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.
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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:
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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.”
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More people means we need more water, but the weather isn’t going to cooperate.
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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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