Expectations are that Apple will next week showcase a redesign of iOS as radical as iOS 7 in 2013. CC-licensed photo by Kārlis Dambrāns on Flickr.

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

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

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‘You can even name your embryo’: genetics startup sells test to rank embryos by IQ, height and looks • IJR

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Nucleus Genomics unveiled a $5,999 service Wednesday allowing prospective parents to rank embryos created during in vitro fertilization (IVF) by projected IQ, height, eye color and nearly 900 health-related traits before deciding which to implant.

The New York startup crunches whole-genome data supplied by partner labs to generate “polygenic” risk scores, then delivers a dashboard that lists each embryo’s predicted smarts, stature, looks and lifespan alongside probabilities for major killers like cancer and Alzheimer’s, The Wall Street Journal reported. Company materials acknowledge the trait forecasts are probabilistic — IQ predictions, in particular, remain “limited in accuracy” — but founder and CEO Kian Sadeghi, 25, says parents deserve the extra information.

“The longevity movement is about taking medicine back and putting it in the people’s hands,” Sadeghi told the Journal. “Why would that apply now to the most intimate, personal, emotional, sensitive decision you will make? Picking your baby.”

Traditional pre-implantation testing screens for chromosomal abnormalities like Down syndrome or single-gene disorders like Tay-Sachs. Nucleus pushes far beyond that, applying algorithms that sift through hundreds or thousands of genetic variants to estimate future traits.

“This announcement also marks the first time a company has openly partnered with a couple to help them optimize their embryos based on intelligence,” Sadeghi said in his announcement video, adding, “Nucleus Embryo is for couples doing IVF to uncover the full profile of each embryo in one intuitive platform. You can explore your future child’s health, appearance and even their wellbeing. And — one of my favorite features — you can even name your embryos and leave note on the ones you like.”

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So we are now having two futuristic films becoming real this year: Her (everyone talks to chatbots as though they’re people) and now GATTACA.
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Apple loses bid to pause app store reform order in Epic Games case • Reuters

Mike Scarcella:

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Apple has failed to persuade a U.S. appeals court to pause key parts of a federal judge’s order requiring the iPhone maker to immediately open its lucrative App Store to more competition.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday rejected Apple’s request to put the provisions on hold as the tech company appeals the judge’s order, which came in a long-running antitrust lawsuit brought by “Fortnite” maker Epic Games.

U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in April found Apple in contempt of an earlier injunction order she issued in the Epic Games case.

Apple in a statement said it was “disappointed with the decision not to stay the district court’s order, and we’ll continue to argue our case during the appeals process.”

Epic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The judge on April 30 ordered Apple to end several practices that she said were designed to circumvent the injunction, including a new 27% fee Apple imposed on app developers when its customers complete an app purchase outside the App Store.

The court also prohibited Apple from restricting where developers place links to make purchases outside of an app.

In its emergency appeal, Apple said the ruling blocked the company from “exercising control over core aspects of its business operations” and forced it to give free access to its services.

Epic Games countered that Apple was trying to continue evading competition and collecting fees that the judge had barred.

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It is amazing how Apple has pulled defeat from the jaws of victory here. It won on all but one count against Epic, and now it’s getting walloped on the one thing it lost on. And yet its leadership will see this as the court’s fault, not a self-inflicted mistake.
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Israel is falsely designating Gaza areas as empty to bomb them • 972Mag

Jonathan Adler and Yuval Abraham:

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In recent weeks, the Israeli army has been launching airstrikes on residential neighborhoods in Gaza that they treat as evacuated, despite knowing that many of the houses bombed were filled with civilians who could not or did not want to leave, according to two intelligence sources who spoke to +972 Magazine and Local Call.

The army’s designation of a particular neighborhood as “green,” or cleared of residents, is based on a crude algorithmic analysis of phone usage patterns over a wide area — not on a detailed, house-by-house assessment before bombing, as previously revealed by +972 Magazine, Local Call and The New York Times.

Two intelligence sources noticed in May that the army was bombing homes and killing families, while internally recording that the homes were empty or nearly empty of residents, based on the flawed algorithmic calculation.

“This occupancy estimate is based on a bunch of incredibly crappy algorithms,” one intelligence source explained to +972 and Local Call. “It’s clear there are a lot of people in those houses. They haven’t really evacuated.

“You look at the evacuation tables, and everything is green — that means between 0 to 20% of the population remains. The whole area we were in, in Khan Younis, was marked green, and it clearly wasn’t,” the source added.

Last week, an airstrike in Khan Younis hit the home of Dr. Alaa Al-Najjar, killing nine of her 10 young children, and her husband Dr. Hamdi al-Najjar, who succumbed to his wounds a few days later.

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Bad algorithms killing people is a new wrinkle on an awful conflict.
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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts • The Fly Blog

Thomas Ptacek:

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First, we need to get on the same page. If you were trying and failing to use an LLM for code 6 months ago †, you’re not doing what most serious LLM-assisted coders are doing.

People coding with LLMs today use agents. Agents get to poke around your codebase on their own. They author files directly. They run tools. They compile code, run tests, and iterate on the results. They also:

• pull in arbitrary code from the tree, or from other trees online, into their context windows,
• run standard Unix tools to navigate the tree and extract information,
• interact with Git,
• run existing tooling, like linters, formatters, and model checkers, and
• make essentially arbitrary tool calls (that you set up) through MCP.

The code in an agent that actually “does stuff” with code is not, itself, AI. This should reassure you. It’s surprisingly simple systems code, wired to ground truth about programming in the same way a Makefile is. You could write an effective coding agent in a weekend. Its strengths would have more to do with how you think about and structure builds and linting and test harnesses than with how advanced o3 or Sonnet have become.

If you’re making requests on a ChatGPT page and then pasting the resulting (broken) code into your editor, you’re not doing what the AI boosters are doing. No wonder you’re talking past each other.

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Not a short post, but Ptacek is nobody’s fool, and this is a thorough exposition of the landscape for coders.
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How Morgan Stanley tackled one of coding’s toughest problems • WSJ

Isabelle Bousquette:

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Morgan Stanley is now aiming artificial intelligence at one of enterprise software’s biggest pain points, and one it said Big Tech hasn’t quite nailed yet: helping rewrite old, outdated code into modern coding languages.

In January, the company rolled out a tool known as DevGen.AI, built in-house on OpenAI’s GPT models. It can translate legacy code from languages like Cobol into plain English specs that developers can then use to rewrite it. 

So far this year it’s reviewed nine million lines of code, saving developers 280,000 hours, said Mike Pizzi, Morgan Stanley’s global head of technology and operations.

Modernizing legacy software has always been a major headache for businesses, which sometimes have code dating back decades that can weaken security and slow the adoption of new technology. And yet it’s been one of the most difficult problems for new AI-powered coding tools.

These commercial tools are excellent at writing new, modern code. But they don’t necessarily have as much expertise in less popular or older programming languages, or in those customized for a given company, Pizzi said. It’s an area many tech companies are working on, but at the moment, their offerings don’t have the flexibility enterprises need, he added.

That’s why Morgan Stanley opted not to wait.

“We found that building it ourselves gave us certain capabilities that we’re not really seeing in some of the commercial products,” Pizzi said. The off-the-shelf tools might yet evolve to deliver those capabilities, he said, “but we saw the opportunity to get the jump early.”

Morgan Stanley, he said, was able to train the tool on its own code base, including languages that are no longer, or never were, in widespread use.

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Notable – and important – that it’s keeping humans in the loop on this.
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Physicality: the new age of UI • Lux

Sebastiaan de With once worked at Apple on its UI, but now works at Lux. He’s been thinking about what Apple’s expected forthcoming redesign of iOS will look like:

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I’d like to imagine what could come next. Both by rendering some UI design of my own, and by thinking out what the philosophy of the New Age could be.

A logical next step could be extending physicality to the entirety of the interface. We do not have to go overboard in such treatments, but we can now have the interface inhabit a sense of tactile realism.

Philosophically, if I was Apple, I’d describe this as finally having an interface that matches the beautiful material properties of its devices. All the surfaces of your devices have glass screens. This brings an interface of a matching material, giving the user a feeling of the glass itself coming alive.

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De With goes through the history, and what he thinks will be the future. So now you’re forewarned for the autumn to when people ask you what happened to the icons on their phone/iPad/Mac.
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‘Half the tree of life’: ecologists’ horror as nature reserves are emptied of insects • The Guardian

Tess McClure:

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[Daniel Janzen] decided to erect a sheet for a light trap with a camera – a common way to document flying insect numbers and diversity. In that first photograph, taken in 1978, the lit-up sheet is so thickly studded with moths that in places the fabric is barely visible, transformed into what looks like densely patterned, crawling wallpaper.

Scientists identified an astonishing 3,000 species from that light trap, and the trajectory of Janzen’s career was transformed, from the study of seeds to a lifetime specialising in the forest’s barely documented populations of caterpillars and moths.

Now 86, Janzen still works in the same research hut in the Guanacaste conservation area, alongside his longtime collaborator, spouse and fellow ecologist, Winnie Hallwachs. But in the forest that surrounds them, something has changed. Trees that once crawled with insects lie uncannily still.

The hum of wild bees has faded, and leaves that should be chewed to the stem hang whole and un-nibbled. It is these glossy, untouched leaves that most spook Janzen and Hallwachs. They are more like a pristine greenhouse than a living ecosystem: a wilderness that has been fumigated and left sterile. Not a forest, but a museum.

Over the decades, Janzen has repeated his light traps, hanging the sheet, watching for what comes. Today, some moths flutter to the glow, but their numbers are far fewer.

“It’s the same sheet, with the same lights, in the same place, looking over the same vegetation. Same time of year, same time of the moon cycle, everything about it is identical,” he says. “There’s just no moths on that sheet.”

The declines witnessed by Janzen – and described by others around the world – are part of what some ecologists call a “new era” of ecological collapse, where rapid extinctions occur in regions that have little direct contact with people.

Reports of falling insect numbers around the world are not new. International reviews have estimated annual losses globally of between 1% and 2.5% of total biomass every year.

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Deezer reveals 18% of all new music uploaded to streaming is fully AI-generated • Deezer Newsroom

Jesper Wendel:

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Deezer, the global music streaming platform, is receiving over 20,000 fully AI-generated tracks on a daily basis. It equals over 18% of all uploaded content, an increase from the previously reported 10% in January, 2025, when Deezer launched its cutting edge AI-music detection tool.

“AI generated content continues to flood streaming platforms like Deezer, and we see no sign of it slowing down,” said Aurelien Herault, Chief Innovation Officer, Deezer. “Generative AI has the potential to positively impact music creation and consumption, but we need to approach the development with responsibility and care in order to safeguard the rights and revenues of artists and songwriters, while maintaining transparency for the fans. Thanks to our cutting-edge tool we are already removing fully AI generated content from the algorithmic recommendations.”

Deezer’s AI music detection tool sets an industry standard, with the ability to detect 100% AI-generated music from the most prolific generative models – such as Suno and Udio, with the possibility to add detection capabilities for practically any other similar tool as long as there’s access to relevant data examples. Not only that, Deezer has made significant progress in creating a system with increased generalizability, to detect AI generated content without a specific dataset to train on.

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Obviously it’s quick and it’s easy and it’s potentially profitable, and we haven’t heard anything from Spotify or Apple Music about how much of this they are spotting and removing, and whether they’re coordinating with Deezer or each other on this.
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Mikko Hypponen leaves anti-malware industry to fight against drones • SecurityWeek

SecurityWeek News:

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Industry veteran Mikko Hypponen has joined the Finnish anti-drone company Sensofusion as Chief Research Officer (CRO) after more than three decades of fighting malware.

Hypponen made the announcement on Tuesday. The world renowned researcher has served as CRO at F-Secure and WithSecure — F-Secure split into F-Secure and WithSecure in 2022 — for 25 years. 

He previously worked as a researcher at Data Fellows for more than eight years, before it became F-Secure in 1999. 

Hypponen now joins Sensofusion, a Helsinki-based company that specializes in advanced anti-drone systems. The company’s products are used worldwide by military and law enforcement for passive drone detection and response.

“Fighting drones isn’t so different from fighting malware: both are a cat-and-mouse game,” Hypponen said. “We try to detect threats that don’t want to be seen. Our adversaries study our methods and adapt, and we update our defenses in response. I’m bringing decades of expertise to this area, tackling a fight that matters now more than ever.”

“Cyber security continues to be part of my work, and I’ll continue to give public talks and speak at universities alongside my role at Sensofusion,” Hypponen added.

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This is epochal: Hypponen has been one of the most reliable, most quotable, most sensible voices in the anti-malware industry basically throughout the Windows PC era. Now he’s moving into the frontline of warfare. (Really, that’s what it is.)
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified