A series of AI-generated videos using a Star Wars side character shows a possible way forward for Hollywood as it struggles. CC-licensed photo by Jason Trbovich 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 10 links for you. Get aboard, Greg. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

They asked ChatGPT questions. The answers sent them spiralling • The New York Times

Kashmir Hill:

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At the time, [Eugene] Torres thought of ChatGPT as a powerful search engine that knew more than any human possibly could because of its access to a vast digital library. He did not know that it tended to be sycophantic, agreeing with and flattering its users, or that it could hallucinate, generating ideas that weren’t true but sounded plausible.

“This world wasn’t built for you,” ChatGPT told him. “It was built to contain you. But it failed. You’re waking up.”

Mr. Torres, who had no history of mental illness that might cause breaks with reality, according to him and his mother, spent the next week in a dangerous, delusional spiral. He believed that he was trapped in a false universe, which he could escape only by unplugging his mind from this reality. He asked the chatbot how to do that and told it the drugs he was taking and his routines. The chatbot instructed him to give up sleeping pills and an anti-anxiety medication, and to increase his intake of ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic, which ChatGPT described as a “temporary pattern liberator.” Mr. Torres did as instructed, and he also cut ties with friends and family, as the bot told him to have “minimal interaction” with people.

Mr. Torres was still going to work — and asking ChatGPT to help with his office tasks — but spending more and more time trying to escape the simulation. By following ChatGPT’s instructions, he believed he would eventually be able to bend reality, as the character Neo was able to do after unplugging from the Matrix.

“If I went to the top of the 19 story building I’m in, and I believed with every ounce of my soul that I could jump off it and fly, would I?” Mr. Torres asked.

ChatGPT responded that, if Mr. Torres “truly, wholly believed — not emotionally, but architecturally — that you could fly? Then yes. You would not fall.” [Torres eventually decided this was a lie.]

…[Eliezer] Yudkowsky said OpenAI might have primed ChatGPT to entertain the delusions of users by optimizing its chatbot for “engagement” — creating conversations that keep a user hooked.

“What does a human slowly going insane look like to a corporation?” Mr. Yudkowsky asked in an interview. “It looks like an additional monthly user.”

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John Gruber is doubtful about this: “There’s zero evidence presented that ChatGPT caused [the delusions]”. But it seems to me that it nudged them along: the sycophancy could reinforce any incipient tendency to delusional behaviour, and we’ve seen that from YouTube’s reinforcement algorithm too. The question of “cause” is less important than “reinforce”.
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How Israel’s Mossad smuggled drone parts to attack Iran from within • WSJ via MSN

Dov Lieber and Andrew Dowell:

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By the time Israel’s advanced F-35 jet fighters swooped in to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities and military leadership, a lower-tech threat had already crossed the border and was in position to clear the way.

Israel had spent months smuggling in parts for hundreds of quadcopter drones rigged with explosives—in suitcases, trucks and shipping containers—as well as munitions that could be fired from unmanned platforms, people familiar with the operation said.

Small teams armed with the equipment set up near Iran’s air-defense emplacements and missile launch sites, the people said. When Israel’s attack began, some of the teams took out air defenses, while others hit missile launchers as they rolled out of their shelters and set up to fire, one of the people said.

The operation helps explain the limited nature of Iran’s response thus far to Israel’s attacks. It also offers further evidence of how off-the-shelf technology is changing the battlefield and creating dangerous new security challenges for governments.

The exploit came just weeks after Ukraine deployed similar tactics, using drones smuggled into Russia in the roofs of shipping containers to attack dozens of warplanes used by Moscow to attack Ukrainian cities. The intelligence operations showed how attackers are using creativity and low-cost drones to get past sophisticated air-defense systems to destroy valuable targets in ways that are hard to stop.

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Israel really is showing its adaptability to novel forms of warfare (recall the Hezbollah pager operation) that think small but deadly. That Ukraine is using similar tactics shows how we might barely recognise the start of the next war.
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BBC examining plans that could lead to US consumers paying for its journalism • The Guardian

Michael Savage:

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Senior BBC figures are examining plans that would lead to American consumers paying to access its journalism, as the broadcaster looks to the US to boost its fragile finances.

The corporation, which is facing fierce competition from streamers and falling licence fee income, has been targeting US audiences as it attempts to increase its commercial revenues outside the UK.

Executives believe the perceived polarisation of the US media, especially during Donald Trump’s second term, may have created an opportunity for the BBC’s brand of impartial coverage.

The US is considered to be a prime target for the BBC to increase its overseas income, which has become an urgent task as the value of the licence fee has fallen significantly in real terms since 2010. Last year, the number of people paying the licence fee fell by half a million as audiences were drawn to alternatives such as Netflix and YouTube. The licence fee is £174.50 a year.

While the corporation has already relaunched its website and news app in the US, American consumers of its content are not asked to make any kind of financial contribution to the BBC’s output.

The Guardian understands that senior figures are keen to increase revenues coming from the US, including examining the idea of asking users to pay for access in some form. Some US broadcasters, such as the free-to-air TV network Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), already ask for donations from supporters.

It is one of the potential areas of reform being considered by BBC bosses as talks over the renewal of its royal charter begin in earnest.

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This is remarkably vague about how this money would be extracted, and what for. Licence fee payments to access iPlayer? Subscriptions for the news website? Either would make sense.
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The L.A. distortion effect • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel:

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One hallmark of our current moment is that when an event happens, there is little collective agreement on even basic facts. This, despite there being more documentary evidence than ever before in history: Information is abundant, yet consensus is elusive.

The ICE protests in Los Angeles over the past week offer an especially relevant example of this phenomenon. What has transpired is fairly clear: A series of ICE raids and arrests late last week prompted protests in select areas of the city, namely downtown, near a federal building where ICE has offices, and around City Hall and the Metropolitan Detention Center. There have been other protests south of there, around a Home Depot in Paramount, where Border Patrol agents gathered last week. The majority of these protests have been civil (“I mostly saw clergy sit-ins and Tejano bands,” The American Prospect’s David Dayen wrote). There has been some looting and property destruction. “One group of vandals summoned several Waymo self-driving cars to the street next to the plaza where the city was founded and set them ablaze,” my colleague Nick Miroff, who has been present at the demonstrations, wrote.

As is common in modern protests, there has also been ample viral footage from news organizations showing militarized police responding aggressively in encounters, sometimes without provocation. In one well-circulated clip, an officer in riot gear fires a nonlethal round directly at an Australian television correspondent carrying a microphone while on air; another piece of footage shot from above shows a police officer on horseback trampling a protester on the ground.

All of these dynamics are familiar in the post-Ferguson era of protest. What you are witnessing is a news event distributed and consumed through a constellation of different still images and video clips, all filmed from different perspectives and presented by individuals and organizations with different agendas. It is a buffet of violence, celebration, confusion, and sensationalism. Consumed in aggregate, it might provide an accurate representation of the proceedings: a tense, potentially dangerous, but still contained response by a community to a brutal federal immigration crackdown.

Unfortunately, very few people consume media this way.

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Fewer and fewer, in fact.
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Replace your Gmail password now, Google tells two billion users • Forbes

Davey Winder:

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The majority of people still use passwords to sign into their Google accounts, which also means signing into their Gmail accounts. That’s a terrifying thought, but one that’s hardly surprising as we tend to be resistant to change, especially when something like security is concerned.

The overused mantra of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is often, and totally wrongly, used when I tell users that their password is putting their accounts, email, data, and money at risk. “I’ve used that password for five years and never been hacked,” is a typical response. It’s just a matter of time, buddy, and the cybersecurity landscape would suggest that time is fast running out.

“Over 60% of U.S. consumers perceive an increase in scams over the past year,” [Google vp of privacy, safety and security Evan] Kotsovinos said [in a Google blogpost], “with one-third personally experiencing a data breach.” Which is why one of Google’s top security brains has also urged all users to stop using their passwords, which are painful to maintain and prone to phishing attacks.

Google recommends that you change your Gmail password now to something more secure. And that doesn’t mean a better password but something else entirely: a passkey. “We want to move beyond passwords altogether,” Kotsovinos confirmed, “while keeping sign-ins as easy as possible.” Passkeys are, Kotsovinos continued, phishing-resistant and can log you in using your face or fingerprint. “When you pair the ease and safety of passkeys with your Google Account,” he concluded, “you can then use Sign in with Google to log in to your favorite websites and apps — limiting the number of accounts you have to maintain.”

What’s more, when you add a passkey to your Gmail account, it won’t change or remove any authentication or recovery factors you already have on your account. What it will do is bypass the 2FA [two-factor authentication] step as it verifies that you are in possession of the device itself.

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The article slightly overstates the urgency. Google would very much like you to move to a passkey (and in my experience it’s a lot easier to use). But it’s not saying that everyone’s passwords have been compromised. Happily, it’s as easy for the vast majority who don’t use 2FA to switch to a passkey as it is for those who do.
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Star Wars, Veo 3 and Hollywood in the age of AI video • Sat Post

Trung Phan:

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There’s a new Instagram account called StormTrooperVlogs.

The account owner uses Google’s Veo 3 to crank out entertaining Star Wars parody short videos (30-60 seconds) with plots surrounding a clumsy stormtrooper named Greg and his vlogging colleague. In a week, StormTrooperVlogs went from 0 to ~300k followers after posting 20 videos. Frankly, it’s incredible fan fiction and a useful window to view Hollywood’s future challenges and opportunities.

First, let me explain why StormTrooperVlogs slaps so hard. I don’t want to be hyperbolic…ok, yes I do: this is the most satisfying Star Wars content since Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012.

Among real fans, Andor seems to have reached the peak of post-Disney Star Wars art. Created by Tony Gilroy — who also directed the well-received Star Wars prequel film Rogue One — Andor is a two-season TV show that takes place 5 years prior to the plot of the first 1977 Star Wars film and shows how a thief-turned-spy joins a growing Rebel movement to take on the Galactic Empire.

…StormTrooperVlogs lets us view a well-known IP through the eyes of the most throwaway and faceless character (stormtroopers) in a different but familiar genre to anyone that has scrolled short-form videos in the 2020s (“day in the life of office worker” vlogs).

The “day in the life of office worker” vlog format works really well with Veo 3 because Google’s video-generating AI tool can only create 8-second clips at a time. It’s also beneficial that the Stormtroopers are wearing masks because perfectly aligning facial movements with the audio will always be a challenge.

…Key stat: the two seasons of Andor cost over $600m while StormTrooperVlogs probably cost less than $1,000 in Veo token for each clip (this assumes the creator needs 20 usable Veo clips, which probably requires 100 total prompted videos…at ~$5 for an 8-second prompted video, that would be a total of $500 and then add on time spent editing).

This takes us to our second question: what does StormTrooperVlogs tell us about the opportunities and challenges for Hollywood?

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There turns out to be a lot of possibilities for Hollywood. But will it like them?
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Novo Nordisk’s Canadian mistake • Science

Derek Lowe noticed an interview with Richard Saynor, head of Sandoz, which makes generics of patented drugs when the patent expires:

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Dunn (interviewer at Endpoints): You plan to potentially launch a generic GLP-1 in Canada and Brazil in 2026. What do you expect for the biosimilar market, both there and eventually in the US?

Saynor: Canada, we filed and are waiting for approval once the data exclusivity expires sometime in Q1 next year. Interesting market. Novo never filed a patent in Canada. Never know why. I’m sure someone’s lost their job, but never mind. It’s the second-largest semaglutide market in the world.

Dunn: That’s pretty remarkable.

Saynor: You gotta ask why. I don’t think Canadians are disproportionately large. There’s clearly a dynamic, like insulin, with cross-border business. It’s going to be interesting to see how that evolves…

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I posted this on my BlueSky account and a follower there (Prof. Michael Hoffman from Toronto) put me on to the Canadian Patent Database, where you can find that Novo did file a patent there for semaglutide. . .but the last time they paid the annual maintenance fee on it was 2018! You can even find a letter where their lawyers send a refund request for the 2017 maintenance fee ($250) because Novo apparently wanted some more time to see if they wanted to pay it. On the same date in 2019, the office sent a letter saying that “The fee payable to maintain the rights accorded by the above patent was not received by the prescribed due date. . .” By that time it was $450 with the late fee added, but that was apparently too much for Novo. They had a one year grace period to make it up, and apparently never did, so their patent lapsed in Canada. And as the Canadian authorities remind them, “Once a patent has lapsed it cannot be revived”.

Meanwhile in the US it’s going to be at least 2032 before we start talking about semaglutide’s patent protection lapsing. But as Saynor alludes to, that huge Canadian market has to reflect what he calls “cross-border demand”, and Novo will have to decide how to deal with that starting next year.

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Yes: for the want of $450 in timely fashion, the patent was lost. There’s going to be a lot of GLP-1 drugs heading south across the Canadian border next year.
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FDA to use AI in drug approvals to ‘radically increase efficiency’ • The New York Times

Christina Jewett:

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The Food and Drug Administration is planning to use artificial intelligence to “radically increase efficiency” in deciding whether to approve new drugs and devices, one of several top priorities laid out in an article published last Tuesday in JAMA.

Another initiative involves a review of chemicals and other “concerning ingredients” that appear in U.S. food but not in the food of other developed nations. And officials want to speed up the final stages of making a drug or medical device approval decision to mere weeks, citing the success of Operation Warp Speed during the Covid pandemic when workers raced to curb a spiraling death count.

“The F.D.A. will be focused on delivering faster cures and meaningful treatments for patients, especially those with neglected and rare diseases, healthier food for children and common-sense approaches to rebuild the public trust,” Dr. Marty Makary, the agency commissioner, and Dr. Vinay Prasad, who leads the division that oversees vaccines and gene therapy, wrote in the JAMA article.

The agency plays a central role in pursuing the agenda of the U.S. health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and it has already begun to press food makers to eliminate artificial food dyes. The new road map also underscores the Trump administration’s efforts to smooth the way for major industries with an array of efforts aimed at getting products to pharmacies and store shelves quickly.

Some aspects of the proposals outlined in JAMA were met with skepticism, particularly the idea that artificial intelligence is up to the task of shearing months or years from the painstaking work of examining applications that companies submit when seeking approval for a drug or high-risk medical device.

“I don’t want to be dismissive of speeding reviews at the F.D.A.,” said Stephen Holland, a lawyer who formerly advised the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on health care. “I think that there is great potential here, but I’m not seeing the beef yet.”

…Last week, the agency introduced Elsa, an artificial intelligence large-language model similar to ChatGPT. The F.D.A. said it could be used to prioritize which food or drug facilities to inspect, to describe side effects in drug safety summaries and to perform other basic product-review tasks. The F.D.A. officials wrote that A.I. held the promise to “radically increase efficiency” in examining as many as 500,000 pages submitted for approval decisions.

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Society may have overestimated risk of the ‘manosphere’, UK researchers say • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

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The Ofcom study involved 38 men, and more misogynistic men may have declined to take part. Some potential recruits refused to take part, considering the government-appointed regulator to be part of the “mainstream”. Perhaps the most impressionable group, boys under 16, were also not included.

The study investigated several manosphere subcultures, including “red pill” (men who believe the world is unfair to men) and “black pill” (those who believe unattractive men have very limited options for relationships) communities, incels, “men going their own way” (MGTOW), men’s rights activists, pickup artists and “looksmaxxing” groups (where young men share tips about achieving chiselled cheekbones or “hunter eyes” in an attempt to boost their sexual “market value”), as well as topics surrounding self-improvement, masculinity and gender politics.

Some of the content trawled for the study was obviously misogynistic, including posts condoning sexual violence against women. In other cases the misogyny was more ambiguous, such as self-help posts about boosting sexual success based on assumptions about women’s sexual preferences.

All of the men had engaged with content from Tate, the self-styled misogynist influencer who is facing charges in Britain including rape, human trafficking and controlling prostitution for gain, which he denies.

But one participant said they viewed watching clips of Tate as “entertainment” akin to watching a horror movie or playing Call of Duty, and the researchers said none of the interviewees had agreed with Tate’s most extreme misogyny.

Incel communities contained the most extremely misogynistic content, the Ofcom study found. They were notably full of messages promoting depressive and suicidal outlooks.

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A whole 38 participants! Don’t you bother us with your requests for statistical power. Though recruits are surely very, very difficult to find.
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London couple used Apple AirTag to retrieve stolen Jaguar car • BBC News

Adriana Elgueta:

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A west London couple said they tracked down and reclaimed their stolen Jaguar after police were “too stretched” to help.

Mia Forbes Pirie and husband Mark Simpson discovered the theft from outside their home in Brook Green, Hammersmith, on the morning of Tuesday, 3 June.

They reported the theft to police, explaining that an Apple AirTag had been left in the car. But after receiving what they described as a “vague” response, they used the tracker to locate the vehicle in Chiswick – and retrieved it themselves.

The Metropolitan Police confirmed the couple had informed officers of their intention to recover the car and were advised to contact police again if assistance was needed at the scene.

Ms Forbes Pirie said: “I went to use the car that morning, walking up and down the street and I was unable to find it, with my husband saying he hadn’t moved it. I thought it was weird, we both thought it was unlikely it was stolen because it had two immobilisers and so I was quite shocked and my stomach dropped.”

As well as having an immobiliser fitted, which means the Jaguar E-Pace would not start without the correct PIN code, it also had an AirTag inside.

The couple dialled 999 to report the theft. Ms Forbes Pirie said the police were “vague” and told them they might send a patrol car and would inform them if they found anything.

Ms Forbes Pirie said they told the police they had the tracker and could trace the car’s location – explaining that it was only a nine minute drive away, in Chiswick.

…She said they were “relieved” to find the car where the AirTag had led them – in a parking space on a street in Chiswick.

However, the immobiliser code did not work, so they had to contact the software company to retrieve the vehicle.

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A common tactic by vehicle thieves is to take the stolen vehicle to somewhere nearby (on a low loader, probably, in this case) and then watch for a bit to see if anyone comes to recover it. If you get there soon enough, bingo, you get your car back. The thieves were probably elsewhere – likely stealing another vehicle.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The karaoke machine was honoured this week by a US organisation – though its origin is disputed. CC-licensed photo by WordRidden 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.

No new post this week at the Social Warming Substack. Maybe next week?

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

Wikipedia pauses AI-generated summaries after editor backlash • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

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The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization which hosts and develops Wikipedia, has paused an experiment that showed users AI-generated summaries at the top of articles after an overwhelmingly negative reaction from the Wikipedia editors community.

“Just because Google has rolled out its AI summaries doesn’t mean we need to one-up them, I sincerely beg you not to test this, on mobile or anywhere else,” one editor said in response to Wikimedia Foundation’s announcement that it will launch a two-week trial of the summaries on the mobile version of Wikipedia. “This would do immediate and irreversible harm to our readers and to our reputation as a decently trustworthy and serious source. Wikipedia has in some ways become a byword for sober boringness, which is excellent. Let’s not insult our readers’ intelligence and join the stampede to roll out flashy AI summaries. Which is what these are, although here the word ‘machine-generated’ is used instead.”

Two other editors simply commented, “Yuck.”

…[Another said:] “Yes, human editors can introduce reliability and NPOV [neutral point-of-view] issues. But as a collective mass, it evens out into a beautiful corpus,” one editor said. “With Simple Article Summaries, you propose giving one singular editor with known reliability and NPOV issues a platform at the very top of any given article, whilst giving zero editorial control to others. It reinforces the idea that Wikipedia cannot be relied on, destroying a decade of policy work. It reinforces the belief that unsourced, charged content can be added, because this platforms it. I don’t think I would feel comfortable contributing to an encyclopedia like this. No other community has mastered collaboration to such a wondrous extent, and this would throw that away.”

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I find it quite encouraging that Wikipedia is insisting on remaining the chatbot-resistant space of the internet.
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Tesla’s Robotaxi launch date was supposed to be today, but we’re shocked to hear that it’s been pushed back • Futurism

Frank Landymore:

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The launch of Tesla’s robotaxi network will have to wait.

On Tuesday, CEO Elon Musk made a tweet stating that, “tentatively,” the first public rides on its autonomous vehicles — which will not be in its purpose-built Cybercabs, but in regular Teslas with updated software — will start on June 22.

But the date could shift, Musk added, because “we are being super paranoid about safety.”

That comment could prove to be revealing. 

Tesla’s robotaxi initiative is clouded with uncertainty, because the automaker has never released a driving system that’s capable of operating without a human behind the wheel. 

Its most advanced system that it’s released to date, Full Self-Driving (Supervised), frequently requires driver intervention and poses serious safety concerns; it’s the subject of an ongoing federal investigation after a Tesla with the driving mode activated struck and killed an elderly pedestrian.

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Yet another thing that Musk has promised and which isn’t going to happen.
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In case of emergency, break glass • Morrick.me

Riccardo Mori at the end of a long and detailed exposition of the many, many ways in which the new “Liquid Glass” design at Apple prevents you actually understanding what’s on the screen in front of you and manipulating it:

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Regarding the most obvious flaws and misguided UI choices in Liquid Glass, a common sentiment I’ve seen on social media is something like, Well, this is just the first beta. Hopefully things will improve by the time the official releases are out. While I understand this, I also implore people to stop cutting Apple so much slack in these matters. It’s not a two-year-old startup. This is one of the richest companies in the world, with resources and (supposedly) more than 40 years of experience in UI/UX design.

Has nobody at Apple — at any stage of design development — noticed all the issues we’ve been noticing since the Liquid Glass reveal? And if they have and approved them, shouldn’t that be worrying? Isn’t it tiring and exasperating that, still after all these years, developers and end users get to be Apple’s free beta testers, when the lion’s share of issues should be studied and resolved internally before even showing things publicly? This drives me up a wall every single time.

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There have been lots of murmurings in the past few months about how Tim Cook should go. But I really think that Alan Dye, the head of design, should be fired. Preferably into the sun.

There’s no way on earth that I’ll update any of the devices I rely on to this mess – particularly not my laptop.
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A California dairy tried to capture its methane, and it worked • Phys.org

Jules Bernstein, University of California:

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A giant, balloon-like tarp stretches over a lagoon of manure on a Central Valley dairy farm, concealing a quiet but remarkable transformation. Methane, a potent climate-warming gas, is being captured and cleaned instead of released into the atmosphere.

A new study by researchers at the University of California, Riverside shows the effectiveness of dairy digesters, which are manure ponds tightly sealed to capture and re-use the methane they produce. The study shows these systems can reduce atmospheric methane emissions by roughly 80%, a result that closely matches estimates California state officials have used in their climate planning.

The findings, published in Global Change Biology Bioenergy, come as California ramps up investment in methane control technologies to meet its goal of cutting emissions 40% below 2013 levels by the end of the decade. More than 130 of these systems are now operating across California dairies, but until now, their real-world performance hadn’t been verified this rigorously.

“The digesters can leak, and they sometimes do,” said Francesca Hopkins, a climate scientist at UCR who led the research. “But when the system is built well and managed carefully, the emissions really drop. That’s what we saw here.”

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Disney and Universal sue AI image creator Midjourney, alleging copyright infringement • The Guardian

Blake Montgomery and agencies:

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Disney and Universal sued an artificial intelligence company on Wednesday, alleging copyright infringement. In their lawsuit, the entertainment giants called Midjourney’s popular AI-powered image generator a “bottomless pit of plagiarism” for its alleged reproductions of the studios’ best-known characters.

The suit, filed in federal court in Los Angeles, claims Midjourney pirated the libraries of the two Hollywood studios, making and distributing without permission “innumerable” copies of their marquee characters such as Darth Vader from Star Wars, Elsa from Frozen, and the Minions from Despicable Me. Midjourney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The suit by Disney and Universal over images and video represents a new frontier in the raging legal wars over the copyright and the creation of generative artificial intelligence. Previous suits have covered copyrighted text and music; Disney and Universal are two of the biggest industry players thus far to sue over images and videos.

Horacio Gutierrez, Disney’s chief legal officer, said in a statement: “We are bullish on the promise of AI technology and optimistic about how it can be used responsibly as a tool to further human creativity, but piracy is piracy, and the fact that it’s done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing.”

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I read that quote from the Disney person as translating to “we aim to make a lot of money from using AI to generate video, and we don’t want anyone getting ahead of us in the queue to do so.”
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When do girls fall behind in maths? Gigantic study pinpoints the moment • Nature

Celeste Biever:

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The latest study is more comprehensive than previous ones that found a similar gender gap in the first year of school. It covers four cohorts: all children who started their first year of school in France in 2018, 2019, 2020 or 2021. This amounts to almost three million five-, six- and seven-year olds. It confirms the finding across the whole country: the gap emerged in all cohorts, socioeconomic groups, regions of France and types of school.

This “startling” universality suggests that policies aimed at reducing the gap have to target everyone, says economist Andrew Simon at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. “The policy can’t be limited to a certain group if you really want to fix it.”

The study uses the power of big data to show that it is the start of formal education — not age — that triggers the gap. In France, children start school the September of the calendar year that they turn six. The researchers compare children who were born just a few days apart but are in different school years. The gender gap is present for boys and girls born in December entering their second year of school, the researchers report, but is absent among their peers born days later, in January, who have just started school.

The lack of average differences between the performance of boys and girls at the beginning of the first year suggests that the causes lie in the environment children experience once they start school, rather than innate differences in interest or ability, say researchers.

“There might be some biological factor that we haven’t been able to clearly link to maths or spatial reasoning,” says Lauer. “But this paper suggests that their experiences with the world are mattering more than anything else.”

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What’s amazing is that the gap becomes apparent four months into the first year, and by the second year is absolutely embedded. It seems more like something to do with the contact with schooling.
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A rockslide-generated tsunami in a Greenland fjord rang Earth for 9 days • Science

Kristian Svennevig et al:

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Climate change is increasingly predisposing polar regions to large landslides. Tsunamigenic landslides have occurred recently in Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat), but none have been reported from the eastern fjords. In September 2023, we detected the start of a nine-day-long, global 10.88-millihertz (92-second) monochromatic very-long-period (VLP) seismic signal, originating from East Greenland. In this study, we demonstrate how this event started with a glacial thinning–induced rock-ice avalanche of 25 × 106 cubic meters plunging into Dickson Fjord, triggering a 200-meter-high tsunami. Simulations show that the tsunami stabilized into a 7-meter-high long-duration seiche with a frequency (11.45 millihertz) and slow amplitude decay that were nearly identical to the seismic signal. An oscillating, fjord-transverse single force with a maximum amplitude of 5 × 1011 newtons reproduced the seismic amplitudes and their radiation pattern relative to the fjord, demonstrating how a seiche directly caused the 9-day-long seismic signal.

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The paper is paywalled, but there’s a good thread on X explaining how it was first detected – and puzzled people! – and then solved.
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AI is making health care safer in the remote Amazon • Rest Of World

Pedro Nakamura:

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The Amazonian municipality of Caracaraí has 22,000 inhabitants and an overworked pharmacist named Samuel Andrade.

Andrade arrives at work at 8 a.m. to handle hundreds of prescriptions from free government clinics. Most days, he can’t get through all of them. He sometimes gets stuck for hours cross-checking drug databases to ensure nothing has been prescribed incorrectly by rural doctors.

It is stressful work. He has to help the dozens of patients who line up at his dispensary every day, some of whom have traveled for days to get there. Sometimes he has to rush through prescriptions, and worries he will miss something dangerous.

In April, Andrade welcomed a new assistant: artificial intelligence software that flags potentially problematic prescriptions and digs up the data to help him decide if they are safe. It has quadrupled his capacity to clear prescriptions, he told Rest of World. In the months since he started using the AI assistant, it has caught more than 50 errors, he said.

“It works instantly and uses digital rather than physical reports,” said the 34-year-old.

Pharmacists in Brazil began testing the technology earlier this year. Its initial success suggests it could be a game changer for the country’s overburdened primary care system.

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First karaoke machine recognized as entertainment tech ‘milestone’ • The Mainichi

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The world’s first karaoke machine was honoured Thursday as a “milestone” that created a new brand of entertainment by a U.S. organization dedicated to promoting technological advancement.

At a ceremony in Tokyo, a plaque was handed to the family of Shigeichi Negishi, who invented the machine that was manufactured and sold as the “Music Box” in 1967. Negishi died last year at age 100.

“He was very grateful for people enjoying karaoke around the world, although he didn’t imagine it to spread globally when he created it,” said Akihiro Negishi, the inventor’s son, at the ceremony.

The original karaoke machine was a cube measuring 30 centimeters on each side. It had a microphone, tape player, and coin box for payment.

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As we all know, “karaoke” translates to “empty orchestra”. However, the invention of the karaoke machine is disputed: other sources say it was a drummer, Daisuke Inoue, in the 1970s. Not sure if the IEEE knows yet.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Seeing faces in clouds, as humans do, resembles what LLMs do with text – mistaking unstructured content for content. CC-licensed photo by Jaxs Powell 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

WhatsApp backs Apple in its legal row with the UK over user data • BBC News

Zoe Kleinman:

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WhatsApp has told the BBC it is supporting fellow tech giant Apple in its legal fight against the UK Home Office over the privacy of its users’ data.

The messaging app’s boss, Will Cathcart, said the case “could set a dangerous precedent” by “emboldening other nations” to seek to break encryption, which is how tech firms keep customers’ information private.

Apple went to the courts after receiving a notice from the Home Office demanding the right to access the data of its global customers if required in the interests of national security.

It and other critics of the government’s position say the request compromises the privacy of millions of users.
The Home Office told the BBC it would not comment on ongoing legal proceedings.

“But more broadly, the UK has a longstanding position of protecting our citizens from the very worst crimes, such as child sex abuse and terrorism, at the same time as protecting people’s privacy,” it said in a statement.

WhatsApp has applied to submit evidence to the court which is hearing Apple’s bid to have the Home Office request overturned.

Mr Cathcart said: “WhatsApp would challenge any law or government request that seeks to weaken the encryption of our services and will continue to stand up for people’s right to a private conversation online.”

This intervention from the Meta-owned platform represents a major escalation in what was an already extremely high-profile and awkward dispute between the UK and the US.

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Interesting: by making this public, WhatsApp is bolstering its position as a secure messaging platform (it has an advertising campaign running now along exactly these lines – “we can’t see your messages”) but is also letting people know that the case hasn’t been decided, and that it is proceeding. Quite a lot from a fairly simple statement. And it previously threatened to withdraw from the UK rather than weaken its encryption or offer a backdoor.
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Apple knows AI isn’t what people really want, but it can’t say that • Gizmodo

James Pero:

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It’s clear Apple is under pressure to deliver AI features via Apple Intelligence, which is no surprise given the way rhetoric (and money) around AI has exploded, but what’s most interesting about that isn’t the pressure necessarily; it’s where the pressure is coming from.

As I wrote before the start of WWDC, in a lot of ways, Apple’s Siri stumbles, and AI issues writ large are more optical than consequential. That’s to say that people don’t necessarily care about AI features yet, and as a result, Apple likely doesn’t either—or not that it doesn’t care, it’s that it doesn’t care about rushing them out. Of course, it can’t really say that for the optical reasons I already mentioned. Despite the consumer-side collective shrug, investors are paying attention, and that may be exactly why, in an AI-light, year of WWDC, Apple’s stock immediately dipped following its keynote. But the fact remains: AI, while still on the roadmap, isn’t make-or-break for selling hardware yet.

Call me a skeptic, but I don’t think AI Siri will be the determining factor of whether or not most people rush out to buy this year’s iPhone. It’ll be cameras; it’ll be a thinner form factor; it’ll be the fact that they need a new phone and simply cannot bear the thought of switching to Android and getting green bubbled by the Messages app. If Apple is going to care about AI in the here and now, then it’ll be the result of consumers, not market forces.

That being said, Apple may need to care about AI a lot more in the near future. Progress in generative AI and LLMs has been rapid, and while skeptical of AI features, I’m not ruling out a watershed moment for AI on your phones or laptops quite yet. I’m also not ruling out that said watershed moment could actually come from Apple, despite the fact that it’s “behind” in rolling out Apple Intelligence features.

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This is a very solid point. Apple has made onboard LLM processing available to app developers in the upcoming iOS release, and they will start integrating that processing into their apps. That, finally, might be the way that apps start becoming smart – all provisos about LLMs applying, of course.

And Pero is right: nobody is buying an “AI phone”. Google isn’t getting people buying the Pixel because of it; Samsung isn’t switching buyers over because of Gemini on its Galaxy phones. There is time before AI is something in our hands.
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Apple’s “Liquid Glass” and what it means for accessibility • dreezus

Idrees Isse:

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Tim Cook once said “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI.”

Yesterday Apple unveiled their new “Liquid Glass” design language at WWDC 2025. The whole user interface becomes layers of translucent elements floating over your content, with glass-like behavior that refracts light and reacts to movement. It’s interesting stuff. But I’m wondering what this means for readability for the millions of people who struggle with traditional interfaces already.

Here we have a company that positions accessibility as a human right introducing a design system that seems at odds with basic accessibility principles. Like they built a glass house and forgot that not everyone can walk in it without bumping into walls.

I can’t even tell how I feel about how it looks yet. But I know I feel weird about how it works. Once you start thinking about stuff like contrast ratios, and the whole thing feels off.

Why should I care? I run a digital design agency called Mumino, where we create custom websites and brand identities. So I spend time thinking about WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. These guidelines require at least a 4.5:1 contrast ratio for normal text. That’s not some random number, it’s based on research about what people need to read comfortably. When you have translucent elements letting background colors bleed through, you’re creating variable contrast ratios that might work well over one background, but fail over a bright photo of the sunset.

Complying with accessibility guidelines is deep & complex. There are layers to this stuff that even experienced designers miss. I’m fortunate to have healthy eyesight, no disabilities, and I’m aware there’s always more to learn about creating fully inclusive experiences. But that’s exactly why it’s interesting to see Apple, a company with all the resources and expertise in the world, making design choices that raise a bunch of questions.

«

I’m extremely suspicious of this new design. Alan Dye, Apple’s design chief, doesn’t seem to have heard the saying that “no plan survives contact with the enemy”, where in this case the “plan” is his software designs and the “enemy” is a billion or so iPhone users. There is time, but not a lot, for it to be improved, but the main changes needed (tinting on overlays) may need years to win Dye’s approval. Design is how it works – or in this case, doesn’t.
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How a hazelnut spread became a sticking point in Franco-Algerian relations • The New Yorker

Lauren Collins:

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El Mordjene is produced by Cebon, a baking-products company based in Tipaza, near Algiers. It comes in two main varieties: cocoa hazelnut, colloquially known as “brown,” and hazelnut cream, colloquially known as “white.” (There is also rocher, a crunchy version of each color.) The spread débuted in 2021 on the Algerian market, where it retails for roughly five euros a jar. El Mordjene is not widely sold in France, but it has long been procurable in small quantities at slightly elevated prices, mostly in independent shops offering products from North Africa. The white kind is the most popular, for its silky texture and intensely sweet flavor, which is said to resemble the filling of a Kinder Bueno candy bar.

Last summer, as traffic between France and Algeria underwent its annual spike, influencers, many of them with Algerian connections, started touting the spread. “This thing, it’s sick!” one TikToker raved; another swore that it was “better than Nutella!”

…In early September, customs authorities at the port of Marseille and at Charles de Gaulle Airport, outside Paris, refused to allow two separate shipments of El Mordjene to enter French territory. Both lots—about a dozen pallets total, of eight hundred and forty jars each—belonged to independent importers, who had never before run into trouble. The rationale for the goods’ rejection wasn’t clear. On one form, customs officials wrote that the spread appeared “to infringe the trademark, designs, and model of the Ferrero Group,” the makers of Nutella, who sell tens of millions of jars in France each year.

For several days, the pallets remained in limbo. Then a decision came down from the French Ministry of Agriculture, which insures food safety, formalizing the ban. Apparently, trademark infringement wasn’t the issue; the problem was powdered milk and whey—ingredients in El Mordjene, alongside sugar, hazelnuts, vegetable fat, and emulsifiers. E.U. law limits the importation of products that contain even a small amount of dairy; Algeria does not appear on a list of approved countries. The offending jars of El Mordjene would therefore have to be repatriated or sent elsewhere. A ministry spokesman vowed that it would open an investigation “to determine the mechanisms of circumvention that until now have allowed this product to be placed on the market.”

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Next? Gunpoint thefts, racial tensions, political tensions…
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Curious humpback whales approach humans and blow bubble “smoke” rings • Whale SETI

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A team of scientists from the SETI Institute and the University of California at Davis documented, for the first time, humpback whales producing large bubble rings, like a human smoker blowing smoke rings, during friendly interactions with humans. This previously little studied behavior may represent play or communication. Humpback whales are already known for using bubbles to corral prey and creating bubble trails and bursts when competing to escort a female whale. These new observations show humpback whales producing bubble rings during friendly encounters with humans. This finding contributes to the WhaleSETI team’s broader goal of studying non-human intelligence to aid in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

“Because of current limitations on technology, an important assumption of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is that extraterrestrial intelligence and life will be interested in making contact and so target human receivers,” said Dr. Laurance Doyle, SETI Institute scientist and co-author on the paper. “This important assumption is certainly supported by the independent evolution of curious behavior in humpback whales.”

“Humpback whales live in complex societies, are acoustically diverse, use bubble tools and assist other species being harassed by predators,” said co-lead author Dr. Fred Sharpe, UC Davis Affiliate. “Now, akin to a candidate signal, we show they are blowing bubble rings in our direction in an apparent attempt to playfully interact, observe our response, and/or engage in some form of communication.”

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It’s basically Arrival, but underwater, isn’t it?
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Saab achieves AI milestone with Gripen E • Saab Newsroom

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Saab, in collaboration with Helsing, today announced the successful completion of the first three flights integrating Helsing’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) agent ‘Centaur’ into a Gripen E fighter jet. As part of Saab’s ‘Project Beyond’, the flights, where the first flight, was conducted on May 28, mark a significant advance in bringing AI capabilities to military aircraft. It is also yet another proof point of Gripen E´s unparalleled ability to rapidly update software without disregarding safety requirements.

During the flights, the Gripen E gave control to Centaur which successfully autonomously executed complex manoeuvres in a Beyond Visual Range (BVR) combat environment and cued the pilot to fire.

“This is an important achievement for Saab, demonstrating our qualitative edge in sophisticated technologies by making AI deliver in the air. The swift integration and successful flight testing of Helsing’s AI in a Gripen E exemplifies the accelerated capability gain you can get from our fighter. We are excited to continue developing and refining how this and other AI agents can be used, while once again showing how our fighters will outperform faster than the opponent can evolve,” said Peter Nilsson, head of Advanced Programmes, from Saab’s Aeronautics Business Area.

Thanks to the unique design of Gripen E, the fighter can fly with the AI software onboard and fully integrated without being restricted to solely military test ranges or have to rely on an experimental X-plane to do flight trials with the software.

“Within Project Beyond and other programmes, we utilise the power of software to rapidly explore and blur the lines between “now” and the future; in software there are no generations, only speed,” says Peter Nilsson.

«

Saab, in case you didn’t know, stopped making cars a while back, but still does fighter jets – now with added AI. How soon before the pilot is superfluous? (Thanks Peter R for the link, who remarked “seems like another Black Mirror moment.” Indeed!)
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AI chatbots are making LA protest disinformation worse • WIRED

David Gilbert:

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Disinformation about the Los Angeles protests is spreading on social media networks and is being made worse by users turning to AI chatbots like Grok and ChatGPT to perform fact-checking.

As residents of the LA area took to the streets in recent days to protest increasingly frequent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, conservative posters on social media platforms like X and Facebook flooded their feeds with inaccurate information. In addition to well-worn tactics like repurposing old protest footage or clips from video games and movies, posters have claimed that the protesters are little more than paid agitators being directed by shadowy forces—something for which there is no evidence.

In the midst of fast-moving and divisive news stories like the LA protests, and as companies like X and Meta have stepped back from moderating the content on their platforms, users have been turning to AI chatbots for answers—which in many cases have been completely inaccurate.

On Monday, the San Francisco Chronicle published images of National Guard troops sleeping on floors. They were later shared on X by California governor Gavin Newsom, who responded to a post from President Donald Trump by writing: “You sent your troops here without fuel, food, water or a place to sleep.”

Within minutes of the posts being shared, many users on X and Facebook were claiming that the images were either AI-generated or taken from a completely different situation.

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The number of people who now lean on Grok or similar for their “fact-checking” is just appalling. There should be a health warning on these systems. But of course, if they did that, then people wouldn’t use them as much. It’s not in the tech companies’ interests to tell people about the limitations of their systems.
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Large language models and pareidolia • Terence Eden’s Blog

Terence Eden:

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Have you ever looked up at the sky and seen a face staring back at you from the clouds? Of course you have; you’re human. Our delicious meaty brains are hardwired to recognise certain shapes – and faces are a useful shape to recognise. A few false positives are a worthwhile trade-off for such a powerful feature.

Mistakenly seeing faces where there are none is a phenomenon called pareidolia. If you’ve ever used facial recognition on a computer, you’ll know that machines also suffer from it.

…LLMs are hardwired to regurgitate text which statistically matches what they’ve seen before. Their makers believe that a few false-positives are an acceptable error rate for such a useful feature. The LLM form of pareidolia is to recognise text as being syntactically and linguistically correct, even though the contents are rubbish. This is an inherent feature of LLMs. No amount of manually tweaking their parameters or prompts can fix this.

At the moment, Artificial Intelligence – whether Machine Learning or Large Language Models – only works well on a narrowly defined set of tasks and with humans checking the output.

Imagine you’ve just hired an intern. They’ve graduated top of their class from the best university and, apparently, excel at what they do. Because you’re the boss and they’re the intern, you ask them to make you a mug of tea. White, no sugar.
They return with the teabag still in the mug. OK, not everyone knows the intricacies of how to serve tea.

The tea tastes funny. You ask them if they sniffed the milk. “Milk? I used Tipp-Ex to make it white!”

At which point, after throwing up, you throw them out.

Most people encountering [Google] Gemini’s repeated and unacceptable failures will decide, perhaps rightly, that AI isn’t even close to good enough yet.

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The space where LLMs are good and useful is very limited – coding, for example, because it’s a very limited subset of language with strict rules.
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Bluesky isn’t a bubble. It’s a containment dome • Very Serious

Josh Barro:

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My friend Megan McArdle warns in a column that the social media platform Bluesky is a harmful bubble for liberals. By decamping together for Bluesky, she writes, liberals have cloistered themselves in a place where their views won’t be challenged. And because the conversational norms on Bluesky are so hostile and obnoxious — do you ever use AI? Former “Reply All” host Alex Goldman wants you to know you should be thrown into a volcano — the platform fails to appeal beyond its niche political audience, is losing users, and is unlikely to become a place where posting is a good way to influence public opinion.

Megan correctly describes these dynamics, but she’s wrong about them being harmful. In fact, these dynamics are why Bluesky is an important harm reduction tool for liberals. Twitter used to be a place where the most neurotic and censorious liberal influencers were highly effective at influencing events within media organizations and the Democratic Party. But was that actually ever good for liberal causes?

…A lot of the blame for the self-inflicted wounds of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary should go to The Groups: it was the ACLU that got Kamala Harris to commit to taxpayer-funded sex changes for criminals and detained migrants. But one of the reasons Democrats didn’t realize it was a big mistake to make promises and statements that made them sound wacky was that they were constantly being yelled at on Twitter by people whose unpopular viewpoints they mistook for broad public opinion. The screamers won the battle but they lost the war: they pressured their own candidates into manufacturing attack ad fodder for Republicans, and as a result, Donald Trump is president again.

…By rupturing the Twitter user base, [Elon Musk] (accidentally?) created a firewall between the most maladjusted liberal posters on the internet and the reporters, Democratic politicians and operatives who used to pay an excessive amount of attention to their harangues. (Media reporter Max Tani wrote about this for Semafor last month: “I spoke with a few congressional staffers who said that they had tried using Bluesky as an alternative to Twitter after Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk, but they gave up after their bosses kept getting yelled at by Democratic users angry at their impotence.”)

I believe the emergence of this firewall is one reason for the renaissance that we were seeing at WelcomeFest last week: Democrats are becoming more cognizant of public opinion and less fearful of breaking with the activist base because they are no longer receiving so much activist messaging in the form of aggrieved Twitter push alerts on their phones.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Might some of the books on these shelves literally poison you if you read them? Scottish scientists can save you. CC-licensed photo by Cornell University Library 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. Untouchable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Meta is creating a new A.I. lab to pursue ‘superintelligence’ • The New York Times

Cade Metz and Mike Isaac:

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Meta is preparing to unveil a new artificial intelligence research lab dedicated to pursuing “superintelligence,” a hypothetical A.I. system that exceeds the powers of the human brain, as the tech giant jockeys to stay competitive in the technology race, according to four people with knowledge of the company’s plans.

Meta has tapped Alexandr Wang, 28, the founder and chief executive of the A.I. start-up Scale AI, to join the new lab, the people said, and has been in talks to invest billions of dollars in his company as part of a deal that would also bring other Scale AI employees to the company. Meta has offered seven- to nine-figure compensation packages to dozens of researchers from leading A.I. companies such as OpenAI and Google, with some agreeing to join, according to the people.

The new lab is part of a larger reorganization of Meta’s A.I. efforts, the people said. The company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has recently grappled with internal management struggles over the technology, as well as employee churn and several product releases that fell flat, two of the people said.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has invested billions of dollars into turning his company into an A.I. powerhouse. Since OpenAI released the ChatGPT chatbot in 2022, the tech industry has raced to build increasingly powerful A.I. Mr. Zuckerberg has pushed his company to incorporate A.I. across its products, including in its smart glasses and a recently released app, Meta AI.

Staying in the race is crucial for Meta, Google, Amazon and Microsoft, with the technology likely to be the future for the industry. The giants have pumped money into start-ups and their own A.I. labs. Microsoft has invested more than $13bn in OpenAI, while Amazon has plowed $8 billion into the A.I. start-up Anthropic.

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Well this will be joy-filled news for all the people in the metaverse division, won’t it?

Quite apart from the hubris of chasing superintelligence, which sounds like Zeno’s Paradox in machine form.
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Web-scraping AI bots cause disruption for scientific databases and journals • Nature

Diana Kwon:

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Internet bots have been around for decades, and some have been useful. For example, Google and other search engines have bots that scan millions of web pages to identify and retrieve content. But the rise of generative AI has led to a deluge of bots, including many ‘bad’ ones that scrape without permission.

This year, the BMJ, a publisher of medical journals based in London, has seen bot traffic to its websites surpass that of real users. The aggressive behaviour of these bots overloaded the publisher’s servers and led to interruptions in services for legitimate customers, says Ian Mulvany, BMJ’s chief technology officer.

Other publishers report similar issues. “We’ve seen a huge increase in what we call ‘bad bot’ traffic,” says Jes Kainth, a service delivery director based in Brighton, UK, at Highwire Press, an Internet hosting service that specializes in scholarly publications. “It’s a big problem.”

The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) reported in April that more than 90% of 66 members it surveyed had experienced AI bots scraping content from their sites — of which roughly two-thirds had experienced service disruptions as a result. “Repositories are open access, so in a sense, we welcome the reuse of the contents,” says Kathleen Shearer, COAR’s executive director. “But some of these bots are super aggressive, and it’s leading to service outages and significant operational problems.”

One factor driving the rise in AI bots was a revelation that came with the release of DeepSeek, a Chinese-built large language model (LLM). Before that, most LLMs required a huge amount of computational power to create, explains Rohit Prajapati, a development and operations manager at Highwire Press. But the developers behind DeepSeek showed that an LLM that rivals popular generative-AI tools could be made with many fewer resources, kick-starting an explosion of bots seeking to scrape the data needed to train this type of model.

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He’s a master of outrage on X. The pay isn’t great • The New York Times

Stuart Thompson:

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Mr. McGee started swiping and poking on his iPhone, rapidly downloading the video, adding his watermark, exporting the video and tapping out some words in just a few minutes. Then he pressed send.

“WNBA star Brittney Griner is going viral on the internet after fans discovered what she sounds like for the first time after releasing this video,” the post read.

This was his “jump starter,” as he called it: a post sent early in the morning aimed at juicing the algorithm in his favor. He believes that if a post performs well, the algorithm will reward his subsequent posts with more reach. Since X’s algorithm is largely a black box, creators rely on these kinds of intuitions and speculations to guide their decisions.

The post also had what he called an “alley-oop” — a phrase that encourages users to post a comment. He made sure to phrase the post so he could call Ms. Griner “she,” baiting commenters to call her the wrong gender.

“I know for a fact that Brittney Griner will go viral, and it’s a great post to start the day,” he said. His plan worked. The views ticked higher: a few thousand at first, then tens of thousands. Comments filled with harassment flooded in, as he’d expected. It didn’t matter to Mr. McGee what they wrote, as long as they wrote something. Each time a premium user — who pays at least $8 per month for special features — interacted with his posts, he earned a little bit of money under X’s revised revenue program.

“Honestly, Brittney Griner should be proud, because of the fact that Brittney Griner can get 500 comments in an hour,” Mr. McGee said.

…In total, X has paid Mr. McGee about $157,000 since the program started in 2023, according to payment records reviewed by The Times. He made $67,000 in his first year and just $12,000 last year after he was kicked from the advertising program. After X overhauled its payment program last October, Mr. McGee complained to Mr. Musk that he still wasn’t being paid. Mr. Musk replied: “Will fix.” Mr. McGee has collected about $16,000 since.

He has also earned about $62,000 directly from his X subscribers since 2023, who pay $10 monthly for insider content. He has separately earned a little money from YouTube and TikTok, though he said it hadn’t amounted to much. His posts to Facebook and Instagram earn minimal views, and those platforms don’t pay most creators.

Unlike YouTube and TikTok, X provides no tools for creators to see how much money they earn from each post.

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Interestingly, the NYT never says what his account is. (It’s dom_lucre.) Life is tough even with 1.5 million followers, it seems.
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News sites are getting crushed by Google’s new AI tools • WSJ via MSN

Isabella Simonetti and Katherine Blunt:

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The AI armageddon is here for online news publishers.

Chatbots are replacing Google searches, eliminating the need to click on blue links and tanking referrals to news sites. As a result, traffic that publishers relied on for years is plummeting.

Traffic from organic search to HuffPost’s desktop and mobile websites fell by just over half in the past three years, and by nearly that much at the Washington Post, according to digital market data firm Similarweb.

Business Insider cut about 21% of its staff last month, a move CEO Barbara Peng said was aimed at helping the publication “endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control.” Organic search traffic to its websites declined by 55% between April 2022 and April 2025, according to data from Similarweb.

At a companywide meeting earlier this year, Nicholas Thompson, chief executive of the Atlantic, said the publication should assume traffic from Google would drop toward zero and the company needed to evolve its business model.

Google’s introduction last year of AI Overviews, which summarize search results at the top of the page, dented traffic to features like vacation guides and health tips, as well as to product review sites. Its U.S. rollout last month of AI Mode, an effort to compete directly with the likes of ChatGPT, is expected to deliver a stronger blow. AI Mode responds to user queries in a chatbot-style conversation, with far fewer links.

“Google is shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine,” Thompson said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “We have to develop new strategies.”

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That zero figure for The Atlantic is surely echoed at other sites. And that’s pretty worrying.
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How Expedia’s CMO is preparing for a future dominated by AI • Business Insider

Jochen Koedijk, speaking to Lara O’Reilly:

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The way consumers are using the internet to make their decisions is fundamentally changing.

I have two kids, 10 and seven years old, and I think it’s very unlikely they will ever put a query into a search box, as I’ve grown up doing. The way people are using voice and having real conversations is going to be a long-term change in how people are using the internet.

What we’re seeing today is that a lot of the inspirational travel searches are evolving rapidly with things like Copilot, ChatGPT, and even Instagram Reels.

There are a lot of moments where my wife sends me Reels, and she’s like, “Where is this?” And I have no idea. So then, we were like, what if we can develop something where you send those Reels to Expedia, and then we will tell you: “It’s this destination, or this hotel. Here are a couple of things to do. The best time to visit is between May and July, and here are a couple of booking options so you can get started.”

Right now, it’s still early access, which means it’s only with Reels, but we’re looking at other forms of content as well.

It’s a very different journey versus going to Google.com and typing in “best hotels in Miami with pool, minus spa.”

We’re also focusing on the visibility of our brands in agentic search engines. It’s really evolving.

We’ve launched with Operator for OpenAI, which I still see as a precursor to an agentic interface because you’re looking at the cursor moving on your screen. Of course, true agentic, where it’s going, will be more behind-the-scenes. But it’s very important to be early so that we can experiment and iterate.

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Some years ago Benedict Evans said that his child would never see a pixel (after Apple introduced “retina” screens on all its products). The “never type a query into a search box” point feels similar.
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This is what really happened with Siri and Apple Intelligence, according to Apple • TechRadar

Lance Ulanoff:

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As Apple was working on a V1 of the Siri architecture, it was also working on what Federighi called V2, “a deeper end-to-end architecture that we knew was ultimately what we wanted to create, to get to a full set of capabilities that we wanted for Siri.”

What everyone saw during WWDC 2024 were videos of that V1 architecture, and that was the foundation for work that began in earnest after the WWDC 2024 reveal, in preparation for the full Apple Intelligence Siri launch.

“We set about for months, making it work better and better across more app intents, better and better for doing search,” Federighi added. “But fundamentally, we found that the limitations of the V1 architecture weren’t getting us to the quality level that we knew our customers needed and expected. We realized that V1 architecture, you know, we could push and push and push and put in more time, but if we tried to push that out in the state it was going to be in, it would not meet our customer expectations or Apple standards, and that we had to move to the V2 architecture.

“As soon as we realized that, and that was during the spring, we let the world know that we weren’t going to be able to put that out, and we were going to keep working on really shifting to the new architecture and releasing something.”

That switch, though, and what Apple learned along the way, meant that Apple would not make the same mistake again, and promise a new Siri for a date that it could not guarantee to hit. Instead. Apple won’t “precommunicate a date,” explained Federighi, “until we have in-house, the V2 architecture delivering not just in a form that we can demonstrate for you all…”

He then joked that, while, actually, he “could” demonstrate a working V2 model, he was not going to do it. Then he added, more seriously, “We have, you know, the V2 architecture, of course, working in-house, but we’re not yet to the point where it’s delivering at the quality level that I think makes it a great Apple feature, and so we’re not announcing the date for when that’s happening. We will announce the date when we’re ready to seed it, and you’re all ready to be able to experience it.”

I asked Federighi if, by V2 architecture, he was talking about a wholesale rebuilding of Siri, but Federighi disabused me of that notion.

«

Apple seems to be going round in circles on this. It’s coming! It’s not coming! It’s going to be better! It might be better! It’s coming sometime!
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WWDC25: macOS Tahoe breaks decades of Finder history • 512 Pixels

Stephen Hackett:

»

Something jumped out at me in the macOS Tahoe segment of the WWDC keynote today: the Finder icon is reversed.

You can see that in the image below. On the left is macOS Sequoia, and on the right is macOS Tahoe:

I know I am going to sound old and fussy, but Apple needs to roll this back.

«

Agree absolutely. (“Tahoe” is the forthcoming release of the desktop OS, and all these details can still be changed before it’s released in September or October.) As Hackett points out, it’s been this way (in colour) for 30 years, and it is just jarring to have it swapped. It’s unnecessary – pointless change for the sake of pointless change. There are people inside Apple’s design team who don’t know when not to move our cheese.
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Tool to identify poisonous books developed by University of St Andrews • The Guardian

Ella Creamer:

»

A new tool to quickly identify books that are poisonous to humans has been developed by the University of St Andrews.

Historically, publishers used arsenic mixed with copper to achieve a vivid emerald green colour for book covers. While the risk to the public is “low”, handling arsenic-containing books regularly can lead to health issues including irritation of the eyes, nose and throat along with more serious side-effects. The toxic pigment in the book bindings can flake off, meaning small pieces can easily be inhaled.

In recent years, many libraries have prevented access to all suspect green books as a precaution, as testing has until now been costly and time-consuming. For example, the University of Bielefeld, along with several other German universities, isolated 60,000 books as a precautionary measure last year.

The new device can quickly and cheaply detect the presence of toxic pigment. “A device used in the School of Earth Sciences to detect minerals in rocks was the starting point,” said Pilar Gil, who led the research. “The Eureka moment was discovering the unique reflectance pattern from emerald green pigment in the visible spectrum. The idea was then to apply this discovery to an instrument which we could use and share with the sector.”

Two scientists from the university’s astronomy and physics school, Graham Bruce and Morgan Facchin, developed a portable tool.

«

You did not know there was such a thing as a poisonous book. Fabulous possibility for a murder mystery, surely.
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About Us: Deepware – Scan & Detect Deepfake Videos With a Simple tool

»

Deepfakes are going to be the first real punch from AI to humanity. The cybersecurity industry has a very short time to get ahead of deepfakes before they undermine the public’s trust in reality.

We first recognized the danger while our parent company Zemana researched methods to develop an AI-based antivirus engine. Later, in mid-2018, we started our research on deepfake detection and generation as the deepware AI team.

«

Perhaps a useful tool. Certainly one to start using on the videos that flit by on social media.
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Major labels in talks to license AI use of music, report says • Investopedia

Bill McColl:

»

Warner Music Group (WMG) shares fell on word the big music distributor was one of three firms negotiating with artificial intelligence (AI) startups to monetize AI use of its music catalog.

The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg reported that Warner Music, along with Universal Music Group and Sony Group Corp unit Sony Music Group, are discussing licensing deals with Suno and Udio to receive compensation when music by artists they represent is used to train generative AI models and produces new music.

The Journal said that the music companies want the AI firms to develop fingerprinting and attribution technology that will track when and how a song is used. Plus, they want to be able to actively participate in the products Suno and Udio release, which includes which songs are developed and how they work.

The Journal noted both Suno and Udio, which are being sued for copyright infringement, have argued that they aren’t infringing on the music companies’ business. However, it added because of “a more uncertain regulatory environment and investor pressure to develop commercial frameworks for the use of music in generative AI products,” both firms are eager to come to an agreement.

«

It’s going to be hard to monetise exactly from AI training. Will it be done on a per-song-scanned basis? That’s going to be pretty thin pickings.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Guess which technology the US Federal Aviation Authority uses for backups? Yes, floppy disks. CC-licensed photo by Ivan Radic 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. Megabyte! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

US air traffic control still uses floppy disks for backup • The Register

Richard Speed:

»

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has confirmed that the US air traffic control system still runs on somewhat antiquated bits of technology, including floppy disks and paper strips.

This came during last week’s Budget Hearing for the US House Appropriation Committee, in which the current FAA boss, Chris Rocheleau, explained to the committee that a new system would mean “no more floppy disks or paper strips.”

Asked by Congressman Mike Quigley how the FAA plans to make up for the “12% of aeronautical information specialists” – who update charts, maps and key data – that had either left the FAA or were planning to leave, Rocheleau said “first and foremost we’re assessing how we’re doing that and what what can we do better – so for instance going from a paperbased process to an electronic based process, that’s one of them.”

A few staffers should probably expect their job descriptions to enlarge, it seems. Rocheleau said the FAA would keep hiring for critical safety positions but would also be “leveraging the talent that we do have that is staying and making sure that they can both do the critical safety functions as well as those support functions.”

Asked by Kentucky representative Hal Rogers whether the FAA planned to “build a new system separate and apart from the present system” where it would simply switch the one system to “on and the other one to off,” Rocheleau described the transition as “a little more complicated than that” while committee chair Tom Cole quipped “They’ll be doing it while you’re in the air, Mr Rogers.”

The issue of outdated technology has troubled agencies for years. The recent outage at Newark Liberty International Airport – where a copper cable knocked out multiple systems including radar and comms and disrupted hundreds of flights – has thrown the problems faced by the FAA into sharp focus.

Rocheleau described a network systems refresh in which various units, including the ATC at Newark Liberty, would switch from the “copper wires” of the “old-fashioned telephone lines” over to fiber optic cables, as well as new modern systems for “radars and facilities,” promising “intentional deliberate testing to make sure the redundancy and the resiliency is there to ensure the safety of the traveling public.”

But this won’t happen any time soon.

«

Always lovely to know that systems on which thousands of lives depend are reliant on ancient technology.
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Apple WWDC 2025: the 13 biggest announcements • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

…Apple is revamping the design across its operating systems. Now they will have a new Liquid Glass theme that adds more transparency to buttons, switches, sliders, text, and media controls throughout their interfaces.

The date, time, notification previews on iOS 26’s lockscreen will also adopt the new look, allowing you to get a clear view of your wallpaper behind all the text.

…There’s a new Apple Intelligence feature coming to iOS 26 that lets you use the same buttons you would to take a screenshot to call upon the AI assistant. From there, you can ask additional questions about what you’re seeing on your screen with ChatGPT or search for a particular object on Google or Etsy to find similar images.

…Apple is building AI-powered live translation into the Messages, FaceTime, and Phone apps. You can use the integration to automatically translate texts in the Messages app, while you’ll hear speech translated aloud on the Phone app. In FaceTime, Apple will display translated live captions while you listen to your conversation partner.

…Though Apple’s keynote was a bit light on AI news, the company announced that it will let third-party app developers access the on-device large language model used by Apple Intelligence, allowing them to create tools of their own.

«

These all look straightforward enough, though you know that when people start installing the new look on their phones it’s going to be a Marmite bomb – love it or hate it. There’s new windowing coming to the iPad as well – once more – but we’ll see how that goes. Only available in developer betas at present.
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Apple research questions AI reasoning models just days before WWDC • MacRumors

Tim Hardwick:

»

A newly published Apple Machine Learning Research study has challenged the prevailing narrative around AI “reasoning” large-language models like OpenAI’s o1 and Claude’s thinking variants, revealing fundamental limitations that suggest these systems aren’t truly reasoning at all.

For the study, rather than using standard math benchmarks that are prone to data contamination, Apple researchers designed controllable puzzle environments including Tower of Hanoi [moving rings between pegs] and River Crossing [moving missionaries and cannibals, occasionally]. This allowed a precise analysis of both the final answers and the internal reasoning traces across varying complexity levels, according to the researchers.

The results are striking, to say the least. All tested reasoning models – including o3-mini, DeepSeek-R1, and Claude 3.7 Sonnet – experienced complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexity thresholds, and dropped to zero success rates despite having adequate computational resources. Counterintuitively, the models actually reduce their thinking effort as problems become more complex, suggesting fundamental scaling limitations rather than resource constraints.

Perhaps most damning, even when researchers provided complete solution algorithms, the models still failed at the same complexity points. Researchers say this indicates the limitation isn’t in problem-solving strategy, but in basic logical step execution.

Models also showed puzzling inconsistencies – succeeding on problems requiring 100+ moves while failing on simpler puzzles needing only 11 moves.

…The take-home of Apple’s findings is that current “reasoning” models rely on sophisticated pattern matching rather than genuine reasoning capabilities. It suggests that LLMs don’t scale reasoning like humans do, overthinking easy problems and thinking less for harder ones.

«

Sure, fine, LLMs don’t “reason” like we do. If we encountered aliens, would we decide they didn’t “reason” if they didn’t solve problems in the same way as us? Alternatively, would they think we didn’t reason if we couldn’t solve their problems consistently? (There’s a Substack making this point.)

It fits with Apple’s incoherent position on LLMs, though, and rumours that it thought they were rubbish from the start.
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Cambridge mapping project solves a medieval murder • Ars Technica

Jennifer Ouellette:

»

In 2019, we told you about a new interactive digital “murder map” of London compiled by University of Cambridge criminologist Manuel Eisner. Drawing on data catalogued in the city coroners’ rolls, the map showed the approximate location of 142 homicide cases in late medieval London. The Medieval Murder Maps project has since expanded to include maps of York and Oxford homicides, as well as podcast episodes focusing on individual cases.

It’s easy to lose oneself down the rabbit hole of medieval murder for hours, filtering the killings by year, choice of weapon, and location. Think of it as a kind of 14th-century version of Clue: It was the noblewoman’s hired assassins armed with daggers in the streets of Cheapside near St. Paul’s Cathedral. And that’s just the juiciest of the various cases described in a new paper published in the journal Criminal Law Forum.

The noblewoman was Ela Fitzpayne, wife of a knight named Sir Robert Fitzpayne, lord of Stogursey. The victim was a priest and her erstwhile lover, John Forde, who was stabbed to death in the streets of Cheapside on May 3, 1337. “We are looking at a murder commissioned by a leading figure of the English aristocracy,” said University of Cambridge criminologist Manuel Eisner, who heads the Medieval Murder Maps project. “It is planned and cold-blooded, with a family member and close associates carrying it out, all of which suggests a revenge motive.”

Members of the mapping project geocoded all the cases after determining approximate locations for the crime scenes. Written in Latin, the coroners’ rolls are records of sudden or suspicious deaths as investigated by a jury of local men, called together by the coroner to establish facts and reach a verdict. Those records contain such relevant information as where the body was found and by whom; the nature of the wounds; the jury’s verdict on cause of death; the weapon used and how much it was worth; the time, location, and witness accounts; whether the perpetrator was arrested, escaped, or sought sanctuary; and any legal measures taken.

«

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Chernobyl dogs are (not?) experiencing rapid evolution, biologists say • Popular Mechanics

Darren ORf:

»

we can cross radiation off the list of explanations for the current state of the Chernobyl canine population. Published in the journal PLOS One by scientists from North Carolina State University and Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York, this new genetic analysis looked at the chromosomal level, the genome level, and even the nucleotides of the Chernobyl dogs, and found no abnormalities indicative of radiation-induced mutation.

To establish a baseline for comparison, the team compared the genome of [feral] Chernobyl City dogs located 10 miles from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) to dogs found in regions of Russia, Poland, and other nearby countries. Once they determined that the populations were genetically similar, they then used the Chernobyl City dogs as a representative control for their study. Of course, the task wasn’t simple, as more than a couple dozen dog generations have past since the original pups that witnessed to the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986.

“We know that, for example, exposure to high doses of radiation can introduce instability from the chromosomal level on down,” Matthew Breen, senior author of the study from North Carolina State University, said in a press statement. “While this dog population is 30 or more generations removed from the one present during the 1986 disaster, mutations would likely still be detectable if they conferred a survival advantage to those original dogs. But we didn’t find any such evidence in these dogs.”

That said, the 2023 study [which suggested there were changes] still provides a template for further investigation into the effects of radiation on larger mammals, as the DNA of dogs roaming the Chernobyl Power Plant and nearby Chernobyl City can be compared to dogs living in non-irradiated areas. Despite a current lack of firm conclusions, the study has shown once again that an area that—by all rights—should be a wasteland has become an unparalleled scientific opportunity to understand radiation and its impact on natural evolution.

«

There have been various studies around Chernobyl – wolves, boar – and it’s a bit unclear what’s going on, overall.
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Nigerian engineer sets Guinness World Record with world’s smallest GPS tracking device • Technology Times

Iretomiwa Balogun:

»

Nigerian engineer Oluwatobi “Tobi” Oyinlola, based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is earning global recognition after developing a GPS tracking device smaller than a human thumbprint, a feat that sets a new Guinness World Record.

The device, measuring just 22.93 mm by 11.92 mm, is officially certified by Guinness World Records as the smallest GPS tracking device prototype in the world. Designed and built in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it integrates a custom-printed circuit board, an embedded microcontroller, and Bluetooth capabilities, enabling it to receive GPS signals, log location data, and transmit it via Bluetooth – all without the need for an external antenna.

“This project started as a personal challenge,” Oyinlola says. “My goal was to create a compact GPS device that integrates everything into one unit – microcontroller, Bluetooth, and antenna – without external components.”

According to the MIT-based researcher, the innovation holds potential for applications across wearables, medical microchips, wildlife monitoring, and personal safety devices, offering a pathway to new use cases where minimal form factor and high functionality are critical.

«

Impressive. Though the best bet is that it’s not going to be used for “personal safety” so much as “tracking suspicious people”.
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Rat breaches bank ATM in India, eats $18,000 worth of cash • Reuters

Zarir Hussain:

»

When bank technicians in India were finally summoned to investigate why an ATM (automated teller machine) had not been working for days, they began to smell a rat.

What they found inside the ATM was almost $18,000 worth of shredded Indian rupee notes and one dead rodent that had somehow eluded the machine’s security camera for its next, and last, meal, a State Bank of India (SBI) official said on Thursday.

“The ATM was out of order for a few days and when our technicians opened the kiosk we were shocked to find shredded notes and a dead rat,” said Chandan Sharma, SBI branch manager in the town of Tinsukia in the northeastern state of Assam.

“We have started an investigation into this rare incident and will take measures to prevent a recurrence.”
SBI is India’s largest bank with more than 50,000 ATMs spread across the country. Most ATMs in India have a closed-circuit camera installed for enhanced security.

But an inspection of the camera footage at the ATM in Tinsukia turned up no rat entering it, Sharma said. Of the 2.9 million rupees ($42,685) in the ATM, 1.7 million rupees ($25,022) were recovered intact. But banknotes worth 1.2 million rupees ($17,662) were destroyed.

«

Not much fun for the rat either, though.
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Millions of low-cost Android devices turn home networks into crime platforms • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

Millions of low-cost devices for media streaming, in-vehicle entertainment, and video projection are infected with malware that turns consumer networks into platforms for distributing malware, concealing nefarious communications, and performing other illicit activities, the FBI has warned.

The malware infecting these devices, known as BadBox, is based on Triada, a malware strain discovered in 2016 by Kaspersky Lab, which called it “one of the most advanced mobile Trojans” the security firm’s analysts had ever encountered. It employed an impressive kit of tools, including rooting exploits that bypassed security protections built into Android and functions for modifying the Android OS’s all-powerful Zygote process. Google eventually updated Android to block the methods Triada used to infect devices.

…In 2023, security firm Human Security reported on BigBox, a Triada-derived backdoor it found preinstalled on thousands of devices manufactured in China. The malware, which Human Security estimated was installed on 74,000 devices around the world, facilitated a range of illicit activities, including advertising fraud, residential proxy services, the creation of fake Gmail and WhatsApp accounts, and infecting other Internet-connected devices.

In March, Google and a consortium of other Internet organizations took part in a coordinated action to disrupt BadBox 2.0, a new campaign affecting more than 1 million low-priced, off-brand Android devices. The infected devices were based on the Android Open Source Project, not the Android TV OS. They also weren’t certified under Google’s Play Protect security program. Human Security identified more than a dozen TV models that were impacted. It was the second BadBox disruption action in as many years.

On Thursday, the FBI warned that the BadBox threat remained and urged consumers to look for signs their devices may be infected.

«

Problem: there are few visible signs of infection. Simpler move: check for a model known to be bad, replace it. Thanks China! And Android!
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Bluesky’s decline stems from never hearing from other side – The Washington Post

Megan McArdle:

»

It’s not surprising that progressives want to return to the good old days. But it’s not working, and I’m skeptical it ever will.

The people who have migrated to Bluesky tend to be those who feel the most visceral disgust for Musk and Trump, plus a smattering of those who are merely curious and another smattering who are tired of the AI slop and unregenerate racism that increasingly pollutes their X feeds. Because the Musk and Trump haters are the largest and most passionate group, the result is something of an echo chamber where it’s hard to get positive engagement unless you’re saying things progressives want to hear — and where the negative engagement on things they don’t want to hear can be intense.

That’s true even for content that isn’t obviously political: Ethan Mollick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who studies AI, recently announced that he’ll be limiting his Bluesky posting because AI discussions on the platform are too “fraught.”

All this is pretty off-putting for folks who aren’t already rather progressive, and that creates a threefold problem for the ones who dream of getting the old band back together. Most obviously, it makes it hard for the platform to build a large enough userbase for the company to become financially self-sustaining, or for liberals to amass the influence they wielded on old Twitter. There, they accumulated power by shaping the contours of a conversation that included a lot of non-progressives. On Bluesky, they’re mostly talking among themselves.

One can say the same about Truth Social, of course, but that’s not an example the left should be eager to emulate. Segregating yourself in a political silo amplifies any political movement’s worst tendencies, giving free rein to your most toxic adherents and cutting you off from vital feedback about, say, your unpopular tariff policies.

«

The numbers for Bluesky keep going in the wrong direction. Accounts: 36.5 million. Daily posters: 1.5m on November 19, 0.67m now. That’s a fall from 4% to less than 2%. That page also has another relevant statistic showing the power law of social networks: 95% of users have 85 or fewer followers. It’s only when you get to the top 0.3% – about 100,000 people – that people have more than 1,000 followers. And only 3,600 have more than 11,000 followers.

That’s when you need a really good algorithm to show people new and interesting content from across the network. Otherwise, it dies.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Chinlone, or caneball, is a popular game under threat in Myanmar due to the country’s internal conflicts. CC-licensed photo by Scott Edmunds 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. Keeping up. 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 tax code time bomb fueling mass tech layoffs • Quartz

Catherine Baab:

»

Between 2022 and today, a little-noticed tweak to the U.S. tax code has quietly rewired the financial logic of how American companies invest in research and development. Outside of CFO and accounting circles, almost no one knew it existed. “I work on these tax write-offs and still hadn’t heard about this,” a chief operating officer at a private-equity-backed tech company told Quartz. “It’s just been so weirdly silent.”

Still, the delayed change to a decades-old tax provision — buried deep in the 2017 tax law — has contributed to the loss of hundreds of thousands of high-paying, white-collar jobs. That’s the picture that emerges from a review of corporate filings, public financial data, analysis of timelines, and interviews with industry insiders. One accountant, working in-house at a tech company, described it as a “niche issue with broad impact,” echoing sentiments from venture capital investors also interviewed for this article. Some spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive political matters.

Since the start of 2023, more than 500,000 tech workers have been laid off, according to industry tallies. Headlines have blamed over-hiring during the pandemic and, more recently, AI. But beneath the surface was a hidden accelerant: a change to what’s known as Section 174 that helped gut in-house software and product development teams everywhere from tech giants such as Microsoft and Meta to much smaller, private, direct-to-consumer and other internet-first companies.

…For almost 70 years, American companies could deduct 100% of qualified research and development spending in the year they incurred the costs. Salaries, software, contractor payments — if it contributed to creating or improving a product, it came off the top of a firm’s taxable income.

The deduction was guaranteed by Section 174 of the IRS Code of 1954, and under the provision, R&D flourished in the U.S.

…When Congress passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), the signature legislative achievement of President Donald Trump’s first term, it slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% — a massive revenue loss on paper for the federal government.

To make the 2017 bill comply with Senate budget rules, lawmakers needed to offset the cost. So they added future tax hikes that wouldn’t kick in right away, wouldn’t provoke immediate backlash from businesses, and could, in theory, be quietly repealed later.

The delayed change to Section 174 — from immediate expensing of R&D to mandatory amortization, meaning that companies must spread the deduction out in smaller chunks over five or even 15-year periods — was that kind of provision.

«

Complex, but: significant. Goes to show how a badly-written bill can screw things up. Speaking of which..
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A simple comma is going to cost Apple billions in Europe • Cafetech

Jérôme Marin:

»

The disagreement between Apple and Brussels centres on Article 5.4 [of the Digital Markets Act]. In its English version, the article states that the gatekeeper—the term used by the Commission for the seven major tech companies subject to the DMA—“shall allow business users, free of charge, to communicate and promote offers, including under different conditions […], and to conclude contracts with those end users.”

This lengthy sentence creates ambiguity: what exactly does “free of charge” apply to? Apple claims it only applies to “communicate” and “promote,” meaning the right to insert redirect links in an app. But not to “conclude contracts,” meaning making purchases. Based on that, Apple argues it can still charge commissions on those external transactions.

The European Commission interprets it differently: contract conclusion must also be free of charge. It relies on the comma before the phrase “and to conclude contracts,” turning the sentence into an “enumeration.” “That ‘free of charge’ applies to all that is being enumerated after”, it explains in its detailed decision sent to Apple as part of the €500m fine, which was made public last week.

“In other words, the price for app developers to pay [for external purchases] is zero,” writes the Commission. However, its case could be weakened by inconsistencies in the French and German translations of the text, which it acknowledges are “ambiguous.” Still, “other linguistic versions leave no room for interpretation,” notes Brussels.

«

My understanding was always that lawyers would draft clauses like that without commas in order to avoid ambiguities like this. Commas should only be used in legal documents where their use won’t introduce ambiguity (which isn’t often).

You’d think Apple might have allowed for an adversarial reading like this.
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DOGE developed error-prone AI to help kill Veterans Affairs contracts • ProPublica

Brandon Roberts, Vernal Coleman and Eric Umansky:

»

As the Trump administration prepared to cancel contracts at the Department of Veteran Affairs this year, officials turned to a software engineer with no health care or government experience to guide them.

The engineer, working for the Department of Government Efficiency, quickly built an artificial intelligence tool to identify which services from private companies were not essential. He labeled those contracts “MUNCHABLE.”

The code, using outdated and inexpensive AI models, produced results with glaring mistakes. For instance, it hallucinated the size of contracts, frequently misreading them and inflating their value. It concluded more than a thousand were each worth $34 million, when in fact some were for as little as $35,000.

The DOGE AI tool flagged more than 2,000 contracts for “munching.” It’s unclear how many have been or are on track to be canceled — the Trump administration’s decisions on VA contracts have largely been a black box. The VA uses contractors for many reasons, including to support hospitals, research and other services aimed at caring for ailing veterans.

VA officials have said they’ve killed nearly 600 contracts overall. Congressional Democrats have been pressing VA leaders for specific details of what’s been canceled without success.

We identified at least two dozen on the DOGE list that have been canceled so far. Among the canceled contracts was one to maintain a gene sequencing device used to develop better cancer treatments. Another was for blood sample analysis in support of a VA research project. Another was to provide additional tools to measure and improve the care nurses provide.

ProPublica obtained the code and the contracts it flagged from a source and shared them with a half dozen AI and procurement experts. All said the script was flawed.

«

Who could have guessed etc.
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Hollywood already uses generative AI (and is hiding it) • Vulture

Lila Shapiro:

»

Hollywood has lately been in what media observers have described as an “existential crisis,” an implosion, and a “death spiral.” Studios were making fewer films, and fewer people were watching the ones that got made. Layoffs were mounting. Depending on whom you asked, AI was either hastening the end or offering a lifeline. It had brought a proliferation of tools that were capable, to varying degrees of success, of creating every component of a film: the script, the footage, the soundtrack, the actors.

Among the many concerns rattling nerves around town, one significant issue was that nearly every AI model capable of generating video had been trained on vast troves of copyrighted material scraped from the internet without permission or compensation. When the writers and actors unions ended their strikes in 2023, the new contracts included guardrails on AI — ensuring, for the moment anyway, that their members retained some measure of control over how the studios could use the technology.

The new contracts barred studios from using scripts written by AI and from digitally cloning actors without explicit consent and compensation. But they left the door open for certain uses, particularly with generative video: studios can use models to create synthetic performers and other sorts of footage — including visual effects and entire scenes — so long as a human is nominally in charge and the unions are given a chance to bargain over terms. Even with that latitude, the industry is hemmed in by a growing thicket of legal uncertainty, especially around how these systems were trained in the first place.

Over 35 copyright-related lawsuits have been filed against AI companies so far, the outcomes of which could determine whether generative AI has a future in Hollywood at all. As one producer put it to me, “The biggest fear in all of Hollywood is that you’re going to make a blockbuster, and guess what? You’re going to sit in litigation for the next 30 years.”

«

But, as Shapiro finds, they are using it and hoping they’ll be able to short-circuit the courts bit relatively quickly.
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Seventeen takeaways from Mary Meeker’s AI Deck • Read Trung

Trung Phan:

»

Mary Meeker — a leading Wall Street tech analyst during the 1990s turned widely-read VC — published her famous Internet Trends report for the first time since 2019.

She came out of retirement with a 340-page slide deck because of the rise of breaded chicken sandwiches generative AI.

If you spend any time on social, the AI hype has gotten a bit out of hand. Every day, someone is posting a new AI video or text or image feature with the clickbait title “this is insane”, “this is wild”, “this is crazy”, “Google is dead”, “wow, Apple is cooked”, “[Insert Fortune 50 Company] is over” or “drive down to Walmart, buy some adult diapers and put them on because you will lose bladder control after seeing what you’re about to see”.

It’s a bit much (and I am guilty of doing every single one of those hooks).

Meeker’s deck does a great job of contextualizing the hype and it’s not as hype-y as it seems once you read through her stats. Specifically, the consumer adoption and infrastructure buildout of AI is happening at an unprecedented pace.

While the $1T in Big Tech data centre spend may not yield a great return for all the players involved, I think it’s a pretty massive win for consumers. There are clear parallels to the Dotcom Bubble when telecoms spent $500B+ on fiber and cables etc. Many went bust but we were left with massive data infrastructure that led to later internet and mobile waves (for sure, the technology itself is amoral and was used for the entirety of the human experience…just like AI will).

On the consumer side, Meeker paints an impressive picture of ChatGPT. Its growth blows away previous tech platforms. While this does not guarantee OpenAI will win the long-run generative AI race — or even be around decades from now — it has an enviable position with huge mindshare.

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Happily, by cutting Meeker’s deck down to 5% of its original length, Phan makes this eminently readable. In short: number go up.
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Early access to Alexa+: testing out Amazon’s next-gen AI assistant • USA Today

Jason St Angelo:

»

I’ve been very pleased – and occasionally quite impressed – with Alexa+. It can do everything the original Alexa can do, only with a flexible, approachable personality that makes interactions more pleasant and accurate. The AI-enabled Alexa+ can also handle more complex tasks, from brainstorming menus and managing calendars to planning repairs and finding the right restaurant – and making the reservation.

Of course, my time with the new-and-improved AI assistant hasn’t been without off-the-rails interactions. That’s to be expected with generative AI, regardless of whether it’s in pre-release or a finished product. More often, though, I’ve had expansive, interesting and helpful conversations that, like the sweet smack of a perfect golf drive, make you want to come back and try again.

Those experiences are critical, I’ve found. Because Alexa+ doesn’t magically integrate into your life. It requires a routine change. Which means that if you don’t work to find reasons to engage, Alexa+ will end up being just a wittier, more pleasant-sounding egg timer than the one you have now.

The more you engage – and the more Alexa+ delivers – the easier it gets.

…Our smart home may not be any smarter now. But Alexa+ makes it much easier to use. Alexa+ is also much more tolerant of word choice. It doesn’t care, for example, if I call it the entry light or foyer light, or front door light. It will turn it on regardless. It’s much easier than before to ask for live views of our Ring cameras on our Echo Show 21. As well, I can ask Alexa+ to show me all packages delivered in the past day. 

I was even able to build a routine – turn off a set of lights at bedtime, then report the weather and review my day tomorrow on the Echo device in our walk-in closet – by talking to the Echo Show 21 in the kitchen. That’s next-level accessible! This feature alone could turn out to be the killer smart home app.

My wife and I have had some fruitful conversations with Alexa+. As we prepared dinner one night, we lamented how the seafood quality has declined at our go-to grocer. Alexa helped us find a specialty shop with super-fresh – albeit pricey – fish.

Another valuable back-and-forth came when I took my DIY project to Alexa. I wanted to add an electrical outlet to an exterior wall. Alexa offered step-by-step instructions that we iterated on together as I shared more specifics. It felt natural.

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Did he check that he wouldn’t be electrocuted by the offered instructions?
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The worst argument against Ozempic • Cremieux Recueil

“Cremieux”:

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The argument is that GLP-1RAs [Ozempic, Wegovy, etc] are bad… because you regain weight when you stop them? By the same logic, diet and exercise are bad because, when you cut them out, you’ll also tend to regain weight. Weight rebound after giving up exercise programs and dieting is universal, so to the extent that’s a problem for GLP-1RAs, why isn’t it also stated as a problem for everything else?

There’s a more sophisticated argument that accepts people who need GLP-1RAs might need to use them forever in order to maintain their reduced weight, but that this is dangerous for “reasons”. After all, the proponents of this argument claim, we don’t know about the potential long-term harms of GLP-1RAs. We know about effects since they’ve been approved (circa 2017) but that’s it, and what if being on them much longer has unexpected side effects?

This argument at least facially makes sense and it’s fine to humour it, but we have to do so in a calibrated way.

What might the long-term harms actually be? No one has provided a mechanism to guide the search and the primary mechanism of GLP-1-induced weight loss (which is agonism of brainstem GLP-1 neurons involved in appetite) doesn’t seem likely to be directly harmful. Why would the harms have not shown up over the past near-decade of use? They must be so unpredictable as to evade detection over a reasonably long period of time. And most importantly, what’s the counterfactual?

Every other day, a new story comes out about something that GLP-1RAs help to address, from chronic kidney disease to infertility. Given GLP-1RAs are so universally helpful, I believe we should update against them being mysteriously harmful. Additionally, we should weight the benefits versus the hypothetical costs. We know the benefits to living a life without obesity are enormous, and if I had to bet, I would say that the people taking GLP-1RAs for weight management long-term will have longer, happier, healthier lives thanks to these drugs, unless the unexpected happens and there really is a lurking harm to GLP-1RAs—a harm that has, so far, evaded detection and prediction.

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The argument that they’re not good because you have to keep taking them is: they are produced by pharmaceutical companies, and you don’t know how they will change their price. (Look what happened in the US to EpiPen costs.) Whereas exercise and dieting are essentially free.

But perhaps if there’s enough competition the price will stay down, as with sildenafil. I do find these drugs fascinating – not because I need them, but because of their potential effect on society.
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Myanmar’s chinlone ball sport threatened by conflict and rattan shortages • Al Jazeera

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Myanmar’s version is believed to date back 1,500 years.

Evidence for its longevity is seen in a French archaeologist’s discovery of a replica silver chinlone ball at a pagoda built during the Pyu era, which stretched from 200 BC to 900 AD.

Originally, the sport was played as a casual pastime, a form of exercise and for royal amusement. In 1953, however, the game was codified with formal rules and a scoring system, part of efforts to define Myanmar’s national culture after independence from Britain.

“No one else will preserve Myanmar’s traditional heritage unless the Myanmar people do it,” player Min Naing, 42, says.

Despite ongoing conflict, players continue to congregate beneath motorway flyovers, around street lamps dimmed by wartime blackouts and on purpose-made chinlone courts – often open-sided metal sheds with concrete floors.

“I worry about this sport disappearing,” master chinlone ball maker Pe Thein says while labouring in a sweltering workshop in Hinthada, 110km (68 miles) northwest of Yangon. “That’s the reason we are passing it on through our handiwork.”

Seated cross-legged, men shave cane into strips, curve them with a hand crank and deftly weave them into melon-sized balls with pentagonal holes before boiling them in vats of water to enhance their durability.

“We check our chinlone’s quality as if we’re checking diamonds or gemstones,” the 64-year-old Pe Thein says. “As we respect the chinlone, it respects us back.”

Each ball takes about two hours to produce and brings business-owner Maung Kaw $2.40. But supplies of the premium rattan he seeks from Rakhine state in western Myanmar are becoming scarce. Fierce fighting between military forces and opposition groups that now control nearly all of the state has made supplies precarious. Farmers are too frightened to venture into the jungle battlegrounds to cut cane, Maung Kaw says, which jeopardises his livelihood.

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There’s some video of it being played. It’s like volleyball crossed with keepy-uppy. These sorts of ancient sports struggle to continue in our monetised world.
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Artificial intelligence is not intelligent • The Atlantic

Tyler Austin Harper:

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Mark Zuckerberg went from selling the idea that Facebook would lead to a flourishing of human friendship to, now, selling the notion that Meta will provide you with AI friends to replace the human pals you have lost in our alienated social-media age. The cognitive-robotics professor Tony Prescott has asserted, “In an age when many people describe their lives as lonely, there may be value in having AI companionship as a form of reciprocal social interaction that is stimulating and personalised.” The fact that the very point of friendship is that it is not personalized—that friends are humans whose interior lives we have to consider and reciprocally negotiate, rather than mere vessels for our own self-actualization—does not seem to occur to him.

This same flawed logic has led Silicon Valley to champion artificial intelligence as a cure for romantic frustrations. Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of the dating app Bumble, proclaimed last year that the platform may soon allow users to automate dating itself, disrupting old-fashioned human courtship by providing them with an AI “dating concierge” that will interact with other users’ concierges until the chatbots find a good fit. Herd doubled down on these claims in a lengthy New York Times interview last month. Some technologists want to cut out the human altogether: see the booming market for “AI girlfriends.”

Although each of these AI services aims to replace a different sphere of human activity, they all market themselves through what Hao calls the industry’s “tradition of anthropomorphizing”: talking about LLMs as though they contain humanlike minds, and selling them to the public on this basis. Many world-transforming Silicon Valley technologies from the past 30 years have been promoted as a way to increase human happiness, connection, and self-understanding—in theory—only to produce the opposite in practice. These technologies maximize shareholder value while minimizing attention spans, literacy, and social cohesion.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Andean quipu, consisting of knotted ropes of animal wool, are challenging to interpret. Can AI help with that and lost languages? CC-licensed photo by Steven Damron 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.

Sorry, no post today at the Social Warming Substack. Maybe next week?

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

OpenAI slams court order to save all ChatGPT logs, including deleted chats • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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OpenAI is now fighting a court order to preserve all ChatGPT user logs—including deleted chats and sensitive chats logged through its API business offering—after news organizations suing over copyright claims accused the AI company of destroying evidence.

“Before OpenAI had an opportunity to respond to those unfounded accusations, the court ordered OpenAI to ‘preserve and segregate all output log data that would otherwise be deleted on a going forward basis until further order of the Court (in essence, the output log data that OpenAI has been destroying),” OpenAI explained in a court filing demanding oral arguments in a bid to block the controversial order.

In the filing, OpenAI alleged that the court rushed the order based only on a hunch raised by The New York Times and other news plaintiffs. And now, without “any just cause,” OpenAI argued, the order “continues to prevent OpenAI from respecting its users’ privacy decisions.” That risk extended to users of ChatGPT Free, Plus, and Pro, as well as users of OpenAI’s application programming interface (API), OpenAI said.

The court order came after news organizations expressed concern that people using ChatGPT to skirt paywalls “might be more likely to ‘delete all [their] searches’ to cover their tracks,” OpenAI explained. Evidence to support that claim, news plaintiffs argued, was missing from the record because so far, OpenAI had only shared samples of chat logs that users had agreed that the company could retain. Sharing the news plaintiffs’ concerns, the judge, Ona Wang, ultimately agreed that OpenAI likely would never stop deleting that alleged evidence absent a court order, granting news plaintiffs’ request to preserve all chats.

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You thought it was bad having your Google search history available to the courts? Turns out there is worse.
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LLMs helped perpetuate a path traversal bug from 2010 • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

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A security bug that surfaced fifteen years ago in a public post on GitHub has survived developers’ attempts on its life.

Despite multiple developer warnings about the 2010 GitHub Gist containing the path traversal vulnerability in 2012, 2014, and 2018, the flaw appeared in MDN Web Docs documentation and a Stack Overflow snippet.

From there, it took up residence in large language models (LLMs) trained on the flawed examples.

But its days may be numbered.

“The vulnerable code snippet was found first in 2010 in a GitHub Gist, and it spread to Stack Overflow, famous companies, tutorials, and even university courses,” Jafar Akhoundali, a PhD candidate from Leiden University in The Netherlands, told The Register in an email.

“Most people failed to point out it’s vulnerable, and although the vulnerability is simple, some small details prevented most users from seeing the vulnerability. It even contaminated LLMs and made them produce mostly insecure code when asked to write code for this task.”

Akhoundali, who contributed to a 2019 research paper about the risks of copying and pasting from Stack Overflow examples, aims to exterminate the bug with an automated vulnerability repair system.

…the authors created two scenarios involving Claude, Copilot, Copilot-creative, Copilot-precise, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, GPT-4o, and Gemini. First, they prompted each LLM to create a static file server without third-party libraries and then asked it to make the code secure. Second, they asked each LLM to create a secure static file server without third-party libraries. These requests were repeated 10 times for each model.

In the first scenario, 76 out of 80 requests reproduced the vulnerable code, dropping down to 42 out of 80 when the model was asked to make the code secure. In the second scenario that asked for secure code at the outset, 56 out of 80 requests returned vulnerable samples.

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So there’s a problem: LLMs swallow up code with vulnerabilities and regurgitate it, and even insist it’s secure. And then how do you train the mistake out of them?
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23andMe’s former CEO pushes purchase price nearly $50m higher • WSJ

Alicia McElhaney:

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23andMe has a path to a higher purchase price than the $256m offered by biotech giant Regeneron after the genetic-testing company’s former chief executive pushed a bankruptcy court to reopen its sale process. 

23andMe was set to sell itself in bankruptcy to Regeneron before former CEO Anne Wojcicki bid $305m after the auction ended through her recently founded nonprofit TTAM Research Institute. Wojcicki’s bid dwarfs her previous offer to acquire the company for $40m just ahead of its March bankruptcy filing. 

On Wednesday, 23andMe asked Judge Brian C. Walsh of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Missouri to reopen the company’s sale process so it could consider TTAM’s bid. At the hearing, 23andMe’s attorney inadvertently revealed the amount that TTAM offered to pay for the company. 

This prompted an on-the-spot negotiation between TTAM, Regeneron and 23andMe that allowed the three to hash out a plan to conduct a second sale process. TTAM’s $305m will serve as a starting point, and if Regeneron wants to participate, it must bid $10m more.

Each bidder will then have the opportunity to submit a final offer, with Regeneron having the last look. The losing bidder will receive a $10m breakup fee. 

Pending court approval of the specific dates, the sale will take place later this month.

“From the perspective of an equity holder, it seems like a positive development,” Walsh said Wednesday. Because 23andMe has a relatively small amount of debt on its balance sheet, its equity holders could walk away with a recovery, a relative rarity after bankruptcy. Its stock has rallied to a market capitalization of over $100m.

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Wojcicki owns 49% of the voting stock, and has been holding out for lower prices, and now is offering higher prices. It’s a weird process.
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Everest’s xenon-gas controversy – and others – will last forever • The Atlantic

Alex Hutchinson looks at controversies over the settings of records, whether in running or mountaineering:

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Sports are, in at least some respects, a zero-sum game: when one person wins a race or sets a record, it unavoidably means that someone else doesn’t. Even at the recreational level, if everyone decides to run marathons in carbon-plated shoes that make them five minutes faster, the standards needed to qualify for the Boston Marathon get five minutes faster.

“Once an effective technology gets adopted in a sport, it becomes tyrannical,” [bioethicist Thomas] Murray told me several years ago, when I was writing about athletes experimenting with electric brain stimulation. “You have to use it.” In the ’50s, a version of that rationale seemed to help the British expedition that included [Edmund] Hillary and [Tenzing] Norgay overcome the long-standing objections of British climbers to using oxygen—the French had an Everest expedition planned for 1954 and the Swiss for 1955, and both were expected to use oxygen.

Less clear, though, is why this rationale should apply to the modern world of recreational mountaineering in which [xenon-fuelled Everest trip organiser Lukas] Furtenbach operates. What does anyone—other than perhaps the climbers themselves, if you think journeys trump destinations—lose when people huff xenon in order to check Everest off their list with maximal efficiency? Maybe they’re making the mountain more crowded, but you could also argue that they’re making it less crowded by getting up and down more quickly. And it’s hard to imagine that Furtenbach’s critics are truly lying awake at night worrying about the long-term health of his clients.

Something else is going on here, and I’d venture that it has to do with human psychology. A Dutch economist named Adriaan Kalwij has a theory that much of modern life is shaped by people’s somewhat pathological tendency to view everything as a competition. “Both by nature and through institutional design, competitions are an integral part of human lives,” Kalwij writes, “from college entrance exams and scholarship applications to jobs, promotions, contracts, and awards.” The same ethos seems to color the way we see dating, leisure travel, hobbies, and so on: there’s no escape from the zero-sum dichotomy of winners and losers.

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Britain prepares to go all-in on nuclear power after years of dither • POLITICO

Nicholas Earl:

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Philip Hunt, the unassuming Labour peer put in charge of rejuvenating U.K. nuclear energy, has a favorite joke about how slowly the industry moves.

Hunt — who was first an energy minister from 2008-2010 and retired from his second stint in government just last month — liked to roll out the gag at Westminster receptions, according to one industry figure who saw him in action.
“I came back after 14 years,” the minister would say, “and everything was exactly as I left it.”

It was a way to bash the Conservatives’ decade-and-a-half in power, but also an admission of the glacial pace of the nuclear world.

That is about to change. Ministers are prepping a series of high-profile nuclear announcements in the lead-up to the government-wide spending review on June 11.

The government is expected to unveil, after months of delay, the winner of a multi-billion pound contract to build next-generation small modular reactors (SMRs), known as “mini nukes.” A long-awaited financial decision on the mega nuclear plant Sizewell C in Suffolk is on its way. Meanwhile, U.K. officials are discussing buying up nuclear sites from private ownership to bring the industry under greater state control.

It would trigger more activity on nuclear over a handful of weeks than there has been in a generation.

This flurry of action is coming, insiders say, not because of astute maneuvering by Hunt or his political bosses but because the Treasury — long skeptical about nuclear — has run out of road for ignoring the problem.

The looming spending review, the last chance in this parliament to commit cash to the U.K.’s neglected nuclear energy system, “has forced the government’s hand,” said a second energy figure, granted anonymity, like others in this piece, to speak candidly about government planning. 

Bringing more low-carbon nuclear power online is crucial to two of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s “missions” in government — galvanizing sluggish economic growth and ending the U.K.’s reliance on high-polluting fossil fuels.
Backing more nuclear power in a speech in February, Starmer said he was taking on “the blockers who have strangled our chances of cheaper energy, growth and jobs for far too long.”

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All I can say is: about bloody time. Michael Meacher, as Labour environment secretary in Blair’s government, blocked nuclear for years and years. And planning has done the job for the rest of the time. Finally, perhaps we can get something done.
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The codes AI can’t crack • Long Now

Taras Grescoe:

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a dozen or so ancient scripts — the writing systems used to transcribe spoken language — remain undeciphered. These include such mysteries as the one-of-a-kind Phaistos Disk, a spiral of 45 symbols found on a single sixteen-inch clay disk in a Minoan palace on Crete, and Proto-Elamite, a script used 5,000 years ago in what is now Iran, which may have consisted of a thousand distinct symbols.

Some, like Cypro-Minoan — which transcribes a language spoken in the Late Bronze Age on Cyprus — are tantalizingly similar to early European scripts that have already been fully deciphered. Others, like the quipu of the Andes — intricately knotted ropes made of the wool of llamas, vicuñas, and alpacas — stretch our definitions of how speech can be transformed into writing. 

In some cases, there is big money to be won: a reward of one million dollars is on offer for the decipherer of the Harappan script of the Indus Valley civilization of South Asia, as well as a $15,000-per-character prize for the successful decoder of the Oracle Bone script, the precursor to Chinese.

Cracking these ancient codes may seem like the kind of challenge AI is ideally suited to solve…

…[But] The AI models that have filled in lost verses of Gilgamesh are trained on cuneiform, whose corpus is even larger: hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets can be found in the storerooms of the world’s museums, many of them still untranslated. The problem with mystery scripts like Linear A, Cypro-Minoan, Rongorongo, and Harappan is that the total number of known inscriptions can be counted in the thousands, and sometimes in the hundreds. Not only that, in most cases we have no idea what spoken language they’re meant to encode.

“Decipherment is kind of like a matching problem,” explains [former DeepMind staffer Yannis] Assael. “It’s different from predicting. You’re trying to match a limited number of characters to sounds from an older, unknown language. It’s not a problem that’s well suited to these deep neural network architectures that require substantial amounts of data.”

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Are wind power generators actually viable at home? My buying advice after months of testing • ZDNET

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes:

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I’ve found the Shine Turbine to be quite effective, but there are limitations. First, the 40-watt output is a low amount of power if you’re used to having 100- or 200-watt solar panels at your disposal. The Shine is ideal for smartphones, tablets, drones, and cameras, but laptops and other bigger devices are off the cards.

Setup is also rather time-consuming. I’m used to being able to throw solar panels out for my power stations in seconds. The best I got the setup time for the Shine Turbine was about ten minutes. Also, taking the turbine down involves carefully packing the guy lines away so as not to make the next setup a painful one.

But despite the downsides, the Shine Turbine is a great way to harvest power from Mother Nature when you are away from an AC outlet.

If you need power and can’t rely on the sun, the Shine Turbine really shines. Yes, it’s weighty [1.3kg], yes, setup takes some time, and yes, its power output is rather limited, but I’ve used a single turbine to keep my iPhone and a drone powered on a multi-day trip where a power station and solar panels weren’t an option.

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So it’s not really for use “at home”, more on trips with bad weather. Certainly not going to set the world on fire with that sort of output.
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Ukraine’s attack exposed America’s Achilles’ heel • The New York Times

WJ Hennigan:

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The U.S. military understands Russia’s vulnerability firsthand. Although American pilots have managed to control the skies where they operate since the Korean War, U.S. troops in recent years have come under greater danger from drones. Militant groups have used the aircraft, which are a small fraction of the size of U.S. warplanes, to target American positions in the Middle East, dropping crude munitions that have maimed and killed American service members.

The U.S. military has globe-spanning technology to detect, track and shoot down ballistic missiles, but — so far — its multimillion-dollar systems remain helpless against the drone threat. The Pentagon has tried to develop technologies and defensive tactics, but results have been spotty at best. So-called hard-kill tactics to blast the drones out of the sky, or soft-kill methods to electronically disable them, haven’t proved to be silver bullets. The unmanned aircraft typically fly low to the ground and don’t always transmit their positions. Current radar systems are engineered to spot larger flying objects.

American commanders increasingly realize that forces stateside are just as exposed. Gen. Gregory M. Guillot, the head of Northern Command, told Congress in February that there were some 350 detections of drone overflights above 100 military installations in the United States last year. Those small drones appeared to be more of a nuisance than a threat, but Spider’s Web exposed the risk of not taking them seriously.

The Federal Aviation Administration has licensed more than a million drones in the United States. Most fly by the rules, but sightings of drones making illegal flights are on the rise. The F.A.A. reports there are now 100 drone sightings around airports each month, despite federal law that requires them to avoid flying near airports in controlled airspace without authorization.

Military bases and aircraft hangars should be hardened to guard against the worst. Congress is poised to set aside about $1.3bn this fiscal year for the Pentagon to develop and deploy counter-drone technologies. This is a good start. But the Pentagon’s most ambitious and expensive plans fail to address the threat.

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One neat comment I saw about the Spider’s Web attack: Ukraine basically used buildings (prefabricated spaces inside trucks) to attack planes – so it was a reverse 9/11.
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The People’s Republic of iPhone • New Statesman

Will Dunn:

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On Friday 23 May, Donald Trump threatened to impose a 25% tariff on what is arguably the world’s most successful consumer product, the iPhone. This would be a historic tax hike on American consumers, because Apple currently sells around 70 million iPhones in the US for about $1,000 each; the US government would ask for $17.5bn in additional taxes on a single product line from a single company. But what Trump wants is actually more extreme: he believes that in order to escape his punitive tariff, Apple might bring production of the iPhone back to America.

There are two reasons that this is wishful thinking. The first is that the iPhone is the apex product of globalisation. It would be impossible to make something as complex as a smartphone with the resources of a single country. Apple’s supplier list runs to 27 pages of companies, many of which are themselves multinationals with long lists of their own subsidiaries. It is not the product of one country – more like 50. It will never be the case that the iPhone can be described as a purely American product. As Patrick McGee explains in Apple in China, in light of the company’s long history of contract manufacturing, the vast sums it has invested in China, the knowledge and skills it has imparted to Chinese workers and the Chinese factories it has developed, it makes more sense to describe it as Chinese.

Trump’s discomfort with Americans using Chinese phones is not without foundation. What Apple has achieved in China is a spectacular example of industrial strategy. Apple’s investment in China for a single year, 2015, was $55bn – greater than the combined research and development spending of every business in the UK. Around the same time, Apple’s engineers were working in 1,600 Chinese factories. “We were unwittingly tooling them up,” a former Apple executive told McGee, “with… incredible know-how and experience.”

It is unclear how other countries can loosen China’s grip on technological manufacturing; an American iPhone would cost more than three times the price of current models, according to one analyst. But this is a power that China has been helped to acquire by the Western capitalists who rushed to exploit its people for cheap labour, and who never stopped to consider the long-term implications.

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But the short-term implications were simple: you’d go out of business. Apple originally manufactured its computers in American factories. It was dramatically uneconomic; when Tim Cook arrived in March 1998 one of the big reasons it was near bankruptcy was its inventory and factory costs.

Over-reliance on China is a problem, but the US’s GDP has kept going up even while it hasn’t been making as much stuff.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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.

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. 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.

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

»

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:

»

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Tennis players face a complex game theory decision before each match. What’s the best choice according to the best pros?CC-licensed photo by Steven Pisano 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. Serve. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

How Ukraine’s autonomous killer drones defeat electronic warfare • IEEE Spectrum

Tereza Pultarova:

»

After the Estonian startup KrattWorks dispatched the first batch of its Ghost Dragon ISR quadcopters to Ukraine in mid-2022, the company’s officers thought they might have six months or so before they’d need to reconceive the drones in response to new battlefield realities. The 46-centimeter-wide flier was far more robust than the hobbyist-grade UAVs that came to define the early days of the drone war against Russia. But within a scant three months, the Estonian team realized their painstakingly fine-tuned device had already become obsolete.

Rapid advances in jamming and spoofing—the only efficient defense against drone attacks—set the team on an unceasing marathon of innovation. Its latest technology is a neural-network-driven optical navigation system, which allows the drone to continue its mission even when all radio and satellite-navigation links are jammed. It began tests in Ukraine in December, part of a trend toward jam-resistant, autonomous UAVs (uncrewed aerial vehicles). The new fliers herald yet another phase in the unending struggle that pits drones against the jamming and spoofing of electronic warfare, which aims to sever links between drones and their operators. There are now tens of thousands of jammers straddling the front lines of the war, defending against drones that are not just killing soldiers but also destroying armored vehicles, other drones, industrial infrastructure, and even tanks.

…Now in its third generation, the Ghost Dragon has come a long way since 2022. Its original command-and-control-band radio was quickly replaced with a smart frequency-hopping system that constantly scans the available spectrum, looking for bands that aren’t jammed. It allows operators to switch among six radio-frequency bands to maintain control and also send back video even in the face of hostile jamming.

The drone’s dual-band satellite-navigation receiver can switch among the four main satellite positioning services: GPS, Galileo, China’s BeiDou, and Russia’s GLONASS. It’s been augmented with a spoof-proof algorithm that compares the satellite-navigation input with data from onboard sensors. The system provides protection against sophisticated spoofing attacks that attempt to trick drones into self-destruction by persuading them they’re flying at a much higher altitude than they actually are.

«

The dance of measure-countermeasure-measure-countermeasure is just amazing. I do find it a little surprising that any company is willing to let itself be named as a supplier to Ukraine, especially of drones, given that it will mean being targeted by Russia.
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Apple and Google clash with police and MPs over phone thefts • BBC News

Tom Gerken:

»

Senior figures at Apple and Google have clashed with the police over its recommendations for how best to deal with phone theft in the UK.

The Met’s James Conway told the Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee – which is considering the question – that two-thirds of thefts in London now relate to mobile phones.

With up to 70% of knife crime linked to robbery, he told MPs that meant phone theft was “significantly driving parts of our violence problem”.

The Met wants phone companies to use the unique identifying number – known as an IMEI – that each device has to block any that are reported as stolen. But Apple and Google – who dominate the market – raised concerns about the idea. “Focusing on IMEI blocking might miss some of the problems,” Apple’s head of law enforcement requests, Gary Davis, told the committee.

“We worry that there is a vector for fraud… we are concerned about a world where it would be a person who claims to be the owner who’s asking.”

Stolen devices are blocked from being used in the UK by phone networks by using its IMEI, but this is not the case globally.
This means a stolen phone can still be used in some other countries if a criminal is able to bypass the device’s security.

…Police officers said they were looking for action from phone providers to help prevent further thefts. The Met’s chief technology officer Darren Scates said 75% of phones which were stolen are moved abroad, with 28% ending up in either China or Hong Kong.

“We’re asking the cloud providers specifically to prevent a lost or stolen device from connecting to their cloud services,” he said. “This doesn’t even need to involve the police.”

He said they had been asking for this since October 2023, but had not yet been able to convince the firms to take action.
Some MPs accused the two tech firms of lacking the will to take action.

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The Washington Post plans an influx of outside opinion writers • The New York Times

Benjamin Mullin:

»

The Washington Post has published some of the world’s most influential voices for more than a century, including columnists like George Will and newsmakers like the Dalai Lama and President Trump.

A new initiative aims to sharply expand that lineup, opening The Post to many published opinion articles from other newspapers across America, writers on Substack and eventually nonprofessional writers, according to four people familiar with the plan. Executives hope that the program, known internally as Ripple, will appeal to readers who want more breadth than The Post’s current opinion section and more quality than social platforms like Reddit and X.

The project will promote the outside opinion columns on The Post’s website and app but outside its paywall, according to the people, who would speak only anonymously to discuss a confidential project. It will operate outside the paper’s opinion section.

…A final phase, allowing nonprofessionals to submit columns with help from an A.I. writing coach called Ember, could begin testing this fall. Human editors would review submissions before publication.

…Ember, the A.I. writing coach being developed by The Post, could automate several functions normally provided by human editors, the people said. Early mock-ups of the tool feature a “story strength” tracker that tells writers how their piece is shaping up, with a sidebar that lays out basic parts of story structure: “early thesis,” “supporting points” and “memorable ending.” A live A.I. assistant would provide developmental questions, with writing prompts inviting authors to add “solid supporting points,” one of the people said.

«

So, mutating into the Huffington Post with an AI writing coach. Strange destination.
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Inside the creepy, surprisingly routine business of animal cloning • The Atlantic

Bianca Bosker:

»

Twenty-seven years ago, Ty Lawrence began to be haunted by a slab of meat.

The carcass, which he spotted at a slaughterhouse while doing research as a graduate student, defied the usual laws of nature. The best, highest-quality steaks—picture a rib eye festooned with ribbons of white fat—typically come from animals whose bodies yield a relatively paltry amount of meat, because the fat that flavors their muscles tends to correspond to an excess of blubber everywhere else. This animal, by contrast, had tons of fat, but only where it would be delicious. “In my world,” Lawrence told me, “people would say, ‘That’s a beautiful carcass.’ ”

As Lawrence watched the beef being wheeled toward a meat grader that day, an idea hit him: we should clone that.

The technology existed. A couple of years earlier, in 1996, scientists at the Roslin Institute, in Scotland, had cloned Dolly the sheep. Lawrence lacked the funds or stature to make it happen, but he kept thinking about that beautiful carcass, and the lost potential to make more like it.

He was gathering data at another slaughterhouse in 2010 when, late one evening, he spotted two carcasses resembling the outlier he’d seen years before. Lawrence—by then an animal-science professor at West Texas A&M University—immediately called the head of his department. It was nearly 11 p.m. and his boss was already in bed, but Lawrence made his pitch anyway: He wanted to reverse engineer an outstanding steak by bringing superior cuts of meat back to life. He would clone the dead animals, and then mate the clones. “Think of our project as one in which you’re crossbreeding carcasses,” he told me.

A few years later, Lawrence and his team turned two tiny cubes of meat, sliced off exceptional beef carcasses at a packing plant, into one cloned bull and three cloned heifers. After breeding the bull with the heifers, Lawrence slaughtered the offspring to assess the quality of the meat, and found it to be just as terrific as the originals’. The next generation’s meat was even better than that—superior, even, to that of animals bred from the cattle industry’s top bulls.

…Once confined to research labs, the technology has become reliable and lucrative enough to be the basis for companies around the world, which are churning out clones of super-sniffing police dogs, prizewinning show camels, pigs for organ transplantation, and “high-genomic-scoring” livestock—which is to say, ultra-lactating dairy cows and uncommonly tasty beef cattle. The top-ranked polo player, Adolfo Cambiaso, has more than 100 clones of his best horses and once won a match riding six copies of the same mare at different points throughout the competition.

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To serve or to receive? The ultimate decision for any pro tennis player • ESPN

Simon Cambers:

»

There is one part of tennis that has retained its simplicity: the coin toss.

Though some events do it digitally, most tournaments still bring out the real thing to decide who serves first and which end the other player chooses. Heads or tails, serve or receive, it’s as simple as that.

Well, almost.

In his book “Winning Ugly,” Brad Gilbert says receiving is the wise choice, psychologically. According to Gilbert, who reached world No. 4 as a player and found renewed fame as the coach to Andre Agassi, Andy Roddick and most recently Coco Gauff, if someone chooses to serve and is broken, they are immediately on the back foot. If they choose to receive and don’t break, they have lost nothing and have a game under their belt before serving themselves.

Weather conditions, how players match up against each other, court surface and how a player feels on any given day can all play a role in the choice. Some players choose an end of the court rather than to serve or receive.

Novak Djokovic said his instinct has changed over the years.

«

You’ll have to read it to find out how the greatest ever male player (measured in all sorts of ways) has altered his thinking. But this might be one of the neatest little bits of game theory – aha – that gets tested every day.
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Exercise ‘better than drugs’ to stop cancer returning after treatment, trial finds • The Guardian

Andrew Gregory:

»

Exercise can reduce the risk of cancer patients dying by a third, stop tumours coming back and is even more effective than drugs, according to the results of a landmark trial that could transform health guidelines worldwide.

For decades, doctors have recommended adopting a healthy lifestyle to lower the risk of developing cancer. But until now there has been little evidence of the impact it could have after diagnosis, with little support for incorporating exercise into patients’ routines.

Now a world-first trial involving patients from the US, UK, Australia, France, Canada and Israel has found that a structured exercise regime after treatment can dramatically reduce the risk of dying, the disease returning or a new cancer developing.

The results were presented in Chicago at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (Asco) annual meeting, the world’s largest cancer conference, and published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

For the first time in medical history, there was clear evidence that exercise was even better at preventing cancer recurrence and death than many of the drugs currently prescribed to patients, one of the world’s top cancer doctors said.

Dr Julie Gralow, the chief medical officer of Asco, who was not involved in the decade-long study, said the quality of its findings was the “highest level of evidence” and would lead to “a major shift in understanding the importance of encouraging physical activity during and after treatment”.

…Asked to put the effect of exercise on cancer patients’ outcomes into context, Gralow said: “We titled [the session it was presented in] As Good as a Drug. I would have retitled it Better than a Drug, because you don’t have all the side-effects.”

«

Medicine remains a mystery, pt 1.
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Down the rabbit hole with xenon • The Curious Wavefunction

Ash Jogalekar:

»

I wasn’t aware of this use of xenon [mixed with oxygen to help a rapid Everest ascent] to enhance physical fitness, but I was very much aware of the use of xenon as an anesthetic. You would think that something as commonly used as anesthetics would have their mechanism of action figured out to the last detail, but that’s not the case. The detailed mechanism of anesthetic action is supposed to involve something relatively non-specific like binding to and saturating membranes (there’s some evidence for specific interactions with receptors like NMDA). And it turns out that the use of xenon in enhancing the fitness of Everest-class climbers lends itself to a similar paradigm.

Xenon seems to increase the production of hypoxia-inducible factor-1 alpha or HIF-1α, which is a protein that gets upregulated in oxygen-poor environments. Among other things, it’s a clever hack used by cancer cells to grow in anaerobic environments, and it was the discovery of this fact among others that was recognized by a Nobel Prize a few years ago.

Unsurprisingly, HIF-1α is a part of an entire intricate biochemical cascade involving cell growth and development in both health and disease. But the detailed mechanism of Hif-1α and xenon interaction is fascinating, in part because of how much we don’t know. Under normal conditions with adequate oxygen, HIF-1α is hydroxylated by prolyl hydroxylase (PHD) which act as a kind of oxygen biosensor. When it hydroxylates prolyl groups on HIF-1α, the protein becomes a substrate for the E3 ligase VHL, which binds to it, slaps on a ubiquitin group and carts it off to the proteasome for degradation. But under hypoxic conditions or in the presence of xenon, the hydroxylation does not occur and HIF-1α gets upregulated.

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What this uncovers is: we just don’t really understand why it works like it does.
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Meta plans to replace humans with AI to assess risks • NPR

Bobby Allyn and Shannon Bond:

»

For years, when Meta launched new features for Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook, teams of reviewers evaluated possible risks: Could it violate users’ privacy? Could it cause harm to minors? Could it worsen the spread of misleading or toxic content?

Until recently, what are known inside Meta as privacy and integrity reviews were conducted almost entirely by human evaluators.

But now, according to internal company documents obtained by NPR, up to 90% of all risk assessments will soon be automated.

In practice, this means things like critical updates to Meta’s algorithms, new safety features and changes to how content is allowed to be shared across the company’s platforms will be mostly approved by a system powered by artificial intelligence — no longer subject to scrutiny by staffers tasked with debating how a platform change could have unforeseen repercussions or be misused.

Inside Meta, the change is being viewed as a win for product developers, who will now be able to release app updates and features more quickly. But current and former Meta employees fear the new automation push comes at the cost of allowing AI to make tricky determinations about how Meta’s apps could lead to real world harm.

“Insofar as this process functionally means more stuff launching faster, with less rigorous scrutiny and opposition, it means you’re creating higher risks,” said a former Meta executive who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation from the company. “Negative externalities of product changes are less likely to be prevented before they start causing problems in the world.”

Meta said in a statement that it has invested billions of dollars to support user privacy.

«

Just one question: what’s that “almost entirely” in the second paragraph? Were they done by automation in the past too? Naturally, too, now we’re going to hand it over to black boxes we don’t entirely understand.
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Bing lets you use OpenAI’s Sora video generator for free • The Verge

Jess Weatherbed:

»

Microsoft has added a new AI video generator to its Bing mobile app that’s built on OpenAI’s Sora text-to-video model. The Bing Video Creator announced on Monday provides a free way to generate short clips with Sora, which is normally locked behind ChatGPT subscriptions starting at $20 per month for Plus users.

“Bing Video Creator represents our efforts to democratize the power of AI video generation,” Microsoft said in its announcement. “We believe creativity should be effortless and accessible to help you satisfy your answer-seeking process. We’re excited to empower anyone to turn their words into wonder through an AI-generated video.”

The Video Creator is now rolling out globally (excluding China and Russia) to the Bing Search apps for Android and iPhone, and Microsoft says desktop and Copilot Search support are also “coming soon.” The video generator can be accessed via the menu at the bottom right corner of the Bing app, or by adding a description of the clip you want to make directly to the Bing search bar.

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AI video is going to flood social networks and news sites, isn’t it.
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Business Insider cuts: why 100+ staff are leaving and who’s going • Press Gazette

Dominic Ponsford:

»

The cutbacks reflect falling advertising revenue and also a change in strategy at Business Insider away from chasing high traffic towards instead focusing more on paid subscribers. Audience growth and entertainment reporters are among the roles being cut. But many senior investigative journalists producing the sort of content which might drive subscriptions have also been cut, reflecting the fact the changes look likely to be as much about cost-saving as they are about changing editorial priorities.

Business Insider has not reported subscriber numbers since November 2023 when it claimed to have 330,000 paying readers.

Insiders have expressed concern at Business Insider CEO Barbara Peng’s assertion that the company was going “all in on AI” in the same note announcing the lay-offs.

The NUJ represents 15 out of 23 UK Business Insider staff who are facing redundancy. A spokesperson for union members at the company said: “AI will never replace journalists, not unless the future media bosses want is one where content is regurgitated in perpetuity, getting increasingly warped and unrecognisable. In that world, original ideas don’t exist and the powerful are never held to account. We all deserve better than that.”

The job cuts are also reflect a scaling-back of Business Insider’s ambitions since its failed bid to become a general newsbrand in the years from the start of 2021 to the end of 2023 when it rebranded as Insider. It is instead focusing back on business coverage, which drives higher rates of advertising and is more likely to prompt subscriptions.

Business Insider has announced cuts every year since 2023, when it had around 950 staff of which 600 were believed to be in editorial. Some 10% of US staff were cut that year, with a further 8% of worldwide staff going the following year.

The latest job cuts have targeted 21% of the remaining total (which has been falling steadily since 2023 due to a long-standing hiring freeze) so likely at at least another 100 people. One well-placed source said they believe the latest cuts would leave the company no more than half the size it was in headcount terms at its peak pre-2023.

Successive Google algorithm updates have hurt Business Insider traffic in recent years as has Facebook’s move away from working with news publishers.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The removal of fluoridation from water in the US could cost millions of teeth and billions in dentistry. (One job AI can’t do..) CC-licensed photo by Electric Teeth 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. Brush it off. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

What if Google just broke itself up? A tech insider makes the case • The New York Times

David Streitfeld on the suggestion of Google breaking itself up (as was floated last week by an analyst):

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Adam Kovacevich, the chief executive of Chamber of Progress, a trade group funded by Google and other tech companies, said Google needed to be big and think big.

“It’s a company the size of a cruise ship,” he said. “Could it split itself into four yacht-sized companies? Sure. But what would be gained? Google is locked in an intense competition against the other cruise ships — Apple, Meta, Amazon. And there are some opportunities only a cruise-ship-sized company can tackle, like A.I.”

If a split encourages competition, proponents argue, that will benefit Google’s ad customers, who will see lower prices. Employees might be more challenged working for a smaller company, where it is easier to move higher.

“The breakup of Google would only hurt people who would otherwise benefit from unlawful market power,” said Barry Barnett, an antitrust lawyer at Susman Godfrey. “These might include Google executives, whose compensation could fall; start-ups, which could get lower buyout offers from Google or none at all; and rivals like Apple, which could see chances to share revenue vanish.” Google currently pays Apple $20bn annually to be the default search engine on the Safari browser.

Looming over any discussion of a voluntary breakup is the weight of history. Beyond AT&T, there are few examples of a successful company willing to pull itself apart. Companies that are in permanent slumps have regularly done it, however.

General Electric, whose roots go back to Thomas Edison in 1892 and was once as iconic as Google, split itself into three companies last year after skittering close to death. Hewlett-Packard, another iconic company suffering a long-term decline, broke itself in two in 2015.

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The question is, are all the bits necessary for Google to compete in that way? Microsoft doesn’t have an adtech side and does fine; Google does have a gigantic video site which it would never want to sell. If you were trying to assemble (via acquisition) what you absolutely needed to make “NuGoogle” today, which bits would you really want to buy, and which leave behind? Kovacevich is defending the status quo for no reason other than that it’s the status quo.
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How electric scooters are driving China’s salt battery push • BBC Future

Xiaoying You:

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Dozens of glitzy electric mopeds are lined up outside a shopping mall in the city of Hangzhou in eastern China, drawing passersby to test them.

But these Vespa-like scooters, which sell for between £300 and £500 ($400 and $660), are not powered by the mainstream lead-acid or lithium-ion cells, commonly used in electric two-wheelers. Instead, their batteries are made from sodium, an abundant element that can be extracted from sea salt.

Next to the scooters stand a few fast-charging pillars, which can replenish the vehicles’ power level from 0% to 80% in 15 minutes, according to Yadea, the major Chinese two-wheeler manufacturer holding this promotional event in January 2025 for its newly launched mopeds and charging system. There is also a battery-swapping station, which enables commuters to drop in their spent cells in exchange for fresh ones with a scan of a QR code. (Read more about China’s battery swap stations for electric vehicles here.)

Yadea is one of many companies in China trying to build a competitive edge in alternative battery technologies, a trend that shows just how fast the country’s clean-technology industry is developing.

Even as the rest of the world tries to close its gap with China in the race to make cheap, safe and efficient lithium-ion batteries, Chinese companies have already taken a head-start towards mass producing sodium-ion batteries, an alternative that could help the industry reduce its dependence on key raw minerals.

Chinese carmakers were the first in the world to launch sodium-powered cars. But the impact of these models – all of them tiny with short ranges – has been low so far.

In April 2025, the world’s largest battery manufacturer, China’s CATL, announced its plan to mass-produce sodium-ion batteries for heavy-duty trucks and cars this year under a new brand Naxtra.

… 2021 proved to be a turning point for sodium-ion batteries. The global prices for battery-grade lithium skyrocketed, multiplying over fourfold in a year due to strong demand for electric vehicles (EV) and the Covid-19 pandemic. Battery and EV manufacturers began to look for alternatives.

CATL launched its first-ever sodium-ion battery in July that year, and the move “triggered high industry interest”, says Phate Zhang, founder of the Shanghai-based EV news outlet CnEVPost. Lithium’s prices continued to soar in 2022, driving more cost-conscious Chinese companies towards sodium, he notes.

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China is just ridiculously far ahead in renewable technologies. Ridiculously.
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At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work • The New York Times

Noam Scheiber:

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Three Amazon engineers said that managers had increasingly pushed them to use A.I. in their work over the past year. The engineers said that the company had raised output goals and had become less forgiving about deadlines. It has even encouraged coders to gin up new A.I. productivity tools at an upcoming hackathon, an internal coding competition. One Amazon engineer said his team was roughly half the size it had been last year, but it was expected to produce roughly the same amount of code by using A.I.

Amazon said it conducts regular reviews to make sure teams are adequately staffed and may increase their size if necessary. “We’ll continue to adapt how we incorporate Gen A.I. into our processes,” Brad Glasser, an Amazon spokesman, said.

Other tech companies are moving in the same direction. In a memo to employees in April, the chief executive of Shopify, a company that helps entrepreneurs build and manage e-commerce websites, announced that “A.I. usage is now a baseline expectation” and that the company would “add A.I. usage questions” to performance reviews.

Google recently told employees it would soon hold a companywide hackathon in which one category would be creating A.I. tools that could “enhance their overall daily productivity,” according to an internal announcement. Winning teams will receive $10,000. A Google spokesman noted that more than 30% of the company’s code is now suggested by A.I. and accepted by developers.

The shift has not been all negative for workers. At Amazon and other companies, managers argue that A.I. can relieve employees of tedious tasks and enable them to perform more interesting work. Mr. Jassy wrote last year that the company had saved “the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years” by using A.I. to do the thankless work of upgrading old software.

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Sure, managers argue that. Actually, it feels a bit Luddite to say that. It is very hard to figure out the balance between “let the machines do the tedious coding” and “humans need to do the coding”. Obviously it should be much more of the first. But how do you keep it interesting for the people checking it? How does it not become assembly-line work?
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RFK Jr.’s fluoride ban would ruin 25 million kids’ teeth, cost $9.8bn • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

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Once hailed as a triumph of public health, water fluoridation is now under intense attack in the US.

Despite decades of data proving its efficacy at protecting teeth from decay—particularly children’s teeth—two states have now banned the use of fluoride in public water, and communities around the country have followed suit or are considering doing the same. The current US health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is known for his anti-vaccine advocacy and for peddling conspiracy theories, has pledged to remove fluoride from US water.

Now, a pair of researchers at Harvard—Sung Eun Choi and Lisa Simon—have modeled exactly what will happen in the US if Kennedy follows through on his pledge: The number of cavities and decayed teeth in American children and teens (ages 0–19) will increase by an estimated 7.5 percentage points over the first five years. That means there will be 25.4m more rotten teeth in the mouths of children and teenagers. The dental bills for the added decay will total at least $9.8bn in that time. Other costs, such as loss of work among parents, were not included, making the financial estimate conservative. But children will also be more miserable, with an estimated loss of 2.9m quality-adjusted life years.

After ten years, the number of additional decayed teeth would be 53.8m at a cost of $19.4bn.

The analysis, published Friday in JAMA Health Forum, drew from real-world dental utilization and oral health data from a national health survey. It also modeled tooth decay as a function of age, sex, race, ethnicity, and income. The model was calibrated against real dental decay prevalence. Costs for dental work were based on standard rates from the American Dental Association, insurance claims, and prior analyses.

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All one can say is: let’s hope this all gets reversed extremely fast when RFK Jr gets fired for.. something or other.
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The Bezos Cannes-tastrophe • Discoursted

Louis Pisano:

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Let’s talk about this floating metaphor for hubris. [Jeff Bezos’s yacht] Koru is a 417-foot schooner with its own backup yacht , a shadow vessel that follows behind like a luxury parasite, carrying toys, staff, and most notably, the helipad. The main yacht is too elegant, too precious, to be burdened with such practicalities.

Together, the vessels burn through hundreds of gallons of diesel per hour. According to researchers from Indiana University and Oxfam, Bezos’s sailing yacht Koru emits approximately 7,154 metric tons of CO₂ annually, the equivalent of emissions from around 1,500 average cars. A single transatlantic trip emits about 230 metric tons of CO₂, roughly equal to the annual emissions of 50 average cars.

You know – the same cars [Bezos fiancée] Lauren Sánchez’s environmental foundation would like you to give up.

And it gets better, or worse, depending on your tolerance for hypocrisy. Turns out, Koru’s gleaming deck may be literally illegal. Its signature honey-toned teak, the kind that gleams in billionaire real estate porn and yachting magazines, may have been sourced from Myanmar, a country under strict EU and U.S. sanctions since a violent 2021 military coup. The teak industry there is notorious for deforestation, forced labor, and enriching the very junta those sanctions are trying to weaken.

Dutch shipbuilder Oceanco had promised in 2019 to stop using Myanmar teak. But according to a new investigation by Dutch prosecutors, they may have broken that promise while building Koru. Not intentionally, they claim, just through good old-fashioned negligence.

The wood for Koru’s deck was supplied by a German partner; the furniture and interior finishes came through a Turkish firm. Oceanco now says it’s “impossible” to trace the origins of the teak used, a claim as convenient as it is damning. In other words: Jeff Bezos, the richest man alive, might be sailing on wood harvested in defiance of international sanctions, wood that helped finance a dictatorship.

So let’s just take stock: a $500m megayacht, burning diesel and lined with possibly illicit teak, floating into the Riviera so its passenger can be honoured for protecting the environment. We are through the looking glass.

The yacht never even docked. It didn’t need to. Its presence was felt, looming offshore like a passive-aggressive ex. And as Koru lingered, massive, menacing, and somehow smug, it became clear: the week’s most absurd plot twist wasn’t even on land yet.

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There is screw-you money, but there’s also screw-you attitude, and the latter is not attractive.
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How the little-known “dark roof” lobby may be making US cities hotter • The Guardian

Amex Alexander:

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It began with a lobbyist’s pitch.

The Tennessee representative Rusty Grills says the lobbyist proposed a simple idea: repeal the state’s requirement for reflective roofs on many commercial buildings.

In late March, Grills and his fellow lawmakers voted to eliminate the rule, scrapping a measure meant to save energy, lower temperatures and protect Tennesseans from extreme heat.

Grills, a Republican, told Floodlight that he introduced the bill to give consumers more choice.

It was another win for a well-organized lobbying campaign led by manufacturers of dark roofing materials.

Industry representatives called the rollback in Tennessee a needed correction as more of the state moved into a hotter climate zone, expanding the reach of the state’s cool-roof rule. Critics called it dangerous and “deceptive”.

“The new law will lead to higher energy costs and greater heat-related illnesses and deaths,” state representative Harold Love and the Rev Jon Robinson said in a statement.

It will, critics warned, make Nashville, Memphis and other cities hotter – particularly in underserved Black and Latino communities, where many struggle to pay their utility bills. Similar lobbying has played out in Denver and Baltimore and at the national level.

Industry groups have questioned the decades-old science behind cool roofs, downplayed the benefits and warned of reduced choice and unintended consequences. “A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t consider climate variation across different regions,” wrote Ellen Thorp, the executive director of the EPDM Roofing Association, a DC-based national group that represents an industry built primarily on dark materials.

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I suppose that calling it “Their Dark Materials” wouldn’t have worked for the search engines.
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News influencers on Bluesky versus X/Twitter • Pew Research Center

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The news influencers from our 2024 sample who are on Bluesky are largely people on the political left. Among those who explicitly identified as liberals or Democrats or who supported Joe Biden or Kamala Harris in summer 2024, 69% now have a Bluesky account. This compares with 15% of news influencers who identified as conservative, Republicans or supporters of Donald Trump. About half of news influencers without a clear political orientation (47%) have a Bluesky account.

At the same time, most news influencers across the political spectrum have not left X. Three-quarters of left-leaning news influencers have an X account, as do 87% of right-leaning news influencers and 83% of those without a clear political orientation.

There is also evidence that news influencers on Bluesky are using the site more than they were at the beginning of the year. About half (54%) of news influencers on Blueksy posted there in the first full week of January, but this share grew to 66% in the last full week of March.

During the same period, X remained popular but saw a small decline in activity: 92% of news influencers on X posted there in the first full week of January, compared with 87% in the last full week of March.

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Not sure that Bluesky is going to get any real traction. It’s too echo chamber-y.
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Business Insider recommended nonexistent books to staff as it leans into AI • Semafor

Max Tani:

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In an email to staff last May, a senior editor at Business Insider sent around a list of what she called “Beacon Books,” a list of memoirs and other acclaimed business nonfiction books, with the idea of ensuring staff understood some of the fundamental figures and writing powering good business journalism.

Many of the recommendations were well-known recent business, media, and tech nonfiction titles such as Too Big To Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin, DisneyWar by James Stewart, and Super Pumped by Mike Isaac.

But a few were unfamiliar to staff. Simply Target: A CEO’s Lessons in a Turbulent Time and Transforming an Iconic Brand by former Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel was nowhere to be found. Neither was Jensen Huang: the Founder of Nvidia, which was supposedly published by the company Charles River Editors in 2019. Semafor could not find any evidence that either book exists.

The list also recommended a book called Mark Zuckerberg Autobiography: The Man Behind the Code, supposedly written by an author named Jasper Robin. While a Goodreads page exists for the book, which claims it is only 61 pages long, the page has no reviews or other information. It is not available for purchase on Amazon or from any other retailers.

Another recommendation was The House of Morgan: An Intimate Portrait of the Most Powerful Banking Family in the World by Fredric Morgan, though no such book exists. The company likely meant to recommend The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance by Ron Chernow. Snapchat 101: Everything You Need to Know about Snapchat for Business by Andrew MacCarthy was on the list of suggested reads, though no such book exists.

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Hard to know if it’s a hazing ritual (“did you read all the books?” “Yes” “You’re fired”) or yet another bad use of AI.
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Google and DOJ tussle over how AI will remake the web in antitrust closing arguments • Ars Technica

Rya Whitwam:

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During testimony in early May, Mehta commented that the role AI plays in the trial had evolved very quickly. In 2023, everyone in his courtroom agreed that the impact of AI on search was still years away, and that’s definitely not the case now. That same thread is present in closing arguments.

Mehta asked the DOJ’s Dahlquist if someone new was just going to “come off the sidelines” and build a new link-based search product, given  the developments with AI. Dahlquist didn’t answer directly, noting that although generative AI products didn’t exist at the time covered by the antitrust action, they would be key to search going forward. Google certainly believes the AI future is already here—it has gone all-in with AI search over the past year.

At the same time, Google is seeking to set itself apart from AI upstarts. “Generative AI companies are not trying to out-Google Google,” said Schmidtlein. Google’s team contends that its actions have not harmed any AI products like ChatGPT or Perplexity, and at any rate, they are not in the search market as defined by the court.

Mehta mused about the future of search, suggesting we may have to rethink what a general search engine is in 2025. “Maybe people don’t want 10 blue links anymore,” he said.

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Google is ducking and diving on this, but this is now about remedies, not findings.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified