pm London time], 2pm Eastern Time. So are a bunch of other top runners, including Georgia Hunter Bell and Jemma Reekie, who have been rehearsing with Kipyegon for their role as pacemakers (more on that below). The goal, according to Reekie: not just getting the pace right, but making sure Kipyegon is comfortable, and even encouraging her as they run.

A few final thoughts before the big day:

I flew into Paris today from Toronto, which has been suffering through a brutal heatwave. I didn’t get much relief. It was 95ºF this afternoon when I went for a jog along the Seine, and the sun was hammering down mercilessly. The forecast for this evening at 8 P.M.—exactly 24 hours before the race is scheduled to go off—is still 82ºF. Tomorrow at 8pm is supposed to be marginally cooler, with a forecast of 79ºF.

…A few weeks ago, in my big round-up of the science of how Kipyegon will try to break four, I lamented that Nike was being cagey about its plan for pacemakers. They’re still not confirming the plan. They did put out a press release offering some hints. For example: “Disruptions can make the smoothness of drafting go haywire; the choice to switch in runners midway through a lap can create micro-undulations in the air frequency, disturbing Kipyegon’s speed.” That strongly suggests they’re going to enlist one set of pacemakers to go all the way, rather than trying to sub in fresh pacemakers halfway through the race.

«

A man first ran the sub-four-minute mile in 1954. In the intervening 71 years, exactly zero women have – so far. The record is 4:07:64, set by Kipyegon in July 2023. However those seven seconds represent about 40 metres; Kipyegon will have to run 3% faster the entire race – hence the talk of “drafting” by getting faster male runners to in effect pull her along in their slipstream.
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The Trump Phone no longer promises it’s made in America • The Verge

David Pierce:

»

the Trump Mobile website now includes what can only be described as vague, pro-American gestures in the direction of smartphone manufacturing. The T1’s new tagline is “Premium Performance. Proudly American.” Its website says the device is “designed with American values in mind” and there are “American hands behind every device.” Under Key Features, the first thing listed is “American-Proud Design.” None of this indicates, well, anything. It certainly doesn’t say the device is made in the USA, or even designed in the USA. There are just… some hands. In America.

«

The screen is also smaller and it’s unclear how much RAM it will have. And the shipping date has moved from “September” to “later this year”. It’s not quite TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) but it’s certainly a bit rubbish
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NYC’s upset election was drawn along an odd line: car ownership • Jalopnik

Amber Dasilva:

»

New York City held its primaries for November’s mayoral race yesterday, where New Yorkers delivered an upset: Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won out over disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo in the first round of voting. Mamdani was expected to either suffer a close loss overall or creep back from behind through successive ranked-choice rounds, depending on which poll you trust, but the 33-year-old never dipped below a 7% lead over his centrist opponent — an upset that even the Mamdani camp didn’t expect. Looking over the data shows an odd trend: Mamdani’s victory was built on the backs of people who don’t own cars. 

Aaron Kleinman, director of research for The States Project, identified the trend late last night on Bluesky. It’s the kind of thing that New York residents would almost immediately notice on a map of the five boroughs — Mamdani won in higher-density districts, Cuomo took less-dense areas — but the data backs up the vibes. The less time you spend in a car, the more likely it is you backed Zohran Mamdani.

On pure alignment, the breakdown makes sense. Mamdani doesn’t own a car, preferring to take transit or bike, while Cuomo famously owns a Dodge Charger Scat Pack Widebody that he operates with little regard for NYC driving laws. Each represents their own constituency with their modes of transport, but the differences go deeper than that. Mamdani ran a heavily pro-transit campaign, promising fast and free buses and an increase in bike lanes, while Cuomo wanted to flood the subway system with police — a move widely loathed and viewed as wasteful by the subway riders who see cops scrolling TikTok on the platforms every day.

«

Shocker as ordinary people vote for person who is simpatico with ordinary people. It’s exactly the same form of “upset” as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s election in 2018 when she defeated the Democratic incumbent because she actually got out and talked to people. Though we hear a lot about how much money political campaigns spend, it starts to look like being on the ground makes the real difference. Plus, of course, having a message that resonates.
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CareerBuilder + Monster, which once dominated online job boards, file for bankruptcy • Reuters

Jonathan Stempel:

»

CareerBuilder + Monster, which once dominated the online recruitment industry, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Tuesday and said it plans to sell its businesses.

Created through the September merger of CareerBuilder and Monster, the Chicago-based company said it agreed to sell its job board operations, its most recognizable business, to JobGet, which has an app for so-called gig workers.

CareerBuilder + Monster also agreed to sell its software services business for federal and state governments to Canadian software company Valsoft, and the military.com and fastweb.com websites to Canadian media company Valnet.

The buyers agreed to act as “stalking horse” bidders, with sales subject to better offers. Terms were not disclosed.
According to papers filed in Delaware bankruptcy court, CareerBuilder + Monster has $50m to $100m of assets, and $100m to $500m of debts.

The company is lining up $20m of financing to keep operating in bankruptcy.

In a statement, Chief Executive Jeff Furman said CareerBuilder + Monster has faced a “challenging and uncertain macroeconomic environment,” and a court-supervised sale process was the best way to maximize value and preserve jobs.

According to published reports, the company has struggled with competition from other job platforms, including aggregators and social media websites such as LinkedIn.

«

Amazing, really. They had a huge lead, and somehow managed to lose it. Perhaps the fact that LinkedIn tied a social network to it made a difference. I’d love to see a good examination of how Monster lost out in the jobs market.
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CCC: UK climate advisers now ‘more optimistic’ net-zero goals can be met – Carbon Brief

Carbon Brief Staff:

»

The UK government’s official climate advisers are now “more optimistic” that the country can hit its emissions targets than they were before the Labour government was elected in July 2024.

Speaking ahead of the launch of the Climate Change Committee’s 2025 progress report, Prof Piers Forster, the CCC’s interim chair, told journalists it would be “possible” to meet the UK’s 2030 international climate goal, as well as its 2050 target to cut emissions to net-zero.

Moreover, Forster responded to attacks on climate policy from opposition parties, the Conservatives and Reform UK, by saying that reaching net-zero would, “ultimately, be good for the UK economy”.

The CCC’s report points to progress in areas such as windfarm planning rules, plans for clean power by 2030 and the accelerating adoption of clean-energy technologies for heat and transport.

It says that 38% of the emissions cuts needed to hit the UK’s 2030 target are now backed by “credible” policies, up from 25% two years earlier.

However, it says “significant risks” remain – and its top recommendation is for government action to reduce electricity prices, which would support the electrification of heat, transport and industry.

This is the first progress report from the CCC to assess climate policy and action under the new Labour government, which took office in July 2024.

Last year’s edition had said that “urgent action is needed” and that the UK was “not on track” for its 2030 international climate goal, namely, a 68% reduction in emissions relative to 1990 levels.

In contrast, the 2025 report says: “This target is within reach, provided the government stays the course.”

«

This is good news! Not getting a lot of coverage, of course.
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Finding a 27-year-old easter egg in the Power Mac G3 ROM • Downtown Doug Brown

Doug Brown found a JPEG hidden in the 1998 machine’s ROM showing “The Team” – the people who worked on the machine. But how to get the image to display? After much spelunking..:

»

I got out my desktop G3, tested it out on real hardware, and sure enough, it worked! If you want to try it for yourself just like ^alex did, you can run Infinite Mac in your browser using this link, which sets up an emulated beige G3 running Mac OS 8.1 using DingusPPC. There’s a quirk that causes it to fail to resolve an alias at startup. I intentionally disabled it; just click Stop when the error pops up. Here are instructions:

• Enable the RAM Disk in the Memory control panel
• Choose Restart from the Special menu
• After the desktop comes back up, select the RAM Disk icon
• Choose Erase Disk from the Special menu
• Type the secret ROM image text exactly as depicted above
• Click Erase.

When you open the newly-formatted RAM disk, you should see a file named “The Team”:

If you double-click the file, SimpleText will open it.

«

And voila! The Team. My question: if something has to be hidden that deep, was the intention ever to display it? Was it something The Team members could do to delight people? The depth of the subterfuge makes sense, though: Steve Jobs was very much against people’s names or identities being attached to their work at Apple because he was concerned about them being poached. (Though it also had the benefit of making them replaceable.)
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Google could be forced to change UK search as watchdog takes steps • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

»

Google could be forced to make a series of changes to its search business, including giving internet users an option to choose an alternative service, after the UK competition watchdog proposed tightening regulation of the company.

The Competition and Market Authority is preparing to give the world’s largest search engine the designation “strategic market status”, a term for tech companies deemed to have considerable market heft that enables the watchdog to use extra powers to regulate them.

Google, which is owned by the US tech group Alphabet, accounts for more than 90% of search queries in Britain.

The CMA said it was minded to introduce bespoke regulatory measures for Google, including giving users “choice screens” to help them switch between search services, ensuring fair ranking of search results, and providing more control for publishers over how their content is used, including in AI-generated responses.

If the CMA confirms its decision in October, Google will be the first company designated since the regulator gained new powers this year. The CMA will then consult on the first wave of bespoke measures.

One option for the “choice screens” would be to include new AI-powered rivals in the search space, such as Perplexity and ChatGPT.

«

The proposal is essentially to loosen Google’s grip on search, AI results and search advertising. Quite the collection.
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16 billion passwords leaked, risking Facebook, Google, Apple users • Rest of World

Damilare Dosunmu:

»

A recent data breach of about 16 billion login credentials is said to have put users of Facebook, Instagram, Google, and Apple at risk of fraud and identity theft.

The stolen records, scattered across 30 databases, are a “blueprint for mass exploitation” that threatens users in developing nations, according to a June 18 report by CyberNews, whose researchers found the breach. Unlike traditional database hacks, this leak originated from malware that infiltrates devices only when users download corrupted files, then targets people with poor password habits.

Developing countries face the greatest risk from this breach due to rapid digital adoption coupled with inadequate cybersecurity infrastructure, experts said. The vulnerability is particularly acute in Asia and Latin America, which represent the largest user bases for many affected platforms.

“Breaches like this can cause serious damage in Africa and Asia, especially emerging economies like India, Brazil, Nigeria, and Indonesia,” Salman Waris, founder of UAE-based cybersecurity consultancy TechLegis, told Rest of World. “Since digital growth is rapid but security is lagging, the risk of fraud and cybercrime spikes for millions.”

«

Since the precise details of a lot of this hasn’t been well reported, it’s worth noting that the passwords are all encrypted, so the question becomes how well they’re salted/hashed. In time some of the databases will be cracked, but that won’t be all of them.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster from a damaged wing was blamed, in part, on PowerPoint. Will chatbots get the same blame for future calamities? CC-licensed photo by NASA on The Commons on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Sliding. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

‘The Mozart of the attention economy’: why MrBeast is the world’s biggest YouTube star • The Guardian

Mark O’Connell:

»

A couple of weeks ago, I had a drink with a friend who’d just got back from Alexandria, where he’d gone to get a complicated root canal situation seen to, at presumably a fraction of what it would have cost him at home. I mentioned I was writing about MrBeast, and my friend – whose dental status has since improved – told me he’d heard from a number of Egyptians that the country’s tourist trade was currently experiencing a significant upswing, and that that upswing could be accounted for by the release, a few months back, of I Spent 100 Hours Inside the Pyramids! (194m views thus far), in which Donaldson and his boys were granted unprecedented access to the deep interiors of the pyramids of Giza.

One obvious question to ask about all of this is why is MrBeast so successful? Another, less obvious, question is: what does his success say about the culture that gave rise to it? The first question is, in a sense, a fairly straightforward one to answer. MrBeast is successful because his videos are highly entertaining. I can personally vouch for this. I don’t imagine, being in my mid-40s (among other limiting demographic and cultural factors), that I’m anywhere close to the MrBeast target viewership, and yet I have consumed more than my fair share of his content, and have been steadily and straightforwardly entertained. Troubled by the general tenor and implications of that state of being entertained, yes, but entertained nonetheless.

[27-year-old Jimmy] Donaldson is not by any means one of God’s chosen entertainment-industry stars. He’s not especially handsome, and neither is he particularly funny-looking. At 6ft 5in, and with the sparse reddish beard he nowadays sports, he has the charmingly awkward aspect of a teen who has recently put on a growth spurt and hasn’t quite settled into himself. He’s likable, and is possessed of a goofy and anarchic sense of humour, but more in a guy-you-went-to-school-with sense than, say, the Eric André or the Jack Black sense. You definitely wouldn’t call him cool, either, and he’s certainly not edgy, but neither is he staid or offensively corny. My wife – who has, in passing, taken in a fair measure of MrBeast content over the time I have been working on this essay, consuming them in a manner roughly analogous to passive smoking – described Donaldson and his crew of sidekicks thus: “They just seem like good kids.”

«

I’ve never watched a single second of MrBeast content, but clearly lots and lots of people spend a lot longer on it.
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The Methaphone is a phone (that’s not a phone) to help you stop using your phone • WIRED

Arielle Pardes:

»

Earlier this year, Eric Antonow was in a coffee shop with his family when he felt the familiar, twitchy urge to reach for his phone. He patted his pockets for relief—the cool, thin slab was still there. He joked to his family that, like an addict jonesing for a hit, he would one day need a medical-grade solution to detox from his phone. Opioid addicts had methadone. iPhone addicts would need … methaphones.

“It was a joke, but I got two laughs from my two teenagers, which is gold,” Antonow says. “I was like, ‘I’m going to commit to the bit.’”

Antonow, a former marketing executive at Google and Facebook, has been committing to bits for half a decade, making what he calls “mindless toys.” His online shop features projects like a “listening switch” to indicate when one is paying attention, and a vinyl for silent meditation, with 20 minutes of recorded silence on each side (record player not required).

So within days of his latest joke, he had enlisted ChatGPT to mock up an image of a gadget in the shape of a phone, without all of the contents: a translucent rectangle that one could look at, or through. From that original generative sketch emerged a more realized design: a six-inch slab of clear acrylic with rounded corners, like the iPhone, and green edges that resembled glass. Antonow placed an order for samples, and started an Indiegogo campaign for the Methaphone: to “leave your phone without the cravings or withdrawal.”

«

Couldn’t he just.. not charge his phone?
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The dumbest phone is parenting genius • The Atlantic

Rheana Murray:

»

When Caron Morse’s nine-year-old daughter asked for a smartphone last year, her reaction, she told me, was unambiguous: “A hard ‘Hell no.’” Morse is a mental-health provider in the Portland, Maine, public-school system, and she was firmly against smartphones, having seen how social media and abundant screen time could shorten students’ attention spans and give them new anxieties. But she wanted her children to have some independence—to be able to call friends, arrange playdates, and reach out to their grandparents on their own. She also needed a break. “I was so sick,” she said, “of being the middle person in any correspondence.”

So when her daughter turned 10, Morse did get her a phone: a landline.

For that gift to provide all the benefits she wanted, Morse had to lay some groundwork. It would be annoying if her daughters—she also has an eight-year-old—were to start calling their friends’ parents’ smartphones all the time, so she told her neighbours about her plan and suggested that they consider getting landlines too. Several bought in immediately, excited for the opportunity to placate their own smartphone-eager kids. And over the next couple of months, Morse kept nudging people. She appealed to their sense of nostalgia by sharing photos of her older daughter sitting on the floor and twirling the landline’s cord around her fingers. She wrote messages: “Guys, this is adorable and working and important.”

The peer pressure paid off. Now about 15 to 20 families in their South Portland neighborhood have installed a landline. They’ve created a retro bubble in which their children can easily call their friends without bugging a parent to borrow their phone—and in which the parents, for now, can live blissfully free of anxieties about the downsides of smartphones.

«

Future pollsters are going to love this. People with landlines!
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Key fair use ruling clarifies when books can be used for AI training • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Artificial intelligence companies don’t need permission from authors to train their large language models (LLMs) on legally acquired books, US District Judge William Alsup ruled Monday.

The first-of-its-kind ruling that condones AI training as fair use will likely be viewed as a big win for AI companies, but it also notably put on notice all the AI companies that expect the same reasoning will apply to training on pirated copies of books—a question that remains unsettled.

In the specific case that Alsup is weighing—which pits book authors against Anthropic—Alsup found that “the purpose and character of using copyrighted works to train LLMs to generate new text was quintessentially transformative” and “necessary” to build world-class AI models.

Importantly, this case differs from other lawsuits where authors allege that AI models risk copying and distributing their work. Because authors suing Anthropic did not allege that any of Anthropic’s outputs reproduced their works or expressive style, Alsup found there was no threat that Anthropic’s text generator, Claude, might replace authors in their markets. And that lacking argument did tip the fair use analysis in favor of Anthropic.

“Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them—but to turn a hard corner and create something different,” Alsup wrote.

Alsup’s ruling surely disappointed authors, who instead argued that Claude’s reliance on their texts could generate competing summaries or alternative versions of their stories. The judge claimed these complaints were akin to arguing “that training schoolchildren to write well would result in an explosion of competing works.”

“This is not the kind of competitive or creative displacement that concerns the Copyright Act,” Alsup wrote. “The Act seeks to advance original works of authorship, not to protect authors against competition.”

Alsup noted that authors would be able to raise new claims if they found evidence of infringing Claude outputs. That could change the fair use calculus, as it might in a case where a judge recently suggested that Meta’s AI products might be “obliterating” authors’ markets for works.

«

Alsup is famous in tech legal cases for having overseen Oracle v Google, where Oracle claimed Android copied Java, and showing great understanding of programming. So this will be similarly strongly argued.
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What a set of knockoff headphones taught me about headphones — and knockoffs • The Verge

David Pierce:

»

I kept hearing that Picun headphones were roughly as good as the AirPods Max for a fraction of the price. A few TikToks I saw argue that you’re not the problem if you buy knockoffs — you’re the problem if you’re spending $500 more just to get a brand name. Some videos purport to perform scientific noise-canceling tests; others just hold up a pair of AirPods Max and then a pair of Picuns, as if the side-by-side proves the point.

All the sales-creators made it clear that I needed to buy these headphones now. Some videos spread a rumor that Apple was suing Picun over the design, so they might be off the market soon. (This is not the case, as far as I know — Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment.) Others continuously claim that the headphones are about to be taken off the TikTok Shop; I’ve been seeing that for weeks, and they’re still for sale.

I don’t believe any of it! And yet, after a few taps I barely even remember, I’d spent $63.58 to get a pair shipped to my door. I also ran to the Apple Store and dropped $581.94 on blue AirPods Max. I had testing to do.

I’ve been using both for the past several weeks, and I’ve come to a conclusion I didn’t expect. The Picun F8 Pros sound a smidge worse than the AirPods Max, but in a few ways, I actually prefer them, and given the price I’d easily pick Picun. The bass in the F8s is a little more pronounced than I like, and can be a little muddy on extra-thumpy songs. They were crisper on the high notes in a song like “Welcome to the Black Parade,” though, and for the most part both brands sound pretty similar.

The limiting factor for headphones, I suspect, is not the headphones themselves but the context. Buy all the great gear you want, but if you’re still streaming Spotify playlists over Bluetooth, there’s only so much fidelity available. Yes, the AirPods Max now support lossless audio over a wired connection, but that’s not how most people listen to music. Most listen on loud subways, in the gym, or while walking the dog; unless you’re in a dedicated listening environment, I’d wager that good-enough sound is usually good enough. Especially for the price.

«

This is very much the point about “high quality” headphones: most real listening environments are high-quality-hostile.
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Delayed Scottish NHS app cut back to just one service • The Times

Henry Anderson:

»

Scotland’s ill-fated NHS app will only be available to dermatology patients after being scaled back by ministers but still faces “significant issues” being delivered on time, an internal review has found.

Known as the digital front door, the health and social care app was first announced in 2021 but has been branded a “national embarrassment” as it is yet to get off the ground.

A stocktake, seen by The Times, said the app had been reduced to a “more limited scope … than originally envisaged” after ministers brought the launch date forward by four months.

At first patients will only be able to receive appointment letters for one specialty, dermatology, at a single health board, NHS Lanarkshire. The system will also let users view personal information and search for health services.

In contrast, England’s NHS App, which has 35 million users, allows patients to message GPs, order repeat prescriptions and receive test results.

Critics say the report confirms the “chaos, delays and mind-boggling expense” caused by the SNP’s mismanagement of the NHS.

Under initial plans the app was due to go live in March 2026, but first minister John Swinney made a commitment to launching it by December in a speech earlier this year. Swinney said the app would “be a much-needed addition to improve patients’ interaction with the NHS”.

«

Got to love government computing projects. No indication here of how much was spent on this one (so far), but you do have to wonder at the “not invented here” syndrome that made them think they could do it better – or should do it separately – of the English NHS. But the Scottish government seems to be very good at screwing things up.
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US House of Representatives bans WhatsApp on government devices • Financial Times

Hannah Murphy, Stephanie Stacey and Alex Rogers:

»

The US House of Representatives has warned staff members not to use Meta’s messaging platform WhatsApp due to privacy concerns.

The warning marks a blow to WhatsApp, whose $1.8tn parent Meta has long battled concerns that it has been lax with user data in its hunt for commercial growth and advertising revenue.

The House’s Chief Administrative Officer told staffers on Monday that WhatsApp had been deemed “a high-risk to users”, according to a copy of the memo seen by the Financial Times.

The email ordered staff not to download or keep the messaging service on any House laptop or mobile device from June 30, adding that anyone who had the application would be asked to remove it.

The decision was taken due to “a lack of transparency in how [WhatsApp] protects user data, absence of stored data encryption, and potential security risks involved with its use”, read the memo, which was first reported by Axios.

A spokesperson for Meta said the company disagreed with the characterisation “in the strongest possible terms”.

The person added that WhatsApp messages were “end-to-end encrypted by default”, meaning that neither the company nor third parties could read them, adding that the platform offered “a higher level of security than most of the apps on the CAO’s approved list”.

«

Bonkers. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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The great PowerPoint panic of 2003 • The Atlantic

Jacob Stern:

»

Sixteen minutes before touchdown on the morning of February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated into the cloudless East Texas sky. All seven astronauts aboard were killed. As the broken shuttle hurtled toward Earth in pieces, it looked to its live TV viewers like a swarm of shooting stars.

The immediate cause of the disaster, a report from a NASA Accident Investigation Board determined that August, was a piece of insulating foam that had broken loose and damaged the shuttle’s left wing soon after liftoff. But the report also singled out a less direct, more surprising culprit. Engineers had known about—and inappropriately discounted—the wing damage long before Columbia’s attempted reentry, but the flaws in their analysis were buried in a series of arcane and overstuffed computer-presentation slides that were shown to NASA officials. “It is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation,” the report stated, later continuing: “The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.”

PowerPoint was not then a new technology, but it was newly ubiquitous. In 1987, when the program was first released, it sold 40,000 copies. Ten years later, it sold 4 million. By the early 2000s, PowerPoint had captured 95% of the presentation-software market, and its growing influence on how Americans would talk and think was already giving rise to a critique. A 2001 feature in The New Yorker by Ian Parker argued that the software “helps you make a case, but it also makes its own case: about how to organize information, how much information to organize, how to look at the world.” Vint Cerf, one of the “fathers of the internet,” took to quipping that “power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”

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Nowadays, of course, it would be death caused by hallucinating chatbot which someone didn’t check. And, indeed, perhaps it will come to that.

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Apple updates its on-device and cloud AI models, introduces a new developer API • Deeplearning.ai

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Apple updated the Apple Foundation Models (AFM) family, including smaller on-device and larger server-hosted versions, to improve their capabilities, speed, and efficiency. It also released the Foundation Models framework, an API that enables developers to call the on-device model on Apple devices that have Apple Intelligence enabled.

• Input/output: Text, images in (up to 65,000 tokens), text out
• Architecture: AFM-on-device: 3 billion-parameter transformer, 300-million parameter vision transformer. AFM-server: custom mixture-of-experts transformer (parameter count undisclosed), 1 billion-parameter vision transformer
• Performance: Strong in non-U.S. English, image understanding
• Availability: AFM-on-device for developers to use via Foundations Models framework, AFM-server not available for public use
• Features: Tool use, 15 languages, vision
• Undisclosed: Output token limit, AFM-server parameter count, details of training datasets, vision adapter architecture, evaluation protocol

…Apple may be behind in AI, but its control over iOS is a huge advantage. If the operating system ships with a certain model and loads it into the limited memory by default, developers have a far greater incentive to use that model than an alternative. Limited memory on phones and the large size of good models make it impractical for many app developers to bundle models with their software, so if a model is favored by Apple (or Android), it’s likely to gain significant adoption for on-device uses.

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Developers are, while annoyed generally with Apple, pleased at the onboard LLMs that are going to ship in its next OS and be available to their apps. It’s going to make quite a difference. Does Google have the same, or is the RAM capability of Android phones too variable? I’d have thought they would have lots of RAM – they always used to – and that means the capability to run LLMs.
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Elon Musk’s lawyers claim he “does not use a computer” • WIRED

Caroline Haskins:

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Elon Musk’s lawyers claimed that he “does not use a computer” in a Sunday court filing related to his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI. However, Musk has posted pictures or referred to his laptop on X several times in recent months, and public evidence suggests that he owns and appears to use at least one computer.

Musk and his artificial intelligence startup xAI sued OpenAI in February 2024, alleging the company committed breach of contract by abandoning its founding agreement to develop AI “for the benefit of humanity,” choosing instead “to maximize profits for Microsoft.”

The Sunday court filing was submitted in opposition to a Friday filing from OpenAI, which accused Musk and xAI of failing to fully comply with the discovery process. OpenAI alleges that Musk’s counsel does not plan to collect any documents from him. In this weekend’s filing, Musk’s lawyers claim that they told OpenAI on June 14 that they were “conducting searches of Mr. Musk’s mobile phone, having searched his emails, and that Mr. Musk does not use a computer.”

Musk and xAI Corp’s lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment. In the filing, Musk’s legal team disputed claims that it was resisting discovery efforts.

Multiple employees at X tell WIRED that while Musk primarily works from his mobile phone, he has occasionally been seen using a laptop.

«

It does seem like a very hard claim to substantiate.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The HS2 high-speed rail project has been a failure almost from the start. Is that because of its scope, or its context? CC-licensed photo by Ross Hawkes on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

HS2 and the slow decay of Britain • The Value of Nothing

M. F. Robbins:

»

HS2 was conceived to solve a clear strategic problem. England’s spine is, from a transport perspective, awkwardly constricted. The railway lines connecting London to the great cities of the north have become bottlenecks, restricting the flow of goods and people and stunting economic growth, like a limb with an insufficient blood supply. HS2 would blast a new, Y-shaped route to the north, the ‘stem’ running from London to Birmingham with two branches going on to Manchester and Leeds. Speed is volume, and fast trains would shift vast numbers of passengers, freeing up huge amounts of capacity on the existing lines for people, goods and trade.

That was the theory at least, but the economic case was always confused. Stewart is (correctly) a fan of the book ‘How Big Things Get Done’ and quotes a line from it: “Projects don’t go wrong, they start wrong.” HS2’s problems started with the vision: while the strategic case was about capacity, the economic case focused on travel times, which were easier to measure and talk about, and more in line with how the Department for Transport typically talks about projects. The conflict between the strategic case and how the economic case was talked about led to constant confusion about the purpose of HS2 in the public discourse (epitomised by the columnist Simon Jenkins), but also made it hard to know how to evaluate proposed solutions.

Worse, a kind of British exceptionalism crept in. It’s a recurring theme that keeps coming up in national infrastructure projects3 – we set out to build something like a nuclear power plant or a high speed railway, and rather than learning from other countries or projects – boring! – we insist on creating our own ‘better’ thing. In this case, it wasn’t enough to just build a high speed railway line, from the outset it had to be the greatest and best high-speed line in the world, with all the signals that gave to suppliers on costs.

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Another insightful piece by Robbins. Reading it, one gets the feeling that it’s all so easy if only people listen to him.

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Tesla launches robotaxi service in Austin • Financial Times via Ars Technica

Rafe Uddin, Stephen Morris, and Kana Inagaki:

»

Tesla’s robotaxi service, touted by Elon Musk as the future of his flagging electric-car maker, launched in the company’s home city of Austin, Texas, on Sunday with about 10 vehicles and a human safety driver on board amid regulatory scrutiny of its self-driving technology.

Shares in Tesla have risen about 50% from this year’s low in early April, with investors hopeful the autonomous ride-hailing service will help revive a company that has suffered declining sales and a consumer backlash against Musk’s political activism.

Despite the hype surrounding Tesla’s robotaxi, the launch—with a company employee seated in the passenger side for safety while leaving the driver’s seat empty—was low-key, and the initial service was open only to a select group of social media influencers.

Shortly before the launch, Musk said on social media that the robotaxi service would begin “with customers paying a $4.20 flat fee.”

According to Musk, who has stepped back from his US government role to focus on the electric-car maker and the robotaxi, the self-driving Tesla Model Y vehicles will only operate in limited areas, avoid challenging intersections, and have teleoperators who can intervene if problems arise.

The limited launch comes as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration continues to carry out multiple investigations into Musk’s claims about the capabilities of Tesla’s autopilot and “full self-driving” systems. Despite its name, the full self-driving system still requires humans to sit in the driver’s seat and pay full attention—unlike Google’s Waymo taxis.

«

The NHTSA is not impressed by the robotaxis, and seems ready even now to investigate the robotaxis. Wonder what sort of end run Musk will seek to get around that. Still, seems to have arrived in better time than trips to Mars.
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Is the world’s big idea for greener air travel a flight of fancy? • Climate Change News

Matteo Civillini, Azril Annuar, David Fogarty, Megan Rowling and Sebastian Rodriguez:

»

One Saturday morning last month in the city of Melaka, volunteers in green T-shirts rushed over as Adibah Rahim and her husband drove into the central square, eager to unpack, weigh and register her consignment of used cooking oil (UCO) – the “liquid gold” in European plans to ramp up production of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).

Rahim left the collection point 90 ringgit ($21) richer, three ringgit per litre of oil – a welcome boost to her family’s household budget.

“We usually collect UCO from around 200 members of the public,” said Michael Andrew, sales manager for Evergreen Oil & Feed, the company running the Melaka collection with the local council and a supplier to leading European SAF producers including Spain’s Repsol, UK-based Shell and Finland’s Neste.

When made from waste such as UCO, rather than agricultural commodities like soy or palm oil, backers say SAF can slash planet-heating emissions by up to 80% over kerosene jet fuel, without taking up land that would otherwise be used for food crops, or fuelling forest destruction.

But behind SAF’s climate-friendly facade, a months-long investigation by Climate Home News and its partner The Straits Times has uncovered an opaque global supply chain that exposes jet fuel providers and their aviation clients to significant fraud risks, raising doubts about the climate benefits of the sector’s main green hope for the years ahead.

As SAF producers scramble for limited raw materials to meet new blending quotas in Europe and growing demand elsewhere, barely used and virgin palm oil is being passed off as UCO to traders that supply fuel companies, experts and industry operators told us. Palm oil that is not considered waste is not permitted under European Union rules for SAF because of its links to deforestation.

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Perverse incentives, perverse incentives everywhere.
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People with severe diabetes are cured in small trial of new drug • The New York Times

Gina Kolata:

»

A single infusion of a stem cell-based treatment may have cured 10 out of 12 people with the most severe form of type 1 diabetes. One year later, these 10 patients no longer need insulin. The other two patients need much lower doses.

The experimental treatment, called zimislecel and made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals of Boston, involves stem cells that scientists prodded to turn into pancreatic islet cells, which regulate blood glucose levels. The new islet cells were infused and reached the liver, where they took up residence.

The study was presented Friday evening at the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association and published online by The New England Journal of Medicine.

“It’s trailblazing work,” said Dr. Mark Anderson, professor and director of the diabetes center at the University of California in San Francisco. “Being free of insulin is life changing,” added Dr. Anderson, who was not involved in the study.

Vertex, like other drug companies, declined to announce the treatment’s cost before the Food and Drug Administration approves it. A Vertex spokeswoman said the company had data only on the population it studied so it could not yet say whether the drug would help others with type 1 diabetes.

About two million Americans have type 1 diabetes, which is caused when the immune system destroys islet cells. A subset of islet cells, the beta cells, secrete insulin. Without insulin, glucose cannot enter cells. Patients with type 1 must inject carefully calibrated doses of the hormone to substitute for the insulin their body is missing.

…“For the short term, this looks promising” for severely affected patients like those in the study,” said Dr. Irl B. Hirsch, a diabetes expert at the University of Washington who was not involved in the study.
But patients in the trial had to stay on drugs to prevent the immune system from destroying the new cells. Suppressing the immune system, he said, increases the risk of infections and, over the long term, can increase the risk of cancer.

“The argument is this immunosuppression is not as dangerous as what we typically use for kidneys, hearts and lungs, but we won’t know that definitely for many years,” Dr. Hirsch said. Patients may have to take the immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of their lives, the Vertex spokeswoman said.

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China’s electric-vehicle factories have become tourist hot spots • WIRED

Zeyi Yang:

»

Tours of electric vehicle factories have quickly become the hottest ticket in Beijing, with tens of thousands of people signing up each month for the chance to win a free visit. Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi, which has reinvented itself as an EV maker in recent years, started offering the one-hour tours in January to visitors interested in seeing its factory up close and getting a race car experience in a Xiaomi EV.

As Chinese EV brands expand from competing on low prices to promoting premium features and sleek designs, they are increasingly putting their factories in the spotlight. At least two Chinese EV brands, Xiaomi and Nio, offer regular tours for the general public this year, and three more automakers have announced plans to follow suit.

“More and more Chinese EVs are using factory tours as an important channel of communication between the brand and the outside world. It offers a chance to not only see the production line up close, but also experience the human side of the brand,” says Freya Zhang, a research analyst at the investment consulting firm Tech Buzz China, who has been organizing tours for foreign investors to visit Chinese electric vehicle startups for two years.

People who have visited the Xiaomi factory say they were struck by the amount of automation on display. The company says that the overall automation rate at the factory has reached 91%, with some production lines like casting fully automated.

“The factory is huge with only a handful of workers. As I stood there watching, it was all robotic arms doing the work. The robots were all running preset programs—picking up parts from one place and delivering them to another, all in a very orderly manner,” says Yuanyuan, a Beijing resident who took her 13-year-old daughter on the Xiaomi tour last month. Yuanyuan says she had been applying to get tickets since January, but since the limited spots are awarded on a lottery basis, she was only finally able to secure them in May.

«

Neat way to make people engage with the prospect of buying one of these cars – or perhaps feeling good about the cars they’ve already bought from that brand. (Thanks Karsten for the link.)
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Reddit considers iris-scanning Orb developed by a Sam Altman startup • Semafor

Reed Albergotti:

»

Reddit is considering using World ID, the verification system based on iris-scanning Orbs whose parent company was co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

According to two people familiar with the matter, World ID could soon become a way for Reddit users to verify that they are unique individuals while remaining anonymous on the platform.

Talks between representatives of Reddit and World ID parent Tools for Humanity highlight the growing market for new identity verification technologies, as artificial intelligence floods online platforms with inauthentic content and governments around the world consider new age verification laws to prevent children and teenagers from accessing social media.

If World ID becomes one of Reddit’s third-party providers, it would be good news for Tools for Humanity, which was founded six years ago with the lofty goal of providing a universal basic income to the world by offering them cryptocurrency called Worldcoin in exchange for scanning their eyeballs with an Orb.

Reddit and Tools for Humanity declined to comment on the talks.

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Don’t think this would be massively popular with Reddit users, to be honest.
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Detachment 201: why Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth joined the US Army reserves • Pirate Wires

An interview with Bozworth, who is one of the first people fast-tracked recruited into the US Army’s “tech bro” division:

»

Blake Dodge: How do you feel like Meta’s culture with respect to the military has evolved? Or maybe it hasn’t changed as much as people think?

Boz: The degree to which people have been comfortable publicly supporting the military has changed a huge amount over the last 20 years, ebbing and flowing. The amount of actual support probably hasn’t changed a huge amount.
For what it’s worth, I’m not sure how much that affected Meta — like me, or Mark Zuckerberg, or what we were doing. It wasn’t clear 10 years ago what kind of position we would’ve been in to do anything of meaning in terms of providing assistance to the government. We really were, at that point, just building websites and apps. But now, following 10 years of big investment in hard research problems — physics problems around optics and the technology required to do super lightweight wearable computing — that is a platform I think is super relevant and interesting to the government. [Same goes for AI.]

So I don’t know how much the change of tone and acceptability of public displays of patriotism affected the actual work Meta was doing. I think the work was the same. I think probably the support was the same. But I am very glad we are now in a moment where the response to me making a personal decision, in a personal capacity, to join the Army Reserves was very, very, very fair. People had reasonable questions about what it meant, but also a lot of people were very proud and very excited about it.

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Quite the journey from “site to keep up with your friends from college” to “aiding, ooh, who knows which country is in line for an invasion to produce regime change”.
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Fake experts and SEO: Journalists adopting new checks • Press Gazette

Rob Waugh:

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Journalists and PRs have changed their habits around verifying sources in the wake of a Press Gazette investigation which revealed that one of the UK’s most widely-quoted psychologists does not exist.

Barbara Santini’s main online presence is on profiles connected with a sex toys website and CBD retailers. Press Gazette revealed in April how a PR working for these businesses duped multiple publishers into quoting Santini by responding to journalist questions posted on services like ResponseSource and Qwoted.

…However, PR companies continue to deploy fake experts apparently using AI-generated responses.

Freelance journalist Rosie Taylor explained that in response to one query via a journalist response service, she received three near-identical responses in the same email format with identical headshots, all at the same time.

While she remains unsure whether the people are real, she said she was convinced the quotes are AI-generated, and now insists on phoning every expert in order to verify them. 

She told Press Gazette: “In an ideal world, journalists would always research their interviewees first and then interview them on a call or face-to-face, but the reality is many of us are under huge pressure to turn copy around quickly and quote multiple experts on a wide variety of topics, so getting the occasional comment over email makes life a whole lot easier.”

Taylor said she received the identical responses 24 hours after submitting a journalist request – but the emails did not appear to come via the service she used.

Taylor, who also edits the media pitching advice newsletter Get Featured, said that the experts had little relation to the story. Among those who responded to her request about car hire were an AI/SEO company, a graphic design company and a lighting business.

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“In an ideal world”. Well, yes, but before email, there really was only one way to get a quote from someone, and that was by phoning them up. So maybe that ideal world did exist. And there was plenty of pressure back then, honest.
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Alibaba, Tencent freeze AI tools during high-stakes China exam • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Luz Ding:

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China’s most popular AI chatbots like Alibaba’s Qwen have temporarily disabled functions including picture recognition, to prevent students from cheating during the country’s annual “gaokao” college entrance examinations.

Apps including Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s Yuanbao and Moonshot’s Kimi suspended photo-recognition services during the hours when the multi-day exams take place across the country. Asked to explain, the chatbots responded: “To ensure the fairness of the college entrance examinations, this function cannot be used during the test period.”

China’s infamously rigorous “gaokao” is a rite of passage for teenagers across the nation, thought to shape the futures of millions of aspiring graduates. Students — and their parents — pull out the stops for any edge they can get, from extensive private tuition to, on occasion, attempts to cheat. To minimize disruption, examiners outlaw the use of devices during the hours-long tests.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Qwen and ByteDance Ltd.’s Doubao still offered photo recognition as of Monday. But when asked to answer questions about a photo of a test paper, Qwen responded that the service was temporarily frozen during exam hours from June 7 to 10. Doubao said the picture uploaded was “not in compliance with rules.”

China lacks a widely adopted university application process like in the US, where students prove their qualifications through years of academic records, along with standardized tests and personal essays. For Chinese high-school seniors, the gaokao, held in June each year, is often the only way they can impress admissions officials. About 13.4 million students are taking part in this year’s exams.

The test is considered the most significant in the nation, especially for those from smaller cities and lower-income families that lack resources. A misstep may require another year in high school, or completely alter a teenager’s future.

The exam is also one of the most strictly controlled in China, to prevent cheating and ensure fairness. But fast-developing AI has posed new challenges for schools and regulators.

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Hard to imagine such a move ever working in the West. Note how China still values personal skills.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Even job applications are being infested by AI-generated applications – which is leading to AI-based rejections. Will it mean AI-based jobs? CC-licensed photo by Loco Steve on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

All the little data • New Cartographies

Nicholas Carr:

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Even my consumption of cultural goods—an ugly phrase, yes, but it seems apt—is shadowed by metadata. When the graphical user interface was introduced to personal computers in the early 1980s, the scroll bar habituated us to a visual indicator of our progress through a document. Now, pretty much all viewing, listening, and reading is tracked, visually or numerically, in real time. When I’m listening to a song, a glance at the progress bar tells me, to the second, how much time has elapsed since the tune began and how much remains before it ends. The same goes for TV shows and movies and videos.

When I’m reading an ebook, I’m kept apprised of the percentage of the text I’ve made it through. When I’m looking over the homepage of a newspaper or magazine site, I’m told how long it will take to read each article. Here’s a “3 min read.” There’s a “7 min read.” (This essay, for the record, is a thirteen-minute read, and you have nine minutes to go.) Every photo on my phone offers its own little data dump: where and when it was taken, the aperture and ISO settings, the exposure time, the image’s size in pixels and bits. My pictures tend to be amateurish, but the data always looks professional.

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A lovely little soliloquy about how much data we have raining down on us, and yet how little it can truly tell us. The computer records all the photo’s metadata, but only we know if it’s a good photo, or one with meaning for us. The data shows what time we had a phone call and how long it lasted; only we know if it was important or trivial (and even the duration might not tell you that).

How can you capture that? You can’t.
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The companies that help people vanish • BBC Worklife

Bryan Lufkin:

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In Japan, these people are sometimes referred to as “jouhatsu”. That’s the Japanese word for “evaporation”, but it also refers to people who vanish on purpose into thin air, and continue to conceal their whereabouts – potentially for years, even decades.

“I got fed up with human relationships. I took a small suitcase and disappeared,” says 42-year-old Sugimoto, who’s just going by his family name for this story. “I just kind of escaped.” He says that back in his small hometown, everybody knew him because of his family and their prominent local business, which Sugimoto was expected to carry on. But having that role foisted upon him caused him such distress that he abruptly left town forever and told no one where he was going.

From inescapable debt to loveless marriages, the motivations that push jouhatsu to “evaporate” can vary. Regardless of their reasons, they turn to companies that help them through the process. These operations are called “night moving” services, a nod to the secretive nature of becoming a jouhatsu. They help people who want to disappear discreetly remove themselves from their lives, and can provide lodging for them in secret whereabouts.

“Normally, the reason for moving is something positive, like entering university, getting a new job or a marriage. But there’s also sad moving – for example, like dropping out of university, losing a job or escaping from a stalker,” says Sho Hatori, who founded a night-moving company in the 90s when Japan’s economic bubble burst. At first, he thought financial ruin would be the only thing driving people to flee their troubled lives, but he soon found there were “social reasons”, too. “What we did was support people to start a second life,” he says.

Sociologist Hiroki Nakamori has been researching jouhatsu for more than a decade. He says the term ‘jouhatsu’ first started being used to describe people who decided to go missing back in the 60s. Divorce rates were (and still are) very low in Japan, so some people decided it was easier to just up and leave their spouses instead of going through elaborate, formal divorce proceedings.

“In Japan, it’s just easier to evaporate,” says Nakamori. Privacy is fiercely protected: missing people can freely withdraw money from ATMs without being flagged, and their family members can’t access security videos that might have captured their loved one on the run.

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This piece also available as a BBC video and as an audio episode.
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AI sludge has entered the job search • The New York Times

Sarah Kessler:

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Katie Tanner, a human resource consultant in Utah, knew the job would be popular: It was fully remote, was at a tech company and required only three years of experience.

But she was still shocked by the response on LinkedIn. After 12 hours, 400 applications had been submitted. By 24, there were 600. A few days later, there were more than 1,200, at which point she removed the post. Three months later, she’s still whittling down candidates.

“It’s crazy,” she said. “You just get inundated.”

The number of applications submitted on LinkedIn has surged more than 45% in the past year. The platform is clocking an average of 11,000 applications per minute, and generative artificial intelligence tools are contributing to the deluge.

With a simple prompt, ChatGPT, the chatbot developed by OpenAI, will insert every keyword from a job description into a résumé. Some candidates are going a step further, paying for A.I. agents that can autonomously find jobs and apply on their behalf. Recruiters say it’s getting harder to tell who is genuinely qualified or interested, and many of the résumés look suspiciously similar.

“It’s an ‘applicant tsunami’ that’s just going to get bigger,” said Hung Lee, a former recruiter who writes a widely read newsletter about the industry.

One popular method for navigating the surge? Automatic chat or video interviews, sometimes conducted by A.I. Chipotle’s chief executive, Scott Boatwright, said at a conference this month that its A.I. chatbot screening and scheduling tool (named Ava Cado) had reduced hiring time by 75 percent.

HireVue, a popular A.I. video interview platform, offers recruiters an option to have A.I. assess responses and rank candidates.

But candidates can also use A.I. to cheat in these interviews, and some companies have added more automated skill assessments early in the hiring process.

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But it’s fine because an AI will take the job anyway.
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Why I am no longer an AI Doomer • The Deep Dish

Richard Meadows:

»

Intelligence is the ability to solve a broad range of problems. ChatGPT is very intelligent: it can solve a broad range of problems across many domains.

Your old Casio pocket calculator is also good at solving problems— albeit within a narrower domain— but it feels weird to call it ‘intelligent’. What’s missing?

To help get at the thing we’re actually interested in, the usual move is to add the concept of agency. We don’t just solve problems; we solve them in the pursuit of our goals (unlike a chatbot or calculator, which just sits around idly until a human gives it something to do). An agent doesn’t just think; it thinks for itself. As Sarah Constantin puts it in her very-good essay of a similar name, agency is what makes humans so powerful—and so dangerous.

But we actually get a lot more clarity when we keep these two concepts separate. Intelligence does not require agency: your pocket calculator is capable of instantly solving problems that very few humans could tackle in their heads (or at all). And agency does not require much in the way of intelligence: an amoeba is an agent in the world, but it is only a tiny bit smarter than a rock.

The third element that needs to be teased apart is creativity, defined by David Deutsch as the ability to come up with new explanatory knowledge; this being a contender for the secret sauce that separates humans from other very smart animals (and from current-level AIs). Crucially, this is a step-change rather than a spectrum of ability: if you can explain something, you can in principle explain anything that is explicable.

…A true AGI will necessarily be an agent, with its own desires, whims, and goals. And a true AGI will necessarily be creative, in the Deutschian sense: it will be able to create new explanatory knowledge.

Current-level AI has neither of these properties, and has no prospect of attaining them via current approaches. It’s incredibly smart, but it’s still much more like a pocket calculator than it is like a person.

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A good explanation; there’s more about the gap between this and “life”.
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Sam Altman says GPT-5 coming this summer, open to ads on ChatGPT—with a catch • AdWeek

Trishla Ostwal:

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced on a new company podcast today that GPT-5 is expected to launch this summer, marking the next major leap in the company’s generative AI capabilities. However, he did not disclose a specific date. 

The announcement comes amid rising competition in the AI arena and growing scrutiny over how these tools are developed and deployed. Business Insider reported that GPT-5 is shaping up to be a significant upgrade over GPT-4, with early testers calling it “materially better.”

Meanwhile, OpenAI’s primary revenue comes from enterprise customers buying beefed-up versions of ChatGPT, and GPT-5 is poised to be the next big play to sustain that momentum.

Altman also weighed in on the possibility of ads on ChatGPT, saying he’s “not totally against” the idea—a shift that could reshape how the chatbot is monetized. 

However, he warned that it would take “a lot of care” to get the experience right. Unlike social media or web search, where users expect some level of monetization, Altman emphasized that modifying the model’s output based on who pays for the ad would be “a trust-destroying moment” for its users. 

Instead, he floated the idea of showing ads outside the large language model’s output stream. Altman didn’t specify what form those ads might take or where they might appear, such as a sidebar or footer. 

“But the burden of proof there, I think, would have to be very high,” he said. “And it would have to feel really useful to users and really clear that it was not messing with the LLM’s output.” 

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I’m old enough to remember when Google was absolutely insistent that it would never put ads on its homepage (the one before you’ve carried out a search). It did indeed turn down a very large sum from a credit card company wanting just that in its early years. But in its later years it wasn’t above advertising its own products, particularly Chrome. After all, every user who switched from Safari or Firefox to Chrome both saved Google money on search clicks, and increased the amount of user data it could collect.

All of which is to say that people will look at the ads being pulled into OpenAI as a goldmine about what people want.
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Websites are tracking you via browser fingerprinting • Texas A&M University Engineering

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New research led by Texas A&M University found that websites are covertly using browser fingerprinting — a method to uniquely identify a web browser — to track people across browser sessions and sites.

“Fingerprinting has always been a concern in the privacy community, but until now, we had no hard proof that it was actually being used to track users,” said Dr. Nitesh Saxena, cybersecurity researcher, professor of computer science and engineering and associate director of the Global Cyber Research Institute at Texas A&M. “Our work helps close that gap.”

When you visit a website, your browser shares a surprising amount of information, like your screen resolution, time zone, device model and more. When combined, these details create a “fingerprint” that’s often unique to your browser. Unlike cookies — which users can delete or block — fingerprinting is much harder to detect or prevent. Most users have no idea it’s happening, and even privacy-focused browsers struggle to fully block it.

“Think of it as a digital signature you didn’t know you were leaving behind,” explained co-author Zengrui Liu, a former doctoral student in Saxena’s lab. “You may look anonymous, but your device or browser gives you away.”

This research marks a turning point in how computer scientists understand the real-world use of browser fingerprinting by connecting it with the use of ads.

“While prior works have studied browser fingerprinting and its usage on different websites, ours is the first to correlate browser fingerprints and ad behaviors, essentially establishing the relationship between web tracking and fingerprinting,” said co-author Dr. Yinzhi Cao, associate professor of computer science and technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

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The irresistible force online: advertising.
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How OpenElections uses LLMs • The Scoop

Derek Willis:

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In the 12-plus years that we’ve been turning official precinct election results into data at OpenElections, the single biggest problem has been converting pictures of results into CSV files. Many of the precinct results files we get are image PDFs, and for those there are essentially two options: data entry or Optical Character Recognition. The former has some advantages, but not many.

While most people are not great at manual repetitive tasks, you can improve with lots of practice, to the point where the results are very accurate. In the past we did pay for data entry services, and while we developed working relationships with two individuals in particular, the results almost always contained some mistakes and the cost could run into the hundreds of dollars pretty quickly. For a volunteer project, it just didn’t make sense.

We also used commercial OCR software, most often Able2Extract, which did pretty well, but had a harder time with PDFs that had markings or were otherwise difficult to parse. Thankfully, most election results PDFs are in one of a small handful of formats, which makes things a bit less complicated, but commercial OCR has too many restrictions.

For parsing image PDFs into CSV files, Google’s Gemini is my model of choice, for two main reasons. First, the results are usually very, very accurate (with a few caveats I’ll detail below), and second, Gemini’s large context window means it’s possible to work with PDF files that can be multiple MBs in size.

…Speed isn’t the most important factor here, though: accuracy is, and using LLMs still means a system of checks to ensure that the results are what the originals say they are. One step in that is taken care of by a suite of tests that run every time a new or changed CSV gets pushed to one of our data repositories. Those tests look for some formatting issues, duplicate records and basic math inconsistencies. A second step – for now manual – is verifying that multiple totals derived from the precinct CSV match the numbers in an official cumulative report.

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I haven’t tried formatting a PDF into a CSV (the ones I deal with tend to be small, and not for stuffing into systems which are retaining their logs for court hearings), but I’d like an explanation of why LLMs should be good at reading PDFs.

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Ear wax as a possible screening medium for Parkinson’s disease • American Chemical Society

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Most treatments for Parkinson’s disease (PD) only slow disease progression. Early intervention for the neurological disease that worsens over time is therefore critical to optimize care, but that requires early diagnosis. Current tests, like clinical rating scales and neural imaging, can be subjective and costly. Now, researchers in ACS’ Analytical Chemistry report the initial development of a system that inexpensively screens for PD from the odours in a person’s ear wax.

Previous research has shown that changes in sebum, an oily substance secreted by the skin, could help identify people with PD. Specifically, sebum from people with PD may have a characteristic smell because volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released by sebum are altered by disease progression — including neurodegeneration, systemic inflammation and oxidative stress. However, when sebum on the skin is exposed to environmental factors like air pollution and humidity, its composition can be altered, making it an unreliable testing medium. But the skin inside the ear canal is kept away from the elements. So, Hao Dong, Danhua Zhu and colleagues wanted to focus their PD screening efforts on ear wax, which mostly consists of sebum and is easily sampled.

To identify potential VOCs related to PD in ear wax, the researchers swabbed the ear canals of 209 human subjects (108 of whom were diagnosed with PD). They analyzed the collected secretions using gas chromatography and mass spectrometry techniques. Four of the VOCs the researchers found in ear wax from people with PD were significantly different than the ear wax from people without the disease.

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There: you were not expecting to discover this when you woke up today. Of note: dogs sniff each others’ ears too when they meet – so perhaps they know some version of this too.

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Global sea levels rising twice as fast as they did last century, according to major scientific report • Sky News

Victoria Seabrook:

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Global sea levels are now rising twice as fast as they did last century, according to a major new scientific report.

The study – which takes a laser focus on climate change in the 2020s, a critical decade to stop the worst damage – finds all 10 measures are going in the wrong direction.

And most of them are doing so at a faster rate.

The findings are “unprecedented” but “unsurprising”, given the world continues to pump record levels of planet-warming gases into the atmosphere.

“We see a clear and consistent picture that things are getting worse,” said lead author Professor Piers Forster.

However, the rate by which emissions are increasing has slowed down, offering a ray of hope they will soon reach their peak.

The new study found sea levels are now rising on average twice as fast, at 4.3mm a year on average since 2019, up from 1.8mm a year at the turn of the 20th century.

The acceleration is stark, but within the realms of what scientists expected. That’s because the warming atmosphere has sent more melting ice flowing into the sea, and the ocean water expands as it warms.

For the island nation of the UK, which risks coastal flooding, cliff falls and damage to homes and buildings, with 100,000 properties expected to be threatened with coastal erosion in England within 50 years.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Wearing AirPods (and other wireless headphones) has become part of everyday life – but can you tell if someone’s listening to you? CC-licensed photo by Xavi Rodriguez Magaña on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

It’s Friday, and there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s about betting.

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

AI avatars in China just proved they are better influencers • CNBC

Evelyn Cheng:

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Avatars generated by artificial intelligence are now able to sell more than real people can, according to a collaboration between Chinese tech company Baidu and a popular livestreamer.

Luo Yonghao, one of China’s earliest and most popular livestreamers, and his co-host Xiao Mu both used digital versions of themselves to interact with viewers in real time for well over six hours on Sunday on Baidu’s e-commerce livestreaming platform “Youxuan”, the Chinese tech company said. The session raked in 55 million yuan ($7.65m).

In comparison, Luo’s first livestream attempt on Youxuan last month, which lasted just over four hours, saw fewer orders for consumer electronics, food and other key products, Baidu said.

Luo said that it was his first time using virtual human technology to sell products through livestreaming.

“The digital human effect has scared me … I’m a bit dazed,” he told his 1.7 million followers on social media platform Weibo, according to a CNBC translation.

Luo started livestreaming in April 2020 on ByteDance’s short video app Douyin, in an attempt to pay off debts racked up by his struggling smartphone company Smartisan. His “Be Friends” Douyin livestream account has nearly 24.7 million followers.

Luo’s and his co-host’s avatars were built using Baidu’s generative AI model, which learned from five years’ worth of videos to mimic their jokes and style, Wu Jialu, head of research at Luo’s other company, Be Friends Holding, told CNBC on Wednesday.

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You can see this two ways: either it’s calamity which means it’s AI all the way now feeding our brains with irresistible junk; or this is finally going to pull the plug on human influencers and collapse the whole industry.
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Address bar shows hp.com. Browser displays scammers’ malicious text anyway • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

Tech support scammers have devised a method to inject their fake phone numbers into webpages when a target’s web browser visits official sites for Apple, PayPal, Netflix, and other companies.

The ruse, outlined in a post on Wednesday from security firm Malwarebytes, threatens to trick users into calling the malicious numbers even when they think they’re taking measures to prevent falling for such scams. One of the more common pieces of security advice is to carefully scrutinize the address bar of a browser to ensure it’s pointing to an organization’s official website. The ongoing scam is able to bypass such checks.

“If I showed the [webpage] to my parents, I don’t think they would be able to tell that this is fake,” Jérôme Segura, lead malware intelligence analyst at Malwarebytes, said in an interview. “As the user, if you click on those links, you think, ‘Oh I’m actually on the Apple website and Apple is recommending that I call this number.’”

The unknown actors behind the scam begin by buying Google ads that appear at the top of search results for Microsoft, Apple, HP, PayPal, Netflix, and other sites. While Google displays only the scheme and host name of the site the ad links to (for instance, https://www.microsoft.com), the ad appends parameters to the path to the right of that address. When a target clicks on the ad, it opens a page on the official site. The appended parameters then inject fake phone numbers into the page the target sees.

Google requires ads to display the official domain they link to, but the company allows parameters to be added to the right of it that aren’t visible. The scammers are taking advantage of this by adding strings to the right of the hostname.

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In a way, it’s faintly encouraging that the scammers are having to resort to this rather than ringing landline numbers at random. (Or maybe they’re still doing that?) And they keep finding new ways to bring people into their scams.

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Taxpayer will subsidise industry energy bills to help firms • The Times

Oliver Wright and Max Kendix:

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British manufacturers will have their energy bills slashed and subsidised by the taxpayer under plans to boost the country’s global competitiveness.

Ministers will announce a multibillion-pound package of support to the UK’s most energy-intensive industries to bring their costs in line with international competitors.

The announcement next week will form the centrepiece of a ten-year industrial strategy under which the government provide bespoke support for sectors that are seen as critical for the UK’s long-term growth.

The standing charges industries such as steel, ceramics and chemicals pay for their electricity supply will fall by up to 90%, saving them hundreds of millions of pounds a year.

But sources said that Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, and Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, wanted to go further and extend the support to other industries that are heavy electricity users but are currently ineligible for support.

They are launching a consultation to extend subsidised power to other key growth sectors such as AI databases and advanced manufacturing that are not currently covered by the existing scheme and cost the government several billion pounds.

This would mean firms being exempt from paying towards the costs of the government’s renewable energy policies — bringing the UK into line with others that largely fund the upfront costs of transitioning to net zero through general taxation.

…Britain has some of the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world, according to 2023 data from the International Energy Agency. Since 2021, the average electricity price for UK non-domestic users has increased to 75% higher than the average price at the start of 2021.

UK firms currently pay about 25p per kilowatt hour for power compared with just 17p in France and Germany. Compared with the United States, prices are almost three times higher.

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16 billion Apple, Facebook, Google and other passwords leaked; act now • Forbes

Davey Winder:

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If you thought that my May 23 report, confirming the leak of login data totaling an astonishing 184 million compromised credentials, was frightening, I hope you are sitting down now. Researchers have just confirmed what is also certainly the largest data breach ever, with an almost incredulous 16 billion login credentials, including passwords, exposed. As part of an ongoing investigation that started at the beginning of the year, the researchers have postulated that the massive password leak is the work of multiple infostealers. Here’s what you need to know and do.

Password compromise is no joke; it leads to account compromise and that leads to, well, the compromise of most everything you hold dear in this technological-centric world we live in. It’s why Google is telling billions of users to replace their passwords with much secure passkeys. It’s why the FBI is warning people not to click on links in SMS messages. It’s why stolen passwords are up for sale, in their millions, on the dark web to anyone with the very little amount of cash required to purchase them. And it’s why this latest revelation is, frankly, so darn concerning for everyone.

According to Vilius Petkauskas at Cybernews, whose researchers have been investigating the leakage since the start of the year, “30 exposed datasets containing from tens of millions to over 3.5 billion records each” have been discovered. In total, Petkauskas has confirmed, the number of compromised records has now hit 16 billion. …These collections of login credentials, these databases stuffed full of compromised passwords, comprise what is thought to be the largest such leak in history.

The 16 billion strong leak, housed in a number ion supermassive datasets, includes billions of login credentials from social media, VPNs, developer portals and user accounts for all the major vendors. Remarkably, I am told that none of these datasets have been reported as leaked previously, this is all new data. Well, almost none: the 184 million password database I mentioned at the start of the article is the only exception.

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In general, you may as well assume that any password you use on the web (banks and very large companies such as Apple, Facebook and Google excepted) is compromised as soon as you (or your password manager) composes it. Which is why for anything that matters you want 2FA, or a passkey.

Also, if anyone’s counting, there are only around 8 billion people on the planet.
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Front brake lights could significantly prevent road crashes • Cosmos Magazine

Coco Veldkamp:

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What if a simple addition to your car—an extra brake light on the front—could prevent thousands of collisions?

That’s the question behind a new study led by Ernst Tomasch, a road safety expert at Graz University of Technology in Austria.

The team analysed real-world crash data and accident reconstructions to test the idea, and the results are striking.

The study, published in Vehicles, suggests that adding a forward-facing brake light—visible to oncoming or crossing traffic—could cut collisions by up to a fifth. At intersections, where vehicles are prone to stopping and starting abruptly, the extra signal could give drivers just enough time to react.

“This visual signal can significantly reduce the reaction time of other road users,” says Tomasch. “This reduces the distance needed to stop and ultimately the likelihood of an accident.”

While rear brake lights have long been standard, front brake lights are virtually absent from today’s vehicles, with only limited field tests—such as one in Slovakia—trialling them in real traffic. Because of this, the researchers relied on detailed reconstructions of accidents from Austria’s Central Database for In-Depth Accident Study and simulated how events may have played out differently if the vehicles involved had been fitted with front brake lights.

The analysis revealed that, depending on the reaction time of road users, 7.5% to 17% of collisions would have been prevented by an additional brake light on the front of the vehicle.

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It might take people a while to get used to them, but there was a time when reversing lights were a shocking, totally unnecessary-seeming addition. They aren’t actually mandatory, but they’ve been on British cars since 1989.
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Tech execs just joined the Army. Boot camp not required • Business Insider

Kelsey Baker:

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Four top tech execs from OpenAI, Meta, and Palantir have just joined the US Army — no obstacle courses, shouted orders, or grueling marches required.

The Army Reserve has commissioned these senior tech leaders to serve as midlevel officers, skipping tradition to pursue transformation. The newcomers won’t attend any current version of the military’s most basic and ingrained rite of passage— boot camp.

Instead, they’ll be ushered in through express training that Army leaders are still hashing out, Col. Dave Butler, a spokesman for the chief of staff of the Army, said in a phone interview with Business Insider.

“They’ll do marksmanship training, physical training, they’ll learn the Army rank structure and history, and uniforms,” Butler explained. He said that “you could think of it as a pilot” of the boot-camp-lite plans, adding that the new soldiers were a part of the Army’s larger effort to rapidly modernize.

The execs — Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, the chief technology officer of Meta; Kevin Weil, the chief product officer at OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab who was formerly the chief research officer for OpenAI — are joining the Army as lieutenant colonels as part of an effort to turbocharge tech innovation and adoption, according to an Army press statement.

The service’s decision to allow the four to skip “direct commissioning” boot camp, a shortened version of regular officer boot camp, is unusual, though not without historical precedence, Butler said.

“The Army has allowed the direct commission of civilians since 1861 to bring experts with critically needed skills into the force,” he wrote in an email to BI.

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Army rank structure! Also, no ball pool or bean bags or lunch massages or onsite Michelin chefs. Damn your boot camps, aren’t they suffering enough?
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How people decided it’s OK to wear AirPods anywhere, anytime • WSJ

Lauren Weber:

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Human communication was awkward enough before AirPods and their non-Apple brethren became so ubiquitous, but at least some pockets of life seemed off-limits. Not anymore.

Dan Weisel, a family medicine doctor, has noticed more patients keeping their earbuds in even after he walks into the examination rooms at his practice in St. Louis.

“My initial reaction is, that’s rude because it seems like you’re not giving me your full attention,” he said. Then he wonders if the person might use them as hearing aids, or have a diagnosis like autism where earbuds help control sensory overload. Most of the time, Weisel has no idea if the devices are serving a legitimate purpose or simply delivering the latest episode of “Smartless.”

Most confusing of all is never knowing whether the wireless earbuds are on or off. “It’s the unknown that’s sort of uncomfortable.”

Some patients see it differently. Joseph Montes, a 55-year-old information-security manager who lives near Boca Raton, Fla., keeps his AirPods in all day. “They’re always off, but if someone calls, I can answer,” he said. The devices are such a constant that when he visited the doctor recently, Montes didn’t understand why the nurse was giving him “dagger eyes.” He finally got the hint when the doctor came in. Montes sheepishly pulled one AirPod out of his ear. “I’m a man, I’m stupid,” he said.

Still, he worries about removing the earbuds even briefly. “If you take it out and put it in your pocket, it can end up in the laundry and you’ve just washed a $250 piece of technology,” he said.

In many cases, it’s workers who now find it totally acceptable to do their very customer-facing jobs while other voices fill their ears. Last month Josh Hammons discovered an AirPod at the bottom of the bag of food he’d just picked up from a restaurant drive-through.

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I wear AirPods while walking my dog; I’ll pause what I’m listening to for brief conversations, but for people I know, or conversations that matter, I’ll take them out. It’s a form of politeness, I think: it signals very clearly that I’m giving you my full attention. (Thanks Karsten L for the link.)
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The mysteriously minimal 11th of the month • David R Hagen

David Hagen:

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On November 28th, 2012, Randall Munroe published an xkcd comic that was a calendar in which the size of each date was proportional to how often each date is referenced by its ordinal name (e.g. “October 14th”) in the Google Ngrams database since 2000. Most of the large days are pretty much what you would expect: July 4th, December 25th, the 1st of every month, the last day of most months, and of course a September 11th that shoves its neighbors into the margins. There are not many days that seem to be smaller than the typical size. February 29th is a tiny speck, for instance.

But if you stare at the comic long enough, you may get the impression that the 11th of most months is unusually small. The title text of the comic concurs, reading “In months other than September, the 11th is mentioned substantially less often than any other date. It’s been that way since long before 9/11 and I have no idea why.” After digging into the raw data, I believe I have figured out why.

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Absorbing read. You won’t guess why it happens – which will make the revelation that much more enjoyable.
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‘City killer’ asteroid may hit the Moon in December 2032 and threaten satellites around Earth • Times of India via MSN

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Asteroid 2024 YR4 is not expected to strike Earth, but scientists are increasingly worried that it could collide with the Moon.

According to the experts at the University of Western Ontario caution that such an impact would hurl more than 100 million kilograms of debris into space. This fast-moving lunar material can be a grave hazard to satellites in low Earth orbit employed for communication, GPS, and climate observation and even put astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) at risk. With increased satellite networks and human space activity, the severity of the implications of a Moon impact by asteroid 2024 YR4 calls for immediate international consideration and readiness.

When 2024 YR4 was initially monitored [back in January/February], it seemed to be a potential threat to Earth. But subsequent observation eliminated a direct Earth impact. Instead, simulations now indicate a higher chance of it striking the Moon, with probabilities increasing from 3.8% to 4.3%. While that seems low, it is sufficient to lead scientists to track the asteroid’s path closely and simulate likely effects.

If the asteroid does hit the Moon, the released energy might be the equivalent of 6.5 megatons of TNT – more than 400 times the Hiroshima bomb (0.015 megatons). A 1-kilometer-wide crater would probably be created by the impact, likely somewhere in the southern hemisphere of the Moon.

The collision could shoot approximately 100 million kilograms of lunar rock and dust into space-debris that will not simply disappear into space. Of greatest concern is that approximately 10% of the lunar debris could make its way towards Earth within days after impact. Most of it will be minuscule, but particles greater than 0.1mm can be hazardous enough to penetrate or harm satellites and spacecraft. These pieces will remain in orbit, risking long-term damage to space-based infrastructure.

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Will nobody rid us of this potentially turbulent asteroid? Always an annoyance to have to consider impacts with the Moon as well as the Earth.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The arrival of AI capable of writing screenplays isn’t far away, according to one industry analyst. CC-licensed photo by Joe Flood on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

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

LA residents foil ICE raids using Amazon Ring’s Neighborhood Watch app • Forbes

Thomas Brewster:

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Neighbors, an app for Ring doorbell users, is typically used by people looking for lost pets or missing packages. But last week, horrified by ICE raids in and around Los Angeles, residents started using the Amazon app to alert their communities to immigration agents carrying out searches and arrests. “It was very grassroots and it’s become a tool being used by people just trying to help keep neighbors safe,” said Nic, a Southern California resident whose full name isn’t being published to protect her safety.

While social media sites and Nextdoor have been used to highlight ICE activity across the U.S. in recent days, Neighbors has been especially popular, with dozens of posts reviewed by Forbes over the last week. It allows anyone to post on safety issues in their locale and users can choose to include footage from their Ring doorbell cameras where relevant. As one community activist wrote on Facebook, “Ring Camera is saving so many families’ lives and proving citizens are being harassed and beat up.”

People turned to Ring in particular around the L.A. protests, which began on June 7 in response to ICE mass arresting immigrants and became a political flashpoint as Trump called in the National Guard and sent in Marines to clamp down on demonstrators. While Trump has slightly tempered the aggression of his immigration policies in recent days, saying he would pause “work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture . . . restaurants and operating hotels,” per the New York Times, big cities like L.A. would continue to be the focus of ICE’s efforts.

Neighbors users remained vigilant in posts reviewed by Forbes over the last week, which featured photos and videos of ICE agents, including their locations and, in numerous cases, their vehicle type. Some posts had information on ICE agents near stores like Dollar Tree, McDonald’s, Starbucks and Target.

…Forbes spoke to three people who used the Amazon-owned app over the last week around the L.A. protests. “My neighborhood is very diverse, I don’t know everyone but many of us are people of color and I assume, some are immigrants, possibly undocumented,” Nic said. “Even as an American born citizen whose family goes back generations on both sides, I’m nervous about the possibility of coming across ICE.”

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Surveillance tech works both ways. It is nice – well, encouraging – to see people using technology in imaginative ways to keep their society cohered, rather than letting it tear them apart.
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Was Iran really developing nuclear weapons? • Financial Times

Andrew England:

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Armed with a cartoon-style drawing of a bomb with a lit fuse, Benjamin Netanyahu took to the UN General Assembly podium in 2012 to try to convince the world of the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear programme.

The Israeli prime minister said the Islamic republic was enriching uranium at such a pace that it was on track to be able to produce sufficient fissile material for a nuclear weapon within months. With a marker pen, he drew a red line across the bomb to highlight the stage of the process where Iran had to be stopped, warning that “the future of the world” was at stake.

Fast-forward 13 years, and Netanyahu says Tehran has moved far beyond his red line by establishing a programme to develop nuclear weapons and is using that as his prime pretext for Israel’s devastating assault on Iran.

“In recent months, Iran has taken steps that it has never taken before — steps to weaponise this enriched uranium,” the prime minister said as the first Israeli bombs fell in the early hours of Friday.

But experts say that while Iran has been dramatically increasing its stockpile of uranium enriched to close to weapons-grade, there is no evidence it has decided to build a nuclear bomb.

“Netanyahu is always keen on dangling evidence in front of cameras, whether it’s nuclear secrets or pieces of Iranian drones,” said Ali Vaez, an Iran expert at Crisis Group. “But he offered no such evidence for that claim.”

…Tehran had for more than a year reached “near-zero breakout time”, giving it the capacity to produce sufficient fissile material required for several nuclear bombs within days, said Kelsey Davenport of the Arms Control Association. But it would still need to develop the technology to build weapons.

“The actual weaponisation process, that’s more challenging to accurately estimate. But it likely would have taken months, possibly up to a year, to convert weapons-grade uranium to fit it with an explosive package, then actually be able to deliver it via a missile,” Davenport said. “So there was no imminent threat of a nuclear bomb.”

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The answer to the headline’s question is: maybe? There’s a dramatic graphic showing the number of (known) centrifuges staying at a low, static level up to the JCPOA in 2016, and then ramping up in November 2020 – though Trump had withdrawn from the deal in May 2018. It looks like Biden’s election persuaded Iran it could do what it want.
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Why is Google still in one piece? The “terminating a monopoly” problem • BIG

Matt Stoller on the peculiar squeamishness of the winners of antitrust cases against Google:

»

let’s look at the remedy proposal. The basics of the case are that Google bought up all the shelf space for search engines, aka paid Apple and browsers like Mozilla to be the default search provider instead of any of its rivals. It created Chrome so it could control that channel of distribution, and it bought Android for the same reason. The judge agreed with the government that doing these activities was unlawful monopoly maintenance.

To fix this situation, the DOJ asked to remove the defaults that automatically place Google as the search choice for most browsers, an end to search-related payments, a spinoff of the Chrome browser which was itself a big search access point, as well as regulation of the mobile operating system Android. It also asked for syndication of Google’s search results and data to approved rivals, which is a way of forcing Google to not enjoy the illegal “fruits” of its monopoly by offering rivals some access to the secret sauce.

It’s not a bad remedy, but it is *not* suggesting cloning Google search or breaking it apart into multiple search engines. The remedy, in other words, is not designed to terminate Google’s monopoly, it is structured to eliminate the barriers to entry in search, in the hopes that rivals will come in and challenge Google. That’s sort of, I don’t know, weird. Google just lost, which means that the plaintiff is given greater weight in its remedial proposal and the court is granted with discretion to fashion a remedy that works. Here, we are not just dealing with a one-off bad act, but over a decade of bad behavior in an industry with massive scale and feedback effects. The court should err on the side of a remedy that works, not err on the side of avoiding disruption to the defendant.

«

Though we know that the next revolution isn’t search; it’s an open question whether anyone could make much money from a new search engine now. The branding race finished long ago. Now it’s about AI, which perhaps replaces search. A smart move would forestall Google being dominant there.
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How AI tools are already changing the jobs of film professionals today • Stephen Follows

Stephen Follows:

»

We’ll go through seven different areas, including:

1: Screenwriting: AI can generate story ideas, produce outlines, draft dialogue, suggest rewrites, provide feedback on structure and market fit, and automatically tag scripts for production breakdowns. This means screenwriting may becomes more about curating and editing machine output, as well as managing floods of new iterations.

2: Packaging: AI can help turn a half-baked concept into a fully fleshed-out proposition overnight, identifying your audience and generating visuals, decks, and materials to make a project feel inevitable.

3: Financing: AI-driven platforms claim to model budgets, simulate box office, and rank casting choices by market value. Whether it’s real insight or risk cosplay, producers are being offered more data than ever to back up the numbers.

4: Legal: Producers with no legal background are leaning on AI to summarise contracts, generate agreements, and flag missing clauses. While risky, it’s easy to see the appeal when legal professionals aren’t exactly queuing up to work for back-end points.

5: Pre-production: Automated tools extract script elements, generate shooting schedules, match crew and cast to projects, scout locations using databases, and help directors visualise shot lists. Planning becomes faster and more integrated, but demands greater clarity and earlier creative decisions.

6: Production: Ironically, the bit that still needs people in a room with a camera may be the least affected in the short term. But streamers are already using patented tech to tag, track, and pre-process footage in real time.

7: Post-production: From editing and VFX to dialogue clean-up and synthetic voice work, post is where AI is having the fastest impact. Some of the biggest shakeups may come in dubbing and localisation, where traditional workflows are looking increasingly outdated.

«

And then he goes into detail. It’s dramatic.
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Turning coalmines into solar energy plants “could add 300GW of renewables by 2030” • The Guardian

Damien Gayle:

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Turning recently closed coalmines into solar energy plants could add almost 300GW of renewable energy by 2030, converting derelict wastelands to productive use, according to a new report.

In a first of its kind analysis, researchers from Global Energy Monitor (GEM) identified 312 surface coalmines closed since 2020 around the world, and 134 likely to close by the end of the decade, together covering 5,820 sq km (2,250 sq miles) – a land area nearly the size of Palestine.

Strip mining turns terrains into wastelands, polluted and denuded of topsoil. But if they were filled with solar panels and developed into energy plants, the report claims, they could generate enough energy to power as big and power hungry a nation as Germany.

Cheng Cheng Wu, the project manager for the energy transition tracker at GEM, said: “The legacy of coal is written into the land, but that legacy does not have to define the future. The coalmine to solar transition is under way, and this potential is ready to be unlocked in major coal producers like Australia, the US, Indonesia and India.

“Repurposing mines for solar development offers a rare chance to bring together land restoration, local job creation, and clean energy deployment in a single strategy. With the right choices, the same ground that powered the industrial era can help power the climate solutions we now urgently need.”

Once lauded as exploiting the “buried sunshine” of the past, burning coal for energy is gradually being phased out around the world because of its high carbon emissions. At the same time, solar energy has become more accessible and affordable.

In 2024, 599GW of solar energy capacity was installed around the world, and there are more than 2,000GW of utility scale solar projects in development, GEM said.

«

Can’t argue that it’s lovely farmland, can you?
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YouTube Shorts now averages 200 billion daily views • The Wrap

Kayla Cobb:

»

YouTube has crossed another major milestone. The platform’s short-form video offering YouTube Shorts is now averaging 200 billion daily views, according to CEO Neal Mohan, who shared the news during his keynote at the 2025 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

This marks a roughly 186% increase in daily viewership compared to a year ago. In March of 2024, YouTube reported that its Shorts offering was averaging 70 billion daily views since its launch in 2021.

During his keynote, Mohan also revealed that viewers are watching over 1 billion hours of YouTube on their TVs daily. As staggering as that number is, it’s not entirely surprising — in May, YouTube led Nielsen’s The Gauge report for the fourth consecutive month in a row, meaning the platform was the most-watched of any streaming service or channel. YouTube accounted for 12.5% of all TV viewership during that month, the largest share of overall viewership any streamer or channel The Gauge has ever reported.

“For more than half of the top 100 most-watched YouTube channels in the world, TV is their most-watched screen,” Mohan said.

«

Is this scary? It feels a little scary. And then he says that Veo 3 is going to be available there too. AI slop has already taken over Facebook; YouTube Shorts is soon to join them. (Thanks Greg B for the link.)
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Mocked Trump Mobile yanks coverage map that ignored Trump renaming Gulf of Mexico • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

The Trump Organization’s rollout of Trump Mobile on Monday—a new wireless service using Trump’s image to sell smartphones—was notably messy. Not only did the website reportedly glitch while processing preorders, but soon after its launch, at least one glaring mistake on the website had to be quickly changed.

Critics on social media were quick to point out that the Trump Mobile coverage map used the Gulf of Mexico instead of using Trump’s controversial new name for the body of water, the Gulf of America, Reuters reported. Trump has been sued for penalizing AP News for failing to adopt the label, so a wireless service bearing his name would be expected to fall in line. Mocked with screenshots, the Trump Organization yanked the coverage map within hours of launching the site, breaking links and generating errors on Tuesday, confirming that “the page could not be found.”

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So inconvenient when this happens.
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Met Office report details rising likelihood of UK hot days • Met Office

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In July 2022, the UK experienced its first recorded temperature above 40°C, when Coningsby in Lincolnshire reached 40.3°C. This unprecedented temperature formed part of Europe’s warmest summer on record. There were significant impacts, including wildfires, disruptions to transport and power systems, and increased mortality. 

The approach taken in the study, called UNSEEN, uses a global climate model to create a large set of plausible climate outcomes in the current climate. This allows an assessment of current risk and how extremes have changed over the last few decades.  

Dr Gillian Kay, Senior Scientist at the Met Office, and lead author explains: “The chance of exceeding 40°C has been rapidly increasing, and it is now over 20 times more likely than it was in the 1960s. Because our climate continues to warm, we can expect the chance to keep rising. We estimate a 50-50 chance of seeing a 40°C day again in the next 12 years. We also found that temperatures several degrees higher than we saw in July 2022 are possible in today’s climate.” 

… The study also examines the length of heatwaves. Dr Nick Dunstone, Met Office Science Fellow and co-author of the study, said: “The well-known hot summer of 1976 had more than a fortnight above 28°C, which is a key heatwave threshold in southeast England. Our study finds that in today’s climate such conditions could persist for a month or more.”

«

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England needs more hosepipe bans and smart water meters • BBC News

Justin Rowlatt:

»

England faces huge future water shortages and needs a “continued and sustained effort” to reduce demand, including more hosepipe bans and ‘smart’ water meters, warns the Environment Agency.

The watchdog says that without dramatic action, England, which uses 14 billion litres of water a day, will have a daily shortage of more than six billion litres by 2055. It says more homes will need meters reporting how much water is used in real time and in future prices may need to rise when supplies are tight.

The warning came with droughts already declared in Yorkshire and the north-west of England this year following what the Met Office says is the warmest and driest Spring in more than half a century.

The EA made the warning in its five yearly National Framework for Water Resources report. It said 5 billion litres would be needed to supply the public and a further 1 billion for agriculture and energy users.

The EA said customers in England need to cut their water use by 2.5 billion litres a day by 2055 – down from an average of around 140 litres per person per day to 110 litres per day. It warns future economic growth will be likely be compromised as water becomes scarcer and has already highlighted how water shortages in parts of Sussex, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Norfolk have limited housing and business growth.

…Professor Hannah Cloke, a hydrologist at Reading University, believes we need to change our attitude towards water. “We really don’t value water,” she says. “We need to think about it as a really, really precious resource. Everybody should be looking after water and conserving it and thinking about what they do when they turn on the tap and when they choose not to.”

«

More people means we need more water, but the weather isn’t going to cooperate.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Following the, er, success of its previous versions Snap(chat) plans to launch new smart glasses in 2026. CC-licensed photo by vivoandcapitone on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Side-eye. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Facial recognition error sees woman accused of theft • BBC News

Kelly Foran & Rumeana Jahangir:

»

A woman who was wrongly accused of shoplifting toilet roll due to an apparent mix-up with a facial recognition system was left “fuming” after being ejected from two Home Bargains stores.

Danielle Horan was escorted from the branches in Greater Manchester in May and June and initially given no explanation. She later discovered she was falsely accused of stealing about £10 worth of items after her profile was added to a facial recognition watchlist to prevent shoplifting.

Retail security firm Facewatch, which provides the technology, said: “We acknowledge and understand how distressing this experience must have been and the retailer has since undertaken additional staff training.”

The firm said a review of the incident later showed the items had been paid for.

Home Bargains has declined to comment.

Ms Horan, who runs a makeup business, said she at first “thought it was a joke” when the manager of Home Bargains in Regent Road, Salford, asked her to leave the shop on 24 May. She said: “Everyone was looking at me. All the customers at the till and I was like ‘for what?'”

After her protestations, the manager advised her to contact Facewatch directly but Ms Horan said she had “no joy” from her messages to the firm, or to Home Bargains. She later visited another Home Bargains store in Fallowfield, Manchester, with her 81-year-old mother on 4 June.

“As soon as I stepped my foot over the threshold of the door, they were radioing each other and they all surrounded me and were like ‘you need to leave the store’,” she said. “My heart sank and I was anxious and bothered for my mum as well because she was stressed. But I was ready for it because of what happened the previous time. I just fought my corner and said ‘you need to tell me why’.”

It was only after repeated emails to both Facewatch and Home Bargains that she eventually found there had been an allegation of theft of about £10 worth of toilet rolls on 8 May.

«

“Additional staff training”, eh. Such a lovely euphemism for taking some minimum wage employees out the back and giving them the hairdryer treatment. Facewatch is the company which runs the software that does the matching: notable how it offers no apology. I’d think Ms Horan probably could sue, though Home Bargains and Facewatch are finger pointing at each other.

It never happens this way in the films like Minority Report. There, they always get it right – too much so. (Also, aren’t the real shoplifters usually wearing masks and completely indifferent to staff?)
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Transparent peer review to be extended to all of Nature’s research papers • Nature

»

Since 2020, Nature has offered authors the opportunity to have their peer-review file published alongside their paper. Our colleagues at Nature Communications have been doing so since 2016. Until now, Nature authors could opt in to this process of transparent peer review. From 16 June, however, new submissions of manuscripts that are published as research articles in Nature will automatically include a link to the reviewers’ reports and author responses.

It means that, over time, more Nature papers will include a peer-review file. The identity of the reviewers will remain anonymous, unless they choose otherwise — as happens now. But the exchanges between the referees and the authors will be accessible to all. Our aim in doing so is to open up what many see as the ‘black box’ of science, shedding light on how a research paper is made. This serves to increase transparency and (we hope) to build trust in the scientific process.

As we have written previously, a published research paper is the result of an extensive conversation between authors and reviewers, guided by editors. These discussions, which can last for months, aim to improve a study’s clarity and the robustness of its conclusions. It is a hugely important process that should receive increased recognition, including acknowledgement of the reviewers involved, if they choose to be named. For early-career researchers, there is great value in seeing inside a process that is key to their career development. Making peer-reviewer reports public also enriches science communication: it’s a chance to add to the ‘story’ of how a result is arrived at, or a conclusion supported, even if it includes only the perspectives of authors and reviewers. The full story of a paper is, of course, more complex, involving many other contributors.

«

Hope other journals start taking this up. As much as anything, it might make plain the peculiarities in choice that some make over language – often the biggest gatekeeper on some topics.
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Strange radio pulses detected coming from ice in Antarctica • Phys.org

Marina Naumova:

»

A cosmic particle detector in Antarctica has detected a series of bizarre signals that defy the current understanding of particle physics, according to an international research group that includes scientists from Penn State. The unusual radio pulses were detected by the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) experiment, a range of instruments flown on balloons high above Antarctica that are designed to detect radio waves from cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere.

The goal of the experiment is to gain insight into distant cosmic events by analyzing signals that reach the Earth. Rather than reflecting off the ice, the signals—a form of radio waves—appeared to be coming from below the horizon, an orientation that cannot be explained by the current understanding of particle physics and may hint at new types of particles or interactions previously unknown to science, the team said.

The researchers published their results in the journal Physical Review Letters.

“The radio waves that we detected were at really steep angles, like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice,” said Stephanie Wissel, associate professor of physics, astronomy and astrophysics who worked on the ANITA team searching for signals from elusive particles called neutrinos.

«

Spooky particles! In Antarctica! It sounds like the first two pages of a science fiction or horror film. Perhaps both. Fingers crossed it isn’t The Thing.
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Snap plans Specs AR glasses release for 2026 • The Verge

Alex Heath:

»

Snap plans to start selling its first pair of augmented reality glasses to the public in 2026.

The coming release is part of CEO Evan Spiegel’s decade-plus bet on what comes after the smartphone. He teased it Tuesday onstage at the Augmented World Expo, an augmented and virtual reality developer conference in Long Beach, California.

“Ever since we launched the developer Spectacles nine months ago, folks have been asking, ‘Hey, when’s the public release coming?’” Spiegel tells me ahead of his keynote. Announcing that they’re coming next year gives developers ample time to “think about their timeline for building and polishing the experiences they have,” he says. “And obviously, that’s really important.”

While he’s resistant to offer more details about the hardware, people who have seen prototypes of next year’s glasses tell me they’re noticeably thinner and lighter than last year’s version, which was only available to developers who applied to rent them. They also boast a wider field of view, allowing virtual graphics to fill more of the lenses.

Spiegel won’t tell me how much the glasses will cost, though he does let slip that they’ll be priced less than Apple’s $3,499 Vision Pro. (I expect them to cost much less than that, but still considerably more than the roughly $300 Meta Ray-Ban glasses.)

«

Seems like the market for smart glasses is going to get very crowded over the next couple of years. Not sure I see Snap coming out of that well, though. Hardware is expensive to make and extremely difficult to make a profit on.
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‘F1’ and Apple’s movie strategy: inside Tim Cook and Lewis Hamilton’s big bet • Variety

Cynthia Littleton:

»

“F1” marks a big milestone for Apple in its expansion over the past half-dozen years of making movies and TV shows. Apple is banking on Kosinski and the team behind 2022’s hit “Top Gun: Maverick” to deliver a four-quadrant smash that will be measured as much for its impact on pop culture and filmmaking as it will be in box office receipts. In a best-case scenario, “F1” becomes the kind of sensation that launches a million memes and is the engine that accelerates the popularity of Formula 1 racing in the U.S. once and for all.

“F1” has been a passion project for Eddy Cue, the architect of Apple’s expansion into producing movies and TV shows. He’s an Apple veteran and racing buff who sits on the board of directors of Ferrari, Hamilton’s racing team. His dreams for the film are loftier even than a nine-figure opening weekend: “I hope that when most people go see the movie, they walk out wanting to be a race car driver,” says Cue.

In Cook’s view, “F1” is the perfect vehicle to test Apple’s power to affect culture with the soft power of a broad-appeal movie rather than through the hardware of its computers and smartphones. 

“To bring something to life that would be authentic to the sport, that would tell a great story as well about the ups and downs of life — ‘F1’ hit on all the things,” Cook says. “And then we could bring some things that are uniquely Apple to the movie, like our camera technology. And we plan to have the whole of the company support it as well — our retail operation and everything. So it was something that we could get the entire company around. It feels wonderful to be a part of it.”

…When pressed about what Apple’s investments in movies and TV shows have meant for the company as a whole, Cook explains that Apple is at heart “a toolmaker,” delivering computers and other devices that enable creativity in users. (This vision for the company, and the “toolmaker” term specifically, was first articulated by Jobs in the early 1980s.) “We’re a toolmaker,” Cook says again. “We make tools for creative people to empower them to do things they couldn’t do before. So we were doing lots of business with Hollywood well before we were in the TV business.

“We studied it for years before we decided to do [Apple TV+]. I know there’s a lot of different views out there about why we’re into it. We’re into it to tell great stories, and we want it to be a great business as well. That’s why we’re into it, just plain and simple.”

«

Of course Cook gets the line about the camera in there. And can’t admit that Apple worried about getting left behind so is trying to get into streaming – but at least has made a better fist of it than it did with virtual reality in the Vision Pro.
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Instagram tests a reposts feature • TechCrunch

Aisha Malik:

»

Instagram is testing the ability for users to repost posts, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Monday. The move doesn’t come as a surprise, as the social network was spotted developing the feature as far back as 2022.

Some users have reported seeing the feature on their accounts, with one noting that users will be able to repost their own content in addition to other users’ posts.

Of course, not everyone will be on board if Instagram decides to roll out the change officially, especially since it would add yet another content format to a platform already overcrowded with posts, Stories, Reels, Notes, DMs, ads, and more.

On the other hand, some people will welcome the change since it will allow them to share and amplify interesting content like they already do on other platforms.

Although you can currently share someone’s post in your Story, this upcoming repost functionality will let you reshare the post in Instagram’s Feed. In addition, some people currently use workarounds and third-party apps to repost content, so an official reshare feature would get rid of the need to find alternatives.

«

This would be a pivotal moment. Instagram has never, ever had a method of making specific individual pieces of content go viral; though you could put posts into Stories, those were limited in visibility.

Once a post can be shown across networks, Instagram is going to be a very different place.
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UK watchdog fines 23andMe for ‘profoundly damaging’ data breach • BBC News

Liv McMahon:

»

DNA testing firm 23andMe has been fined £2.31m by a UK watchdog over a data breach in 2023 which affected thousands of people.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said the company – which has since filed for bankruptcy – failed to put adequate measures in place to secure sensitive user data prior to the incident.

“This was a profoundly damaging breach that exposed sensitive personal information, family histories, and even health conditions,” said Information Commissioner John Edwards.

23andMe is set to be sold to a new owner, TTAM Research Institute, which said it had “made several binding commitments to enhance protections for customer data and privacy.”

23andMe’s users were targeted by what is known as a “credential stuffing” attack in October 2023. This saw hackers use passwords exposed in previous breaches to access 23andMe accounts for which people had used the same or similar credentials.

They were able to access 14,000 individual accounts – and, through those, download information relating to about 6.9m people linked to as possible relations on the site.

According to the ICO, this included access to personal data belonging to 155,592 UK residents, such as names, year of birth, geographical information, profile images, race, ethnicity, health reports and family trees. Stolen data did not include DNA records.

«

That’s going to be a fun Day One bill for Anne Wojcicki, its new owner.
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Makers of air fryers and smart speakers told to respect users’ right to privacy • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

»

Makers of air fryers, smart speakers, fertility trackers and smart TVs have been told to respect people’s rights to privacy by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

People have reported feeling powerless to control how data is gathered, used and shared in their own homes and on their bodies.

After reports of air fryers designed to listen in to their surroundings and public concerns that digitised devices collect an excessive amount of personal information, the data protection regulator has issued its first guidance on how people’s personal information should be handled.

It is demanding that manufacturers and data handlers ensure data security, are transparent with consumers and ensure the regular deletion of collected information.

Stephen Almond, the executive director for regulatory risk at the ICO, said: “Smart products know a lot about us: who we live with, what music we like, what medication we are taking and much more.

“They are designed to make our lives easier, but that doesn’t mean they should be collecting an excessive amount of information … we shouldn’t have to choose between enjoying the benefits of smart products and our own privacy.

“We all rightly have a greater expectation of privacy in our own homes, so we must be able to trust smart products are respecting our privacy, using our personal information responsibly and only in ways we would expect.”

The new guidance cites a wide range of devices that are broadly known as part of the “internet of things”, which collect data that needs to be carefully handled.

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Air fryers? Air fryers? Indeed: back in November, the Consumers Association raised concerns about them.
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Oxford Street will be pedestrianised as soon as possible, says London mayor • The Guardian

Gwyn Topham:

»

Sadiq Khan has said he will pedestrianise Oxford Street “as quickly as possible”, after two in three respondents to a public consultation backed plans to ban traffic from London’s central shopping area.

The mayor’s office said there was “overwhelming public and business support” for the proposals to regenerate the street, whose lustre is slowly returning as department stores muscle back among the sweet and souvenir shops of dubious repute.

More than 6,600 businesses, individuals and groups responded to the formal consultation on plans announced last year that included full pedestrianisation of a 0.7-mile strip west from Great Portland Street; improving the area; and allowing street cafes and outdoor events.

Khan said: “Oxford Street has suffered over many years, so urgent action is needed to give our nation’s high street a new lease of life.

“It’s clear that the vast majority of Londoners and major businesses back our exciting plans, so I’m pleased to confirm that we will now be moving ahead as quickly as possible.”

The Labour government has said it will approve a mayoral development corporation (MDC) to push through plans, after previous attempts to pedestrianise the street were knocked back by Westminster city council. An MDC could now be established in early 2026, including representation from the council, which even now under Labour control has opposed the scheme.

Cllr Adam Hug, the leader of the council, said: “While the mayor’s formal decision today was not the council’s preferred outcome, it is far from unexpected, and it is now important for Oxford Street’s future to move forward together.”

«

The road is a key artery for buses and taxis – who are as far from gruntled as it’s possible to be – but retailers, unexpectedly, like the idea. It would be a radical transformation of an iconic street.
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Minnesota shooting suspect allegedly used data broker sites to find targets’ addresses • WIRED

Lily Hay Newman:

»

The man who allegedly assassinated a Democratic Minnesota state representative, murdered her husband, and shot a state senator and his wife at their homes in a violent spree early Saturday morning may have gotten their addresses or other personal details from online data broker services, according to court documents.

Suspect Vance Boelter, 57, is accused of shooting Minnesota representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman, in their home on Saturday. The couple died from their injuries. Authorities claim the suspect also shot state senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette Hoffman in their home earlier that night. The pair are currently recovering and are “incredibly lucky to be alive,” according to a statement from their family.

According to an FBI affidavit, police searched the SUV believed to be the suspect’s and found notebooks that included handwritten lists of “more than 45 Minnesota state and federal public officials, including Representative Hortman’s, whose home address was written next to her name.” According to the same affidavit, one notebook also listed 11 mainstream search platforms for finding people’s home addresses and other personal information, like phone numbers and relatives.

The addresses for both lawmakers targeted on Saturday were readily available. Representative Hortman’s campaign website listed her home address, while Senator Hoffman’s appeared on his legislative webpage, The New York Times reports.

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Is there any chance this will lead to better data protection in the US? Any at all?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The invention of the transistor at Bell Labs was not the first time someone had described such a device, its inventors discovered. CC-licensed photo by Bill Bradford on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. File early, file often. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

The Meta AI app lets you ‘discover’ people’s bizarrely personal chats • WIRED

Kylie Robison:

»

“WHAT COUNTIES [SIC] do younger women like older white men,” a public message from a user on Meta’s AI platform says. “I need details, I’m 66 and single. I’m from Iowa and open to moving to a new country if I can find a younger woman.” The chatbot responded enthusiastically: “You’re looking for a fresh start and love in a new place. That’s exciting!” before suggesting “Mediterranean countries like Spain or Italy, or even countries in Eastern Europe.”

This is just one of many seemingly personal conversations that can be publicly viewed on Meta AI, a chatbot platform that doubles as a social feed and launched in April. Within the Meta AI app, a “discover” tab shows a timeline of other people’s interactions with the chatbot; a short scroll down on the Meta AI website is an extensive collage. While some of the highlighted queries and answers are innocuous—trip itineraries, recipe advice—others reveal locations, telephone numbers, and other sensitive information, all tied to user names and profile photos.

Calli Schroeder, senior counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said in an interview with WIRED that she has seen people “sharing medical information, mental health information, home addresses, even things directly related to pending court cases.”

“All of that’s incredibly concerning, both because I think it points to how people are misunderstanding what these chatbots do or what they’re for and also misunderstanding how privacy works with these structures,” Schroeder says.

It’s unclear whether the users of the app are aware that their conversations with Meta’s AI are public or which users are trolling the platform after news outlets began reporting on it. The conversations are not public by default; users have to choose to share them.

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I’ll go with them not knowing – Facebook/Meta’s designers are making the assumption that everyone has the same understanding of “share” on a button. Some people might interpret it to mean an instruction to the machine to share its insight just with them, the person making the enquiry. Besides which there’s a ton of junk and spam in that tab. It’s a crowded wasteland empty of human thought.
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Dear Microsoft: stop it with Copilot already • Marc D Anderson’s Blog

Marc Anderson:

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Until recently, one of the easiest ways to get “into” Microsoft 365 was to go to Office.com. I’ll readily admit that I never spent any time on the page, mainly because most of my time in Microsoft 365 is spent building sites, pages, libraries, etc.

But Microsoft’s stated intent – stated many times, in fact – was to help you get right back to your work by going to Office.com’s home page. It showed the Office apps for which you were licensed, and more importantly to many people, the files with which you’d recently been working.

[Didn’t know this. But Anderson points out that it has changed, and, as you’d expect, it’s for the worse – Overspill Ed]

…The fact that Microsoft is now forcing people to a page focused on Copilot shows a disconnect from a large portion of their user base. There are several important considerations here.

• First, many organizations simply aren’t ready to do anything with AI or Copilot. Putting Copilot front & center when they haven’t subscribed to Copilot at all is not useful for them
• Second, this is a significant change to a landing page which Microsoft has touted for years as “the place to start your day”. That use case has been removed totally from the page. No recent documents, no apps, no waffle, etc. Sure, there’s an Apps link to the left, but it adds an unnecessary extra click to go where we want to go
• Third, the only way to go from that page to something we’ve recently worked on is to search – encouraging people to use search where the Microsoft Graph was actually being useful before by showing recent work – or by asking Copilot. See my first point
• Finally, by forcing agents on people, we are going to get yet another ungoverned mess. Plus, if you don’t have Copilot licensing or pay-as-you-go enabled, you very quickly hit a dead end with agents. It’s a solution begging for use to invest in it – which is NOT a good look for Microsoft. Forcing people into buying licenses to make a page useful was not the ethos we expected historically from them.

This change to Office.com just one example of Copilot being rammed down the throats of people who may not want it at all, while taking away features people actually used.

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Trump Mobile’s “Made in the USA” T1 is… made in China • Apple Insider

Mike Wuerthele and Malcolm Owen:

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The Trump Organization has launched Trump Mobile and plans to release the T1, a smartphone that it says is “made in USA” at the same time that the iPhone 17 will launch. The problem is, the phone was made in China. Marking ten years after the launch of President Donald Trump’s original presidential campaign, the Trump Organization has decided to launch its own mobile phone network. Dubbed Trump Mobile, it is a network that is being promoted as an All-American service,” and heavily leaning on the Trump brand. Trump Mobile frames itself as a “next-generation wireless provider,” with mentions of it delivering “top-tier connectivity” and “unbeatable value.” All with a “customer-first” approach and an “all-American service.”

…The Trump Mobile offering falls into two main offerings, consisting of the phone plan itself and the smartphone. Neither looks particularly great from a consumer point of view. And that smartphone that the Trump organization claims is made in the US? It’s a cheap Chinese android device available on Amazon for a third of the price with some new plastic slapped on, at which point they called it a day.

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MVNO service – all yours for $47.45 (Trump is/was 47th and 45th president) per month for the mobile network. It’s possible that no artefact will say so clearly “I’m a mug” three years from now.
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‘It’s absolutely f—ed’: Why Google’s new £1bn London office is in crisis • Daily Telegraph

Liam Kelly:

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The crowning glory of Google’s new, massive headquarters in London’s King’s Cross is its rooftop garden. More than 300m long, with hundreds of trees across four stories and a running track, star designer Thomas Heatherwick envisaged it as a haven for the tech giant’s 7,000 staff, as well as bats, bees, birds and butterflies.

At least, it is meant to be the crowning glory. However, delays to the project have meant that, while it is still under construction, the building and its garden have been invaded by foxes. The vulpine skulk has taken advantage of the building’s lack of human occupants, digging burrows in the manicured grass and leaving their droppings around.

“Fox sightings at construction sites are pretty common, and our King’s Cross development is no exception,” a Google spokesperson said after a report on the London Centric website. “While foxes have been occasionally spotted at the site, their appearances have been brief and have had minimal impact on the ongoing construction.”

The foxes, pests though they are, may be the least of Google’s problems. Today, visitors to the construction site are met with the cacophonous sounds of drilling and hammering; the sights of scaffolding and cherry pickers obscuring the view; the constant bustle of workmen coming and going. The 11-storey building, the cost of which has never been confirmed but expected to be well north of £1bn, still appears to be a long way from being completed.

Building site sources tell The Telegraph that all manner of things have gone wrong, from shoddy workmanship that was, in effect, “hidden” because of the vastness of the project to wooden floors that became so saturated with rainwater that they need complete repairs. Much of the ground floor, which is supposed to house shops and other public spaces, remains a shell.

The date for its opening, which was meant to happen last year, has been repeatedly pushed back. “If they get this job done by the end of 2026 it would be a f—ing miracle,” one worker tells me. “I don’t think the people building it know what they are doing.” An electrician says: “They have unlimited money so they throw out ridiculous dates. It’s going to be interesting, but very stressful and long hours.” (Both Google and Heatherwick Studio declined to comment on these claims.)

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WhatsApp is officially getting ads • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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WhatsApp is rolling out ads. In an update on Monday, Meta announced that it will now show ads from businesses through its Stories-like status feature.

The status feature lives within WhatsApp’s “Updates” tab and allows users to share disappearing text, photo, voice notes, or video messages. But now, you might see sponsored content in addition to the updates shared by friends or family members.

Meta had been considering bringing advertising to WhatsApp for years now, an idea its founders were entirely against. Though Meta reversed plans to roll out in-app ads in 2020, WhatsApp head Will Cathcart confirmed in 2023 that the company was still working on an implementation. Last year, Meta made more than $160 billion in ad revenue.

Meta says it will tailor the ads to your interests by using “limited” information, including your country or city, language, the channels you follow, and how you interact with ads on the platform. You can also change your ad preferences from Meta’s Accounts Center if you’ve opted into the hub.

“We’ve been talking about our plans to build a business that does not interrupt your personal chats for years and we believe the Updates tab is the right place for these new features to work,” Meta writes in its update.

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Fine by me as long as they stay there, because I never visit that tab. But I suspect that won’t be sufficient, over time, for Meta.
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Founder of 23andMe buys back company out of bankruptcy auction • Financial Times via Ars Technica

Sujeet Indap:

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Anne Wojcicki has been declared the winner of a bankruptcy auction for 23andMe, the genetics testing start-up she founded, prevailing over a rival bid from Regeneron Pharmaceuticals.

TTAM Research Institute, a non-profit public benefit company also founded by Wojcicki, won the auction with a $305m bid for the 23andMe assets, which will not come with any company liabilities attached.

23andMe filed for bankruptcy in March after rejecting several go-private offers from Wojcicki in recent years. Regeneron was declared the winning bidder in May after the company accepted a $256m bid in a previous auction.

TTAM then accused the debtor and its advisers of prematurely shutting down the May auction before it could put in a higher bid. The company in court filings said it rejected higher bids from TTAM after it could not confirm its ability to raise necessary financing.

TTAM later said it had obtained backing from a “Fortune 500 company with a current market capitalization of more than $400bn and $17bn of cash on hand.”

The federal bankruptcy court in Missouri held additional rounds of bidding on Friday morning to allow TTAM to formally submit a higher bid.

Regeneron had the opportunity to see the “best and final” TTAM bid and make a higher offer, but it declined. It is set to receive a $10m termination fee, according to court filings.

TTAM’s winning offer requires judicial approval, and a court hearing to approve the bid is set for next week.

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So basically all back to square one. With a ton of money spent and now with a ton of DNA profiles stored.
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How common is multiple invention? • Construction Physics

Brian Potter:

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The frequency of multiple invention is a useful thing to know, because it can give us clues about the nature of technological progress. A very low rate of multiple invention suggests that progress might be driven by a small number of “genius” inventors (what we might call the Great Man Theory of technological progress), and that it might be highly historically contingent (if you re-rolled the dice of history, maybe you get a totally new set of inventions and a different technological palette).

A high rate of multiple invention suggests that progress is more a function of broad historical forces (that inventions appear when the conditions are right), and that progress is less contingent (if you re-rolled the dice of history, you’d get a similar progression of inventions). And if the rate of multiple invention is changing over time, perhaps the nature of technological progress is changing as well.

…First, there may be multiple descriptions of the same basic idea. When Bell Labs went to file a patent for the transistor in 1948, it was discovered that physicist Julius Lillienfeld had filed a patent for a similar idea in 1926. Lillienfeld likely never actually built his transistor (it would have almost certainly been impossible to build a working one due to material limitations), but he nevertheless described the concept.

Similarly, concepts for airships were described many years before a working one was built. I counted these descriptions as multiple inventions only if the description included a basic functional mechanism that could have plausibly worked: So Lillienfeld’s patent counts as a multiple invention, but someone idly stating that “it would be great if there was a solid state amplifier” wouldn’t.

…My main takeaway is that the ideas behind inventions are often in some sense “obvious,” or at least not so surprising or unexpected that many people won’t think of them.

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The conclusion isn’t that obvious. But it is interesting.
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Why Israel struck now • The Atlantic

Graeme Wood:

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Membership in the nuclear club—the nine countries known to have nuclear weapons—comes with one incredible perk: near immunity from direct attack, even with conventional weapons, by other nuclear powers. India and Pakistan have bent this rule, but overall it has held, because the danger of nuclear escalation is just too high to risk it. The peculiar thing about Iran—what made it unique among aspiring inductees into that club—was that until recently, it enjoyed this perk even while its membership application remained under review. When countries attack Americans and American interests overseas, the United States is generally uninhibited in striking back. (Libya, Iraq, Sudan, and Afghanistan are recent examples.) Iran attacks American interests all the time—and yet it has been treated gently in return by every U.S. president since Jimmy Carter, as if it were not a nuclear aspirant but a club member already.

It achieved this deterrence by infiltrating much of the Middle East, and rigging it to blow. The first detonator was installed in Lebanon, in the form of Hezbollah, which succeeded so spectacularly there that it became the template for deterrence and punishment of Iran’s enemies across the region. The militias and states that arose on this template were the Axis of Resistance, and their ability to unleash havoc on the region (combined with Iran’s own conventional forces) was enough to make Israel and the United States repeatedly decline to touch Iran within its own borders, even when American soldiers were being killed in large numbers by Iranian proxies.

Why, then, did Iran not make a mad rush for a nuclear weapon? Because it already had the immunity that a nuclear weapon would confer—and because as long as it didn’t have a nuclear weapon, it could use its threat of getting a bomb to extract concessions from America and its allies. Instead of getting a bomb and joining the club, it could advance half the remaining distance to the nuclear threshold whenever it wished—always getting closer but, like Zeno, never getting to the end. Each step closer to the threshold served as an impetus to negotiation, a new reason to demand less support for dissent inside Iran or more money, lest the next step closer to the bomb be taken.

…An Iran without a vigorous Axis simply does not have much to bargain, or threaten, with. And a reduced Iran is just another country, a Sudan or Libya with better weather. The only way to recover the lost deterrence would be to close the distance to the threshold and achieve real nuclear statehood, rather than just the provisional and revocable version. Iran has in the past reached low points in its power, and it has taken, in some cases, years to recover its position and find a strategy. Perhaps its strategy was a rush for a bomb. Perhaps it was not, but Israel saw no point in waiting around to find out what it would do instead.

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It is notable that nuclear-armed Israel is prepared to attack Iran to prevent it getting to nuclear status.
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Stop sending us AI articles • The Critic Magazine

David Scullion and Ben Sixsmith:

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We know we’re setting ourselves up for a fall when, on an off-day, we will unwittingly publish 3000 dry words written by ChatGPT on Nepal’s growing naval blockade. But most of the time we can tell when you’re sending us an article written by artificial intelligence, and when we suspect it, we run it through a system that gives us the score. If you think we haven’t noticed then it’s probably just because we’ve been too polite to tell you when we passed on your piece: we knew. 

We’re a small team and we read a lot of pitches and articles sent to us on spec. This takes a long time that we’re happy to spend, and we’ve found some amazing writers who have gone on to be prolific and fascinating to read, here and elsewhere. We aim to be relaxed in how we handle talent, but we take very seriously our obligation to find and encourage new contributors.  But the rise of the “AI-writer” threatens to bog us down, make our jobs tedious, and reduce the chance of new scribblers being found. When it takes longer to read an article than it took to generate it, we’ve all got a serious problem.

Most people have the good sense to be coy, and don’t tell us that the 2000 words they filed on the impact of global trade from Trump’s latest TRUTH SOCIAL post were not entirely written by themselves, but perhaps that will change too? We’ve even been sent an article which we were invited to run with two bylines: one of them the nominal author, and the other the name of the AI software which did 80% of the work. You will not be surprised that we turned it down.

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It’s faintly astonishing that people are sending in freelance work – even on spec – that’s so obviously written by a chatbot. Although I can see the attraction for freelances: you get some quotes and some facts and you tell the chatbot to write a X,000-word feature which uses these facts and these quotes. And then you polish it.
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Here comes the AI sponcon • The Verge

Mia Sato:

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TikTok announced today it was adding new capabilities to Symphony, the company’s AI ads platform it launched in 2024. The features go beyond generating basic videos and images — instead, the system’s new output mimics what audiences are used to seeing from human influencers.

The company says advertisers will be able to upload images, provide a text prompt, and generate videos with virtual avatars holding products, trying on and modeling clothing, and displaying a brand’s app on a phone screen. Some features already available to TikTok users — like creating a video out of a photo — will also now be available to advertisers.

AI creep in the influencer industry has been a steady development: advertisers already have the option of using synthetic characters (sometimes resembling real people) to do things like read scripts to promote brands and products. This new set of features brings an interactivity, with virtual avatars essentially acting like human influencers by using and modeling products. or advertisers, the appeal is a mix of automating processes and cutting costs — an AI avatar can’t demand specific rates or terms in a contract, and a brand can generate an endless amount of content without recording each video separately.

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“Sponcon”, if you didn’t know, is “sponsored content”. Perhaps this will make it easier for us to ignore it, since we will be able – surely! – to recognise that junk too.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified