The ENIAC system was such a power guzzler in 1953 that it caused power blackouts in Philadelphia. CC-licensed photo by terren in Virginia 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. Full of energy. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Journalist discovers Google vulnerability that allowed people to disappear specific pages from search • 404 Media

Matthew Gault:

»

By accident, journalist Jack Poulson discovered Google had completely de-listed two of his articles from its search results. “We only found it by complete coincidence,” Poulson told 404 Media. “I happened to be Googling for one of the articles, and even when I typed in the exact title in quotes it wouldn’t show up in search results anymore.”

Poulson had stumbled on a vulnerability in Google’s search engine that allowed people to maliciously delete links off of Google, which is a reputation management company’s dream and which could easily be used to suppress information. The SEO trick had allowed someone to de-list specific web pages from the search engine using Google’s Refresh Outdated Content tool, a site that lets users submit pages to URLs to be recrawled and re-listed after an update. The vulnerability had to do with capitalizing different letters in the URL in this tool, which ultimately caused the delisting. 

In 2023, Poulson published an article about tech CEO Delwin Maurice Blackman’s 2021 arrest on a felony domestic violence charge.

After Poulson published Blackman’s arrest records in 2023, the CEO has attempted to suppress the story in various ways, including lawsuits and DMCA takedown requests. Eventually, the stories disappeared from Google, using this vulnerability. As far as Poulson could tell, the only two articles on his newsletter that had been de-listed by Google using the trick were related to the CEO. 

Google confirmed the problem in an email to 404 Media. “This tool helps ensure our search results are up to date. We’re vigilant in monitoring abuse, and we worked quickly to roll out a fix for this specific issue, which was only impacting a tiny fraction of web pages.”

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“Vigilant in monitoring abuse” as long as they’re told about it by journalists. Perhaps they need a team who are trying to remove all their details from the search results.
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Mark Zuckerberg promises you can trust him with superintelligent AI • The Verge

Hayden Field:

»

Hours before Meta’s earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared his vision for the future of AI: personalized super-smart AI for everyone — especially in the form of wearable glasses.

He said his vision is for everyone to have an AI tool that “helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be.”

The announcement came in the form of a plain-text webpage and letter to the public espousing the importance of bringing “personal superintelligence” to everyone, even if it takes a while. Superintelligence is another term for artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a type of AI that equals or surpasses human intelligence on a wide range of tasks — a goal that most leading AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, are chasing right now.

“The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable,” Zuckerberg wrote of AI’s advances. “Developing superintelligence is now in sight.”

…Zuckerberg also subtly cast doubt on the goals of his competitors in AI, writing that Meta’s goal “is distinct from others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output.” For instance, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has publicly stated he believes that AI could replace many jobs in society and eventually lead to a form of universal basic income.

Zuckerberg continued his bullish stance on smart glasses, writing that above all, humanity’s “primary computing devices” will be personal devices like glasses.

«

I can believe that smart glasses will be a thing – potentially a huge thing – but the question is how soon. That’s really the only question. There had been smartphones for years before the iPhone turned up in 2007 and showed the world how to do it, and it needed Android to copy it and make it widespread for the form to take over from the BlackBerry and Nokia and Windows Mobile forms.
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Physicists disagree wildly on what quantum mechanics says about reality, Nature survey shows • Nature

Elizabeth Gibney:

»

Quantum mechanics is one of the most successful theories in science — and makes much of modern life possible. Technologies ranging from computer chips to medical-imaging machines rely on the application of equations, first sketched out a century ago, that describe the behaviour of objects at the microscopic scale.

But researchers still disagree widely on how best to describe the physical reality that lies behind the mathematics, as a Nature survey reveals.

At an event to mark the 100th anniversary of quantum mechanics last month, lauded specialists in quantum physics argued politely — but firmly — about the issue. “There is no quantum world,” said physicist Anton Zeilinger, at the University of Vienna, outlining his view that quantum states exist only in his head and that they describe information, rather than reality. “I disagree,” replied Alain Aspect, a physicist at the University of Paris-Saclay, who shared the 2022 Nobel prize with Zeilinger for work on quantum phenomena.

To gain a snapshot of how the wider community interprets quantum physics in its centenary year, Nature carried out the largest ever survey on the subject. We e-mailed more than 15,000 researchers whose recent papers involved quantum mechanics, and also invited attendees of the centenary meeting, held on the German island of Heligoland, to take the survey.

The responses — numbering more than 1,100, mainly from physicists — showed how widely researchers vary in their understanding of the most fundamental features of quantum experiments.

«

You might think: who cares, quantum theory is a century old. But being able to think of new ways to explore the theory depend on how you interpret the theory. And there’s surprisingly low confidence even in the most popular reading of quantum theory.
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Apple loses fourth AI researcher in a month to Meta’s superintelligence team • Bloomberg via South China Morning Post

Mark Gurman:

»

Apple has lost its fourth AI researcher in a month to Meta Platforms, marking the latest setback to the iPhone maker’s artificial intelligence efforts.

Bowen Zhang, a key multimodal AI researcher at Apple, left the company on Friday and is set to join Meta’s recently formed superintelligence team, according to people familiar with the matter. Zhang was part of the Apple foundation models group, or AFM, which built the core technology behind the company’s AI platform.

Meta previously lured away the leader of the team, Ruoming Pang, with a compensation package valued at more than US$200m, Bloomberg News has reported. Two other researchers from that group – Tom Gunter and Mark Lee – also recently joined Meta. AFM is made up of several dozen engineers and researchers across Cupertino, California, and New York.

In response to the job offers from Meta and others, Apple has been marginally increasing the pay of its AFM staffers, whether or not they have threatened to leave, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the moves are private. Still, the pay levels pale in comparison with those of rivals.

Spokespeople for Apple and Meta declined to comment.

The departures have thrown Apple’s models team into flux. Pang played a central role in defining the department’s road map and research direction, and multiple people within AFM now say its future is unclear. Additional engineers are actively interviewing for jobs jobs elsewhere, according to the people. Another team member – Floris Weers – left for a start-up in recent weeks.

«

These are crazy offers in terms of money. It’s become exactly the same as sports teams, but without the audience participation. Or maybe the audience participation takes a different form.

Meanwhile Apple’s miss on generative AI, distracted by cars and augmented reality goggles, is still something it can recover from by hiring in something else (as it did for search and, initially, maps). But people misread it as a disaster.
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ENIAC at 75: A computing pioneer • Data Center Dynamics

Dan Swinhoe:

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A 100-word magnetic-core memory built by the Burroughs Corporation was added to ENIAC in 1953.

Capable of around 5,000 calculations a second, ENIAC was a thousand times faster than any other machine of the time and had modules to multiply, divide, and square root.

“This was a machine that straddled the point in history where we went from mechanical calculators and adding machines to electronic computers,” says Thompson.

While a massive step-change in terms of capability compared to any other computer in the world at the time, it also had various challenges in operation. With minimal cooling technology – two 20-horsepower blowers – ENIAC raised the room temperature to 50ºC when in operation and its 160kW energy consumption caused blackouts in the city of Philadelphia.

Reliability was also a constant challenge. Before speciality tubes became available in 1948, the machine used standard radio tubes, which burnt out on a near-daily basis. At first it took hours to work out which tube had actually blown, but the team eventually developed a system to reduce this down to around 15 minutes thanks to some ‘predictive maintenance’ and careful monitoring of equipment.

«

Just to show that concerns about power consumption by computers is absolutely not a new thing. (Thanks Seth F for the link.)
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Of course we should stop kids from watching porn • The Critic Magazine

Jo Bartosch:

»

Some things shouldn’t need saying — like don’t let kids watch porn. You’d think this was a moral baseline broad enough to unite everyone from Germaine Greer to the Pope. But BBC articles have framed the new requirement for age verification on porn sites as a profound ethical dilemma. The state broadcaster strained to find nuance — and ended up platforming pornographers and privacy bores with predictable objections.

Like most legislation, the Online Safety Act is far from perfect. It’s clunky, overreaching, and the way platforms like X/Twitter have implemented its requirement for age verification has already led to unjustifiable censorship — including reports that footage of protests in the UK has been blocked. Meanwhile, some pornography sites are offering risible age checks that a monkey could bypass. But one thing is clear: this law will mean that kids are less likely to simply stumble across porn on social media. And that is unequivocally a Good Thing. 

There are no upsides to children viewing scenes of (real or simulated) rape, incest or sexual torture — yet this is the bulk of mainstream porn. The average age of first exposure is just 13. And studies from the British Board of Film Classification and the Children’s Commissioner show that typically minors don’t seek porn out; it finds them. In fact, 41% first encountered porn on X/Twitter, more than on dedicated porn sites.

The real question isn’t why age checks have been introduced — it’s why they weren’t there in the first place.

The BBC itself inadvertently highlighted the issue in its reporting. When twentysomething Newsbeat presenter Jordan Kenny asked technology minister Peter Kyle, “How old were you when you first saw porn?” the 54-year-old wisely refused to answer. But the question itself was revealing. Not if, but when. Porn is now so normalised, it’s a given we’ve all seen it. But normal doesn’t mean harmless.

…There are legitimate concerns about how the Online Safety Act might be used to enforce censorship. And more widely, whether its moves to criminalise speech or abolish trial by jury, the government seems suspiciously eager to rob citizens of our rights. But pornography is not just another liberty issue — it’s a public health and child protection crisis. We’re heading towards a hellscape where boys grow up to be rapists and girls grow up to be targets. Faced with this dystopia, fretting over blocked protest clips or being asked for your date of birth is ludicrous.

«

The debate over the Online Safety Act is fascinating. The mild inconvenience for lots of adults (who prefer to just install a VPN) v the benefit for lots of children (who will just install a VPN).
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VPN nation • The Critic Magazine

Christopher Snowdon:

»

Preventing children from seeing hardcore pornography is a noble aim, but parents can already protect them from adult content of all varieties by using features such as Family Link which have the added benefits of location sharing and screen time controls. The government insists that age verification is designed to stop online “predators”, with one minister even suggesting that those who criticise it are Jimmy Savile enablers but, as the Institute of Economic Affairs predicted from the outset, the threat of heavy fines has led internet platforms to extend the censorship far beyond porn. 

People are right to be concerned about this slippery slope and yet it cannot be denied that it is pornography enthusiasts who have been hardest hit by the Online Safety Act in the short term. They must now verify themselves in one of three ways, each less appealing than the last. They can submit their credit card details, they can scan in proof of ID, such as a passport, or they can take a photo of their face and allow AI to judge how old they are. If they want to maximise their chances of being the victim of blackmail and identity theft, they could do all three. 

While we might not think twice about submitting our credit card details to Amazon or posting our photos on Instagram, there is an understandable reluctance to hand over private data in order to access dubious websites for the purposes of sordid acts of self-pollution. The government assures us that the data will be kept confidential but it is only two weeks since we learned about a data breach that led to the names of 19,000 Afghans who wanted to flee the Taliban being given to the Taliban and it is less than two months since the names and addresses of 6.5 million Co-op customers were stolen in a cyber-attack. Rightly or wrongly, millions of British plank-spankers and rug-tuggers do not wish to identify themselves to anybody.

…Downloading random VPNs comes with risks of its own and opens up a whole new world of illicit online activity from free Premier League football to the Dark Web. But there is a deeper reason to feel uneasy about this unintended, albeit predictable, consequence of paternalistic regulation. By driving another wedge between the state and the individual, it further normalises rule-breaking in a country where casual lawlessness is becoming part of daily life. A law-abiding society cannot long endure if the median citizen thinks that the law is an ass.

«

Fascinating debate, part 2.
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Meta unveils wristband for controlling computers with hand gestures • The New York Times

Cade Metz:

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The prototype looks like a giant rectangular wristwatch. But it doesn’t tell the time; it lets you control a computer from across the room simply by moving your hand.

With a gentle turn of the wrist, you can push a cursor across your laptop screen. If you tap your thumb against your forefinger, you can open an app on your desktop computer. And when you write your name in the air, as if you were holding a pencil, the letters will appear on your smartphone.

Designed by researchers at Meta, the tech giant that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, this experimental technology reads the electrical signals that pulse through your muscles when you move your fingers. These signals, generated by commands sent from your brain, can reveal what you are about to do even before you do it, as the company detailed in a research paper published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

With a little practice, you can even move your laptop cursor simply by producing the right thought. “You don’t have to actually move,” Thomas Reardon, the Meta vice president of research who leads the project, said in an interview. “You just have to intend the move.”

Meta’s wristband is part of a sweeping effort to develop technologies that let wearers control their personal devices without touching them. The aim is to provide simpler, quicker and less awkward ways of interacting with everything from laptops to smartphones — and maybe even to develop new digital devices that replace what we all use today.

Most of these technologies are years away from widespread use. They typically involve tiny devices surgically implanted in the body, which is a complicated and risky endeavor. These implants are tested solely with disabled people who cannot move their arms and hands, and need new ways of using computers or smartphones.

«

Good grief, Meta, don’t you read this newsletter thing? “When you write your name in the air”. Give me strength. Why is that better than “when you say a trigger word aloud”? The answer is that it isn’t. Gestures keep being reinvented, and keep being rejected.
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After $380m hack, Clorox sues its “service desk” vendor for simply giving out passwords • Ars Technica

Nate Anderson:

»

Hacking is hard. Well, sometimes.

Other times, you just call up a company’s IT service desk and pretend to be an employee who needs a password reset, an Okta multifactor authentication reset, and a Microsoft multifactor authentication reset… and it’s done. Without even verifying your identity.

So you use that information to log in to the target network and discover a more trusted user who works in IT security. You call the IT service desk back, acting like you are now this second person, and you request the same thing: a password reset, an Okta multifactor authentication reset, and a Microsoft multifactor authentication reset. Again, the desk provides it, no identity verification needed.

So you log in to the network with these new credentials and set about planting ransomware or exfiltrating data in the target network, eventually doing an estimated $380m in damage. Easy, right?

According to The Clorox Company, which makes everything from lip balm to cat litter to charcoal to bleach, this is exactly what happened to it in 2023. But Clorox says that the “debilitating” breach was not its fault. It had outsourced the “service desk” part of its IT security operations to the massive services company Cognizant—and Clorox says that Cognizant failed to follow even the most basic agreed-upon procedures for running the service desk.

In the words of a new Clorox lawsuit, Cognizant’s behavior was “all a devastating lie,” it “failed to show even scant care,” and it was “aware that its employees were not adequately trained.”

“Cognizant was not duped by any elaborate ploy or sophisticated hacking techniques,” says the lawsuit, using italics to indicate outrage emphasis. “The cybercriminal just called the Cognizant Service Desk, asked for credentials to access Clorox’s network, and Cognizant handed the credentials right over. Cognizant is on tape handing over the keys to Clorox’s corporate network to the cybercriminal—no authentication questions asked.”

«

That’s the joy of outsourcing! (Thanks Ian C for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The temperatures in Svalbard during the Arctic winter have reached record highs, which is not a good sign. CC-licensed photo by zen whisk 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. Melting point. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Hertz’ AI system that scans for “damage” on rental cars is turning into an epic disaster • Futurism

Noor Al-Sibai:

»

As our sister site The Drive reported last month, customers soon started complaining that Hertz was charging them hundreds of dollars for minor cosmetic scuffs that would have been shrugged off by a human employee, or in some cases for phantom damage when none was visible at all.

As much as Hertz wants the storm to pass, anecdotal reports make it sound like the system is still a disaster — and one that’s alienating customers even as other rental providers eye similarly divisive tech.

In a post on the r/HertzRentals subreddit, one user insisted they were “done” with the agency after UVeye flagged nonexistent dings when they returned their rental.

After renting a car for a week from a Hertz location at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, the user said that they were alerted that UVeye had flagged some apparent damage on the vehicle. When they checked the car, however, there was nothing visible.

Perturbed by the apparent mistake, the user tried to speak to employees and managers at the Hertz counter, but none were able to help, and all “pointed fingers at the ‘AI scanner.'” They were told to contact customer support  — but even that proved futile after representatives claimed they “can’t do anything.”

“Did the AI scanner [misinterpret] water reflections or dirt on the black car as damage?” they pondered. “There’s no way to even present that possibility, no path to defend yourself. It’s an unchallengeable, automated accusation.”

According to a recent New York Post article, Hertz’ UVeye scanners only appear to be deployed at the company’s airport locations for now. Still, recent reporting from our sister publication The Drive indicates that other rental companies are investing in similar damage-detection AI software.

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Who could possibly have predicted this? Who?
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Web Guide: an experimental AI-organized search results page • Google Blog

Austin Wu, group product manager for Search:

»

We’re launching Web Guide, a Search Labs experiment that uses AI to intelligently organize the search results page, making it easier to find information and web pages.

Web Guide groups web links in helpful ways — like pages related to specific aspects of your query. Under the hood, Web Guide uses a custom version of Gemini to better understand both a search query and content on the web, creating more powerful search capabilities that better surface web pages you may not have previously discovered. Similar to AI Mode, Web Guide uses a query fan-out technique, concurrently issuing multiple related searches to identify the most relevant results.

For example, try it for open-ended searches like “how to solo travel in Japan.” Or try detailed queries in multiple sentences like, “My family is spread across multiple time zones. What are the best tools for staying connected and maintaining close relationships despite the distance?”

«

I thought Google already had a system for ranking search results. Had it for the past 30-odd years, in fact.
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Google Chrome adds AI-powered store summaries to help US shoppers • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

Google on Monday announced an update to its Chrome web browser that will introduce AI-generated store reviews to U.S. shoppers with the aim of helping to determine the best places to make a purchase. The feature, which will be available by clicking an icon just to the left of the web address in the browser, will display a pop-up that informs consumers about the store’s reputation for things like product quality, shopping, pricing, customer service, and returns.

The feature, which is currently available only in English, will generate the summaries based on reviews from partners, including Bazaarvoice, Bizrate Insights, Reputation.com, Reseller Ratings, ScamAdviser, Trustpilot, TurnTo, Yotpo, Verified Reviews, and others.

The feature will initially be available to Chrome on the desktop. When reached for comment, Google could not confirm if or when AI summaries would come to mobile devices.

Google says the goal with the summaries is to provide a safer and more efficient shopping experience. However, the feature also helps Google better compete with other AI features rolled out by retail giant Amazon, which has been using the new technology to summarize product ratings and reviews, help customers find clothes that fit, get product recommendations and comparisons, and more.

«

I don’t find the Amazon summaries helpful; “customers say…” is not useful in a world where so many of the reviews are fake (or, these days, AI-written). Of course this is an “everyone else is doing it, we must too” thing. How is Google going to test whether people like these? Will it A/B test them? What form will that take?
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Cheyenne to host massive AI data center using more electricity than all Wyoming homes combined • AP News

Mead Gruver and Matt O’Brien:

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An artificial intelligence data center that would use more electricity than every home in Wyoming combined before expanding to as much as five times that size will be built soon near Cheyenne, according to the city’s mayor.

“It’s a game changer. It’s huge,” Mayor Patrick Collins said Monday.

With cool weather — good for keeping computer temperatures down — and an abundance of inexpensive electricity from a top energy-producing state, Wyoming’s capital has become a hub of computing power.

The city has been home to Microsoft data centers since 2012. An $800 million data center announced last year by Facebook parent company Meta Platforms is nearing completion, Collins said.

The latest data center, a joint effort between regional energy infrastructure company Tallgrass and AI data center developer Crusoe, would begin at 1.8 gigawatts of electricity and be scalable to 10 gigawatts, according to a joint company statement.

A gigawatt can power as many as 1 million homes. But that’s more homes than Wyoming has people. The least populated state, Wyoming, has about 590,000 people.

…A top producer of coal, oil and gas, Wyoming ranks behind only Texas, New Mexico and Pennsylvania as a top net energy-producing state, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Accounting for fossil fuels, Wyoming produces about 12 times more energy than it consumes. The state exports almost three-fifths of the electricity it produces, according to the EIA.

But this proposed data center is so big, it would have its own dedicated energy from gas generation and renewable sources, according to Collins and company officials.

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Not so long ago it was bitcoin that was going to burn up all the energy. Now it’s got some stiff competition.
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What to expect from the next Apple TV • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

• New A-Series Chip – The next-generation Apple TV is expected to get an updated A-series chip. The Apple TV could get the prior-generation A17 Pro, the current A18 series chips, or the A19 chips that are coming with the iPhone 17 lineup. With any of these chips, the Apple TV will support console-quality games thanks to much improved CPU and GPU performance.

• Apple-designed Wi-Fi Chip – Apple is developing its own communications chip that combines Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, reducing its reliance on Broadcom. Apple’s chip is expected to feature either Wi-Fi 6E or Wi-Fi 7 connectivity, so either way it will work on the 6GHz Wi-Fi band. Users can expect faster Wi-Fi speeds and lower latency.

• A Camera? – This is far from guaranteed and we haven’t heard anything about it for quite some time, but there have been rumors suggesting that a future version of the Apple TV could have a front-facing camera for FaceTime. Right now, the Apple TV requires a connected iPhone for FaceTime calls, but if a built-in camera is added, an iPhone wouldn’t be needed. A camera could also add support for gesture-based controls.

«

“Gesture-based controls”. Why do people keep trying to make these happen? They have been tried and knocked back again and again because they are a usability nightmare. How does the machine disambiguate you waving your hands around from intentional gestures? If the gestures are complicated enough that they won’t be confused with ordinary hand movements, they’re hard to learn.

I’ve seen programmers show off their gesture-based systems. They gave them up after a few weeks. And remember Microsoft’s Kinect. I tried that, as did zillions of gamers. It sold really well. Then people stopped using it.

All of which is to say: if there’s a camera on the next Apple TV (I don’t think there will be), it won’t be for gesture control. Expected by the end of the year, according to the rumours.
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Two bacteria identified as possible causes of multiple sclerosis • Earth.com

Jordan Joseph:

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For decades scientists have combed the gut looking for bacteria in the microbiome that push the immune system toward multiple sclerosis (MS). New evidence from a rare twin study now points a clear finger at two species of bacteria that hide in the small intestine.

The study, which compared 81 pairs of genetically identical siblings, singled out Eisenbergiella tayi and Lachnoclostridium as the most likely triggers of the nerve‑damaging disorder.

Dr. Anna Peters of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich steered the international team that linked these bacteria to disease in both people and mice.

Identical twins share nearly every gene, so differences in health are often related to outside factors. By focusing on twins where only one sibling had MS, the researchers stripped away much genetic noise.

Detailed DNA tracking of gut samples revealed 51 microbial candidates whose numbers diverged between affected and unaffected siblings.

Two species of bacteria kept resurfacing with the highest odds ratios, putting them at the top of the watch list.

Those samples came from the ileum, the last stretch of small intestine that hosts a busy immune garrison. The choice mattered because pro‑inflammatory T cells gather here before they head for the brain and spinal cord.

…To test cause rather than correlation, the investigators moved beyond sequencing. They transplanted ileal microbes from selected twins into germ‑free mice bred to develop MS‑like inflammation.

In animals that received bacteria from the sibling with multiple sclerosis, paralysis appeared within twelve weeks. Mice given microbes from the healthy twin stayed mobile the entire study.

…E. tayi and Lachnoclostridium belong to the Lachnospiraceae family, a large clan of anaerobes that usually help digest fiber. Most relatives are considered harmless and even beneficial.

What sets these two apart is not yet clear, but the German group noted that both can thrive on mucus sugars when dietary fiber is scarce. That ability could thin the intestinal barrier and expose immune sensors to microbial products.

«

The study needs replication, of course, but also you can’t just go around zapping guy bacteria at random. Expect many more mice studies.
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Svalbard winter warming is reaching melting point • Nature Communications

James Bradley et al:

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Svalbard is at the front line of the climate crisis, warming at six to seven times the global average rate. Human-caused global warming is particularly amplified in the Arctic, causing the climate in the Arctic to warm more quickly than the rest of the Earth. The winter period is experiencing the highest rates of warming with winter temperatures over Svalbard rising at nearly twice the annual average. Meanwhile, centennial trends for annual precipitation in west Svalbard show increases of 3–4% per decade, of which a greater proportion is falling as rain.

As such, over the past 40 years, rain-on-snow events have significantly increased, and rain is projected to become the dominant form of precipitation in the Arctic by the end of this century.

This year, Arctic winter air temperatures were among the warmest ever recorded. In Ny-Ålesund, the world’s northernmost permanent settlement, situated in north-west Svalbard and approximately 1,200 km from the North Pole, the air temperature average for February 2025 was -3.3°C — considerably higher than the 1961-2001 average for this time of year of -15°C, and reached a maximum of 4.7°C.

Air temperatures higher than 0°C were recorded in Ny-Ålesund on 14 of the 28 days of February 2025. Such sustained warmth, coupled with prolonged rainfall, triggered widespread melting of snow and ice. When winter warming crosses the 0°C threshold, it marks more than just a warm anomaly — it signals a fundamental shift in Arctic winter dynamics.

Episodic thawing events during winter can have significant and lasting environmental consequences, including influencing ice layer formation, triggering microbial activation, altering nutrient discharge, and affecting permafrost thaw and ground ice development. The episodic warming event of February 2025 was not an isolated occurrence: winter warming events in Svalbard have been a recurring phenomenon in recent decades as a consequence of anthropogenic climate change.

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London Administrative Court Daily Cause List • Royal Courts of Justice

»

The King (on the application of B and others) v Investigatory Powers Tribunal

FOR JUDGMENT HAND DOWN

This judgment will be handed down by the judge remotely by circulation to the parties’ representatives by email and release to The National Archives. The date and time for hand-down will be deemed to be at 2:30pm 30/07/2025. A copy of the judgment in final form as handed down can be made available after that time, on request by email to the administrativecourtoffice.listoffice@justice.gov.uk

«

This is scheduled for today (Wednesday). I don’t know what it pertains to – “on the application of B and others” is an intentional obfuscation – but I’d guess it might have something to do with Apple’s complaint about efforts by the British government to stop it using end-to-end encryption (a complaint in which WhatsApp has joined it).

So anyway, that’s an email worth sending at 2.31pm for any (other) journalists reading this.
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Some Kenyan runners see doping as a path to glory – and to a daily meal • The New York Times

Tariq Panja:

»

Thousands of feet above the Great Rift Valley that runs through East Africa, the small city of Iten, Kenya, calls itself the Home of Champions. It has long produced and attracted world-class running talent, its high altitude and red dirt roads a training ground for thousands.

The town also has a far less laudatory reputation. It is a well-documented center of a doping crisis that shows little sign of being tamed.

Runners come here for access to competition, coaching talent and the benefit of training in thin air, all to try to earn riches from running. Many Kenyans who try to join the elite endure cramped and dirty living conditions, little food and separation from their families in service of their ambitions.

In a region where the average annual income is the equivalent of little more than $2,000 and the competition so intense, the potentially life-changing lure of banned substances, referred to locally as “the medicine,” is obvious. A few thousand dollars in prize money or participation in a single overseas race can be the difference between runners and their families eating three meals a day and scratching around for the next bite.

They calculate that doping is worth the risks not only of getting caught, but also of damaging their health and, in some cases, even dying.

…“This economic reality means the high-risk situation is always going to be impossible to completely eradicate,” said Brett Clothier, the head of global track and field’s unit responsible for antidoping efforts.

Many runners and coaches suspect that their rivals dope, and they point to the roster of athletes barred from international competitive racing. Kenya, which has a smaller population than 25 other countries, has the most names on the list.

Some of Kenya’s most prominent runners have been caught doping and barred from competition. The women’s marathon world-record holder, Ruth Chepngetich, who is from the Rift Valley, was suspended this month after testing positive for a prohibited substance.

«

There is a big industry – with money taken against future earnings. It’s a big problem for the anti-doping authorities.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new theory suggests our universe might exist inside a black hole. The strangest thing? It’s not against the laws of physics. CC-licensed photo by brx0 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. Eventful. 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 UK is slogging through an online age-gate apocalypse • The Verge

Jess Weatherbed:

»

Over the past several days, several large social media platforms have started requiring age verification in the UK to access certain features and types of content, in partnership with third-party software providers. Users typically have a choice between uploading bank card information, an image of government-issued ID, or a facial scan that estimates the user’s age.

Meta users likely won’t have seen a huge difference over the weekend, as Facebook and Instagram rolled out age verification requirements a few years ago. Bluesky users in the UK, however, now can’t access direct messaging capabilities until they complete the platform’s new age verification process. Reddit has also blocked access to specific subreddits for UK-based users who don’t complete its age verification process, some of which — r/periods, r/stopsmoking, r/stopdrinking, and r/sexualassault, for example — provide valued community support and resources for adults and minors alike.

People are already finding loopholes for these systems. The face scanning systems for Persona and k-ID — the third-party verification software used by Reddit and Discord, respectively — can both be easily tricked using Death Stranding’s photo mode. (Facebook and Instagram use a similar service called Yoti, which so far does not appear to have been fooled the same way.)

X doesn’t yet have a direct verification system, and is instead currently estimating age based on factors like account creation date, social connections, email addresses, and legacy verification. Accounts that don’t have any of these signals in place are locked out of accessing certain content until X rolls out the ID and facial scanner-based checkers it’s planning to release “in the following weeks.” That includes protest footage and video game clips that depict violence — and users who aren’t even based in the UK are reporting content restrictions as well.

«

As the next link shows, there’s a huge problem implied in uploading personal data to a gazillion sites. So, we finally got the age verification system that everyone had been calling out for. And its biggest effect has been to drive people to start using VPNs, because given the choice between uploading your personally identifying information to a random site, and getting a VPN, the latter is always preferable.
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A second Tea breach reveals users’ DMs about abortions and cheating • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

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A second, major security issue with women’s dating safety app Tea has exposed much more user data than the first breach we first reported last week, with an independent security researcher now finding it was possible for hackers to access messages between users discussing abortions, cheating partners, and phone numbers they sent to one another.

Despite Tea’s initial statement that “the incident involved a legacy data storage system containing information from over two years ago,” the second issue impacting a separate database is much more recent, affecting messages up until last week, according to the researcher’s findings that 404 Media verified. The researcher said they also found the ability to send a push notification to all of Tea’s users.

It’s hard to overstate how sensitive this data is and how it could put Tea’s users at risk if it fell into the wrong hands. When signing up, Tea encourages users to choose an anonymous screenname, but it was trivial for 404 Media to find the real world identities of some users given the nature of their messages, which Tea has led them to believe were private. Users could be easily found via their social media handles, phone numbers, and real names that they shared in these chats.

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I’ve seen someone describe the Tea hack(s) as the worst PII (private identifying information) breach they’ve ever seen. The app demands people upload identifying images such as a driver’s licence, and of course doesn’t delete it. (Much easier to say “sure we deleted it!” and not do so.)

The recommendation now is for anyone who ever used it to put a block on their credit and monitor their bank statements. The class action lawsuits can only be a day away.
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The “have lots” and the “have nots” • Spyglass

MG Siegler:

»

Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have all had layoffs in recent months while at the same time also engaging in the crazy talent arms race that’s happening in AI. These companies are essentially saying to some employees that they’re so valuable that they’re worth paying not just a lot of money, but more money than basically anyone in the world gets paid – including, often, their own CEOs. And yet to others, they’re basically saying they’re worthless – I mean literally not worth paying anything to any longer. Just to put it in directionally stark terms: some employees are worth $100m a year while others are worth $0 a year.

There have always been pay discrepancies at companies – and it has long been most pronounced at tech companies because engineering talent is so vital to the literal job to be done. And yes, there exist the mythical “100x engineers” who can produce work that may actually be worth more than 100 other people because no other people could simply do the same work.

But AI has taken this up several notches. We now effectively have “100Mx engineers” – people so valuable to a company that there more or less is no limit to the amount they might be worth. I would say maybe a company’s overall market cap – but there would be push back against that because some would say that this talent can likely raise that market cap by billions. I mean, at least one report has Mark Zuckerberg throwing out the “B” word in such talent discussions.

«

Om Malik makes much the same point (perhaps less brutally) in his analysis of Satya Nadella’s memo to staff. The old pact of “work for us, it’ll go great” is over in Silicon Valley.
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Google failed to warn ten million of Turkey earthquake severity • BBC News

James Clayton, Anna Foster and Ben Derico:

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Google has admitted its earthquake early warning system failed to accurately alert people during Turkey’s deadly quake of 2023.

Ten million people within 98 miles of the epicentre could have been sent Google’s highest level alert – giving up to 35 seconds of warning to find safety. Instead, only 469 “Take Action” warnings were sent out for the first 7.8 magnitude quake.

Google told the BBC half a million people were sent a lower level warning, which is designed for “light shaking”, and does not alert users in the same prominent way. The tech giant previously told the BBC the system had “performed well” after an investigation in 2023.

The alerts system is available in just under 100 countries – and is described by Google as a “global safety net” often operating in countries with no other warning system.

Google’s system, named Android Earthquake Alerts (AEA), is run by the Silicon Valley firm – not individual countries.

The system works on Android devices, which make up more than 70% of the phones in Turkey.

More than 55,000 people died when two major earthquakes hit south-east Turkey on 6 February 2023, more than 100,000 were injured. Many were asleep in buildings that collapsed around them when the tremors hit.

Google’s early warning system was in place and live on the day of the quakes. However it underestimated how strong the earthquakes were.

«

Reminiscent of the “Google Flu Trends” system, which turned out to seriously overestimate levels of flu in the US after its launch in 2008.
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Did our cosmos begin inside a black hole in another universe? • Space

Victoria Corless:

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A team of scientists is proposing a bold alternative to the Big Bang theory, suggesting that our universe may have formed inside a colossal black hole residing in a larger, parent universe. The Big Bang theory, along with Einstein’s general relativity, has successfully explained major cosmological phenomena, including the cosmic microwave background, the universe’s large-scale structure, and its accelerating expansion often linked to dark energy.

Yet, fundamental problems remain with this theory, such as the unexplained nature of dark energy and dark matter, the singularity at the Big Bang, and inconsistencies between general relativity and quantum mechanics. “Most scientists have responded by proposing either a mysterious new form of energy — [called] dark energy — or by modifying the laws of physics,” Enrique Gaztañaga, professor at the University of Portsmouth, told Space.com. “But these are drastic steps.”

Gaztañaga says he and his colleagues wondered if a simpler explanation might suffice. “[Our study] began with a simple but profound question: Why is the expansion of the universe accelerating?” he said. “Our entire observable universe lies inside its own gravitational radius, meaning that from the outside, it would appear like a black hole. That led to a radical idea: What if the universe formed in the same way a star collapses into a black hole?”

…The new study explores the idea that the universe may not have begun with a singularity but instead emerged from the collapse of a massive cloud of matter in another universe. To investigate, the research team ran simulations in search of a solution that could address some of the inconsistencies in current cosmological theories — and unexpectedly found that an exact, analytical solution describing the fundamental principles of this process already exists.

“Under the right conditions, this collapse doesn’t end in a singularity — instead, it bounces and begins expanding again,” said Gaztañaga. “That bounce mimics what we call the Big Bang.”

While “bouncing scenarios” have been proposed in the past, this model stands out by relying solely on known laws of physics. It avoids introducing speculative particles or forces and describes a purely gravitational collapse occurring within a black hole.

«

Sounds bonkers, and yet if it doesn’t violate the laws of physics.. then it’s passed the first test of a scientific theory. There’s plenty more in the article.
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Exclusive: Napster (formerly Infinite Reality) lays off some of its team • GamesBeat

Dean Takahashi:

»

Infinite Reality recently bought Napster for $207m, and the Infinite Reality renamed itself as Napster Corp. in the wake of its $500m acquisition of Touchcast. Now it is focusing on providing the next generation of digital media and e-commerce.

…the company raised a lot of money — reportedly several billion dollars — in pursuit of acquisitions to build a metaverse company. It’s more fashionable to say immersive virtual worlds, but you get the idea.

The deals under Infinite Reality included acquisitions of Obsess, Stakes, Drone Racing, Ethereal and Action Face. It also sought but didn’t acquire a majority stake in Super League Gaming. Back in January, Infinite Reality said it raised $3bn at a valuation of $12.25bn. And in 2024, the company raised $350m and bought Landvault.

After some pressure from investors and others, Napster said that Sterling Select, a venture development firm associated with Sterling Equities and the Katz family, represented the investor who invested a significant portion of the $3bn investment that the company announced earlier this year.  

The spokesperson said, “These are difficult but expected steps in the course of integrating teams and streamlining operations. We continue to employ hundreds of full-time team members around the world—including nearly 100 engineers and hundreds of talented professionals across product development, marketing, and operations—and we remain focused on executing against our vision with clarity and momentum.”

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Amazing that they could raised $3bn to build “immersive virtual worlds”. Don’t they know all the play is in chatbots? Anyway, this feels like the latest in Napster’s long, slow slide into vanishment.
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Economists are struggling to find jobs. It’s an ominous sign for the economy • The New York Times

Noam Scheiber:

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Last year, the average base salary for newly hired economics professors at major research universities was more than $150,000, according to the American Economic Association, and their compensation swelled to about $200,000 once bonuses and summer teaching were included. As recently as the 2023-24 academic year, the employment rate for Ph.D. economists within a few months of graduation was 100%, said John Cawley, the chair of the association’s Committee on the Job Market, citing the group’s surveys. Job satisfaction topped 85%.

Those glory days seem to be ending. Universities and nonprofits have scaled back hiring amid declining state budgets and federal funding cuts. At the same time, the Trump administration has laid off government economists and frozen hiring for new ones.

Tech companies also have grown stingier, and their need for high-level economists — once seemingly insatiable — has waned. Other firms have slowed hiring in response to the economic uncertainty introduced by President Trump’s tariffs and the possibility that artificial intelligence will replace their workers, even if those workers have a doctoral degree.

“The advent of A.I. is also impacting the market for high-skilled labor,” said Betsey Stevenson, a labor economist at the University of Michigan, in an email. “So the whole thing is kind of a mess.”

Of course, if it were only some egghead economists scrambling to find work, that might be not be terribly consequential. But the same forces bedeviling economists are crimping employment for other highly trained scientists and social scientists, as well as for many recent college graduates, whose jobless rate has been unusually high for an otherwise strong economy.

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Economic uncertainty? Employability uncertainty? It’s hard to know which; all one sees is the pattern.
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The world is run by old men in a hurry • Financial Times

Janan Ganesh:

»

The numbers should amaze us. Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi and Vladimir Putin are all in their seventies. So are Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil. The president and supreme leader of Iran are 70 and 86 respectively. The presidents of Nigeria and Indonesia are each 73. More than half of the world’s population, and much of its land area and military capacity, is in the hands of men who are older than Ronald Reagan was when he entered the White House at what seemed a dicey 69.

One of the destabilising forces in the world today is the advanced age of those who run it.

For one thing, old leaders have an incentive to secure a legacy — a defining achievement — before time runs out for them. The unification of mainland China with Taiwan is an example of such a project. So is avenging the loss of Russia’s prestige and “strategic depth” after the cold war. Even Trump’s haste to find a settlement in Ukraine, however invidious the details of such a peace might be to that nation, and to end world trade as we have known it, whatever the economic cost, suggests an old man in a hurry.

The problem with aged leaders is not their health — almost all those named above are robust and lucid — but their incentives. As well as not having much time to leave a mark, they won’t have decades of retirement in which to suffer the legal and reputational penalties of any disastrous act committed in office.

We have to get our heads around, if not a paradox, then a surprise. Age, which “should” instil caution and restraint in people, quite often emboldens them.

…Either way, the world is living through a lesson in the perverse consequences of age. It seems that age confers wisdom, but also a certain liberation. It imposes a sense of social duty, but also a deadline for personal achievement. To explain the disorder of the modern world, it is far more intellectually proper to cite economic trends and grand historical forces. But perhaps part of the story is that a few old men are striving for a legacy in the time that is left to them.

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North Korean hackers ran US-based “laptop farm” from Arizona woman’s home • Ars Technica

Nate Anderson:

»

Christina Chapman, a 50-year-old Arizona woman, has just been sentenced to 102 months [8.5 years] in prison for helping North Korean hackers steal US identities in order to get “remote” IT jobs with more than 300 American companies, including Nike. The scheme funneled millions of dollars to the North Korean state.

Why did Chapman do it? In a letter sent this week to the judge, Chapman said that she was “looking for a job that was Monday through Friday that would allow me to be present for my mom” who was battling cancer. (Her mother died in 2023.) But “the area where we lived didn’t provide for a lot of job opportunities that fit what I needed. I also thought that the job was allowing me to help others.”

She offered her “deepest and sincerest apologies to any person who was harmed by my actions,” thanked the FBI for busting her, and said that when she gets out of prison, she hopes to “pursue the books that I have been working on writing and starting my own underwear company.”

Managing all this fraud required plenty of tedious bureaucracy. The North Koreans had to steal US identities, of course, but then they also had to get hired. This involved endless paperwork, such as writing resumes and filling out I-9 forms to show eligibility to work in the US. (In one chat, Chapman said that she was happy to send I-9 forms from her home address but that she would prefer not to “do the paperwork” herself because “I can go to FEDERAL PRISON for falsifying federal documents.”)

Chapman was also key to the less obvious, more technical part of the scheme—how to make it appear like all these remote workers were actually living in the country.

When her clients got hired, Chapman would receive their corporate laptops in the mail. Sometimes she would re-ship them to “a city in China on the border with North Korea.”

But she kept more than 90 of the machines at her place in Arizona. Using proxies, VPNs, and remote-access software like Anydesk, the North Koreans logged in to their “American” computers from afar and then appeared to be normal, US-based remote employees, showing up to staff meetings on Zoom, collecting paychecks, and occasionally exfiltrating data or installing ransomware.

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The first planned migration of an entire country is underway • WIRED

Fernanda González:

»

Tuvalu is preparing to carry out the first planned migration of an entire country in response to the effects of climate change. Recent studies project that much of its territory could be submerged in the next 25 years due to rising sea levels, forcing its inhabitants to consider migration as an urgent survival measure.

This island nation in Oceania is made up of nine coral islands and atolls inhabited by just over 11,000 people. The country’s average altitude is just two metres above sea level, making it extremely vulnerable to rising oceans, flooding, and storm surges, all exacerbated by the climate crisis.

A study by NASA’s Sea Level Change Team revealed that, in 2023, the sea level in Tuvalu was 15cm higher than the average recorded over the previous three decades. If this trend continues, it’s projected that most of the territory, including its critical infrastructure, will be below the high-tide level by 2050.

In the face of this existential threat, an unprecedented climate visa program has begun. In 2023, Tuvalu and Australia signed the Falepili Union Treaty, an agreement that provides for a migration scheme that will allow 280 Tuvaluans per year to settle in Australia as permanent residents.

The visas will be allocated through a ballot system and will grant beneficiaries the same health, education, housing, and employment rights enjoyed by Australian citizens. In addition, Tuvaluans will retain the ability to return to their home country if conditions permit.

…The agreement with Australia is not the only action taken by Tuvalu in the face of the threat of disappearing. In 2022, the country launched an ambitious strategy to become the world’s first digital nation. This initiative includes 3D scanning its islands to digitally re-create them and preserve their cultural heritage, as well as moving government functions to a virtual environment. In order to protect national identity and sovereignty, the project is also contemplating constitutional reforms to define the country as a virtual state, a concept already recognized by 25 countries, including Australia and New Zealand.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Great Barrier Reef in Australia is the scene of efforts to use geoengineering to benefit its climate. CC-licensed photo by eutrophication&hypoxia 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. Deep breath. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in • Financial Times

Tim Bradshaw:

»

Thousands of sites offering adult content, as well as popular social media apps including X, Reddit and TikTok, have introduced new “age assurance” systems and controls for UK users since Friday, to comply with the Online Safety Act.

Media regulator Ofcom said it would this weekend start to enforce the new age checks, which are designed to prevent children under the age of 18 from accessing sites that carry pornography as well as other “harmful” material that relates to self-harm, eating disorders or suicide.

But to evade the new rules, a growing number of people in the UK are turning to tools more often used by citizens in authoritarian regimes to get around internet censorship.

Apps offering virtual private networks — which route a smartphone or PC’s internet traffic to another country, bypassing local network providers — made up half of the top ten most popular free apps on the UK’s App Store for iOS this weekend, according to Apple’s rankings.

Proton VPN leapfrogged ChatGPT to become the top free app in the UK, according to Apple’s daily App Store charts, with similar services from developers Super Unlimited and Nord Security also rising over the weekend.

Proton, the Swiss-based company behind the top VPN app, said it had experienced a more than 1,800% increase [18x? – Overspill Ed] in daily sign-ups from UK-based users after new age verification rules took effect on Friday.

Nord said there had been a 1,000% increase [10-fold? – Overspill Ed] in UK purchases of VPN subscriptions since before the rules took effect.

«

Nord has been spending tons of money on podcast adverts months ahead of this. Wasted? Or good brand building? A few days ago, the BBC was stroking its chin over whether people would hand over their details. Seems we have an answer.
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Microsoft to stop using China-based teams to support US Department of Defense • Ars Technica

Renee Dudley and Doris Burke:

»

Last week, Microsoft announced that it would no longer use China-based engineering teams to support the Defense Department’s cloud computing systems, following ProPublica’s investigation of the practice, which cybersecurity experts said could expose the government to hacking and espionage.

But it turns out the Pentagon was not the only part of the government facing such a threat. For years, Microsoft has also used its global workforce, including China-based personnel, to maintain the cloud systems of other federal departments, including parts of Justice, Treasury and Commerce, ProPublica has found.

This work has taken place in what’s known as the Government Community Cloud, which is intended for information that is not classified but is nonetheless sensitive. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, the US government’s cloud accreditation organization, has approved GCC to handle “moderate” impact information “where the loss of confidentiality, integrity, and availability would result in serious adverse effect on an agency’s operations, assets, or individuals.”

The Justice Department’s Antitrust Division has used GCC to support its criminal and civil investigation and litigation functions, according to a 2022 report. Parts of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education have also used GCC.

Microsoft says its foreign engineers working in GCC have been overseen by US-based personnel known as “digital escorts,” similar to the system it had in place at the Defense Department.

Nevertheless, cybersecurity experts told ProPublica that foreign support for GCC presents an opportunity for spying and sabotage. “There’s a misconception that, if government data isn’t classified, no harm can come of its distribution,” said Rex Booth, a former federal cybersecurity official who now is chief information security officer of the tech company SailPoint.

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So many cold wars, so little time.
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Extreme heat is making us age faster • CNN

Laura Paddison:

»

The soupy, smothering extreme heat that has scorched parts of the Northern Hemisphere this summer takes a hard toll on our bodies. It can make you feel nauseous, woozy and dehydrated. It can have pernicious health effects on multiple organs.

But there’s another, less well-known, impact of extreme heat: it makes you age faster.

Prolonged exposure to soaring temperatures can cause a deterioration in our cells and tissues and speed up biological aging, according to a new and growing body of research. Chronological age refers to how long a person has lived, but biological — or “epigenetic” — age measures how well our tissues and cells function. The difference between the two explains why sometimes someone’s age does not seem to match their health and vitality.

An accelerated biological age is the “canary in the coal mine” for future risk of earlier onset of diseases such as cancer, dementia and diabetes, and early death, said Jennifer Ailshire, professor of gerontology and sociology at the University of Southern California Leonard Davis School of Gerontology.

As climate change forces people to endure increasingly severe and longer lasting heat waves, scientists say there is an urgency to better understand the ways heat is slowly and silently undermining human health at a cellular level.

…Ailshire is one of the scientists trying to change that. She and another researcher, Eunyoung Choi, published the first population-scale research into this area in February.

They analyzed blood samples taken from a group of more than 3,600 people across the United States aged 56 and above. They used tools called “epigenetic clocks,” which capture the way DNA is modified and provide an estimate of biological age. They then linked this to daily climate data in participants’ locations in the years before the blood samples were taken.

Their results, published in February, found people who experienced at least 140 extreme heat days a year — when the heat index, a combination of temperature and humidity, was above 90ºF — aged up to 14 months faster than those in locations with less than 10 extreme heat days a year.

This link between heat and biological aging remained even when taking into account individual factors such as exercise levels and income, although the study did not look at access to air conditioning or time spent outside. The strength of the association was significant, too. The results showed extreme heat had the same impact on aging as smoking or heavy alcohol use.

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The hottest business strategy this summer is buying crypto • WSJ via MSN

Gregory Zuckerman and Vicky Ge Huang:

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Companies are raising tens of billions of dollars, not to invest in their businesses or hire employees, but to purchase bitcoin and more obscure cryptocurrencies. A Japanese hotel operator, a French semiconductor manufacturer, a Florida toy maker, a nail-salon chain, an electric-bike maker—they’re all plowing cash into tokens, helping to send all kinds of digital currencies to record levels. News that a new company plans to buy crypto is enough to send its shares flying—spurring others to consider joining the frenzy.

Since June 1, 98 companies have announced plans to raise over $43bn to buy bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, according to Architect Partners, a crypto advisory firm. Nearly $86bn has been raised for this purpose since the start of the year. That’s more than double the amount of money raised in initial public offerings in the U.S. in 2025, according to Dealogic.

Skeptics say the rush of companies buying crypto is a sign the market is overheating, noting that digital tokens, especially the obscure ones, are notoriously volatile and have uncertain futures. They scratch their heads about why an investor would buy shares of a company purchasing cryptocurrencies when they can buy them on their own through low-cost exchange-traded funds and other vehicles.

Others note that many of these companies are worth much more than the cryptocurrencies they hold, as if investors are willing to pay $2 for a $1 bill.

That hasn’t stopped big-name bankers, investors and others from jumping in. Mutual-fund giant Capital Group, hedge fund D1 Capital Partners and investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald are among those backing recent efforts by companies to raise huge sums to purchase cryptocurrencies.

Venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital and other investors backed a move by a company called Bitmine Immersion Technologies to raise $250m to buy ether. The company, worth $26m on June 27, the Friday before its announcement, is now worth over $2bn after a surge of more than 800%. Thiel, the tech billionaire known for starting PayPal and Palantir, holds a 9.1% stake in the company, according to a recent filing. He declined to comment.

“If you blink, you miss a couple of these deals,” said Bob Diamond, the former Barclays chief executive.

«

As the next link points out, this is just like the runup to the financial crash of 2007-08. (Diamond made a killing back then. Don’t think this time will be any different.)
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The coming crypto crisis • Financial Times

Rana Foroohar:

»

Bitcoin, one of the digital assets banks may lend against, has been nearly four times as volatile as major indices since 2020. It has also had ties to terror funding, and I have yet to read anything that made me think it is more than a tool for speculators and criminals. But that hardly matters when the largest political donors are behind it.

Crypto political action committees have, over the last several years, spent tens of millions of dollars donating to not only Republican politicians but many Democrats too. This effort culminated a couple of weeks ago in the passage of the Genius Act. Legislation covering other crypto assets is expected later this year. I predict all this will not only cause the next financial crisis, but fuel even more political populism and unrest in the US.

It’s all too reminiscent of 2000, when advocates for over-the-counter derivatives descended on Washington begging to be properly “regulated” so that they could gift the world with financial “innovation.” What we got instead was a seven-fold increase in poorly regulated credit default swaps that culminated in the great financial crisis of 2008.

Now consider that US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent expects the stablecoin market to grow tenfold over the next few years, from a near-$200bn to a $2tn industry, one that will be embedded in everything from loan underwriting to Treasury markets.

As Democrat Elizabeth Warren, the ranking member of the Senate banking commission, told me last week: “We’ve seen this movie before,” with lobbyists “saying, ‘Please regulate us’ because they want the gold sticker of government confirmation that they are a ‘safe’ investment,” and politicians offering up bipartisan support for deregulation.

Indeed, you can draw a clear line from derivatives deregulation in 2000, and the broader Clinton era deregulation that eroded the barriers between trading and lending, to the weakening of Dodd Frank regulation for regional banks in 2018 (which contributed to the banking crisis of 2023), and now, the Genius Act. All of it was bipartisan.

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Even if Warren says it, I don’t think she’s wrong. The potential for this all to go enormously south is exactly the same as with CDOs and the other alphabet soup.
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Under siege from Trump and Musk, a top liberal group falls into crisis • The New York Times

Kenneth Vogel, Kate Conger and Ryan Mac:

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Media Matters raised nearly $250m in the two decades between its creation in 2003 and the end of 2023, establishing itself as a force in Democratic politics by effectively undermining major right-wing media figures and politicians.

…Founded in 2003 by David Brock, a self-described “right-wing hit man” who switched sides and became an enforcer for Democrats, Media Matters set out to neutralize what Mr. Brock saw as a powerful Republican information ecosystem. The group became the flagship in a constellation of nonprofits formed or acquired by Mr. Brock to help Democrats and undermine Republicans.

…In November 2023, Media Matters published research showing that ads appeared on X next to antisemitic and pro-Nazi content. The report — along with a post in which Mr. Musk endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory — contributed to an advertiser exodus from X that cost the company more than $75m in revenue through the end of that year.

Later that month, X sued in federal court, claiming that Media Matters had “manipulated” the site to bypass safeguards and display advertisements next to incendiary posts in an effort to damage X’s relationships with advertisers. In a December 2023 livestream on X, Mr. Musk took aim at Media Matters, telling listeners, “We will pursue not just the organization, but anyone funding that organization.” Mr. Musk and X did not respond to requests for comment.

The suit was quickly followed by investigations from the offices of Republican attorneys general Ken Paxton of Texas and Andrew Bailey of Missouri, probing Mr. Musk’s claims that the group had manipulated data in its research about X and suggesting donors in their states may have been misled.

Media Matters sued, and a federal court blocked the Texas investigation, ruling that the state attorneys general were likely infringing on the organization’s First Amendment rights. Missouri agreed to drop its investigation. Still, the legal fights cost Media Matters nearly $2m.

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American sites getting sued towards oblivion by billionaires isn’t novel, but it is becoming more common. Particularly, left-wing sites are being targeted. The beloved First Amendment isn’t looking so robust.
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The manmade clouds that could help save the Great Barrier Reef • The New York Times

Ferris Jabr:

»

Since 2016, [oceanographer Daniel] Harrison and his colleagues have been investigating whether it is possible to reduce coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef by altering the weather above it. As the planet heats up, unusually high ocean temperatures are stressing corals around the world, forcing them to eject their symbiotic partners: the photosynthetic single-celled algae that live in their tissues and provide them with much of their sustenance. Theoretically, machine-generated fog and artificially brightened clouds can shade and cool the water in which corals live, sparing them much of that stress.

Not far behind the primary fogger on the big ship stood a pair of cloud-modifying machines known as the cannons. From a distance, each tubular white contraption resembled a jet engine angled toward the sky. Up close, you could see that they were mostly hollow, outfitted on one end with a large fan and on the other with a ring of torpedo-shaped manifolds, each of which supported nearly 100 small metal nozzles. When the scientists switched them on, a series of squat, square air compressors began to groan and shake, like washing machines pushed to their breaking point. This time, seawater pumped onboard was combined with highly pressurized air before being expelled through the nozzles. The result was a fine white mist that burst from the cannons at more than 60 miles per hour. As the wind lifted the briny spray into the air, it intermingled with low-lying clouds, making them more reflective.

Harrison’s project is essentially a highly localized version of geoengineering: the deliberate modification of the planet to counteract climate change.

…“Things have changed very quickly even in the last six months,” says [physicist David] Keith, who headed solar-geoengineering research at Harvard before moving to the University of Chicago in 2023 to establish a new climate-engineering initiative. “There’s a much higher level of interest. More senior political and environmental figures are willing to engage in a serious way. More people in the scientific core are talking about it. There’s new money. It feels different.”

«

(Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Women dating safety app ‘Tea’ breached, users’ IDs posted to 4chan • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

»

Users from 4chan claim to have discovered an exposed database hosted on Google’s mobile app development platform, Firebase, belonging to the newly popular women’s dating safety app Tea. Users say they are rifling through peoples’ personal data and selfies uploaded to the app, and then posting that data online, according to screenshots, 4chan posts, and code reviewed by 404 Media. In a statement to 404 Media, Tea confirmed the breach also impacted some direct messages but said that the data is from two years ago.

Tea, which claims to have more than 1.6 million users, reached the top of the App Store charts this week and has tens of thousands of reviews there. The app aims to provide a space for women to exchange information about men in order to stay safe, and verifies that new users are women by asking them to upload a selfie.

…The thread says the issue was an exposed database that allowed anyone to access the material. While reporting this story, a URL the 4chan user posted included a voluminous list of specific attachments associated with the Tea app. 404 Media saw this list of files. In the last hour or so, that page was locked down, and now returns a “Permission denied” error.

404 Media verified that Tea does contain the same storage bucket URL that 4chan claims was related to the exposure. 404 Media did this by downloading a copy of the Android version of the app and decompiling its code.

«

This has been confirmed all over the place during the weekend, with geocoding for the IDs as well. Pretty disastrous for the app; calamitous for the app makers. If they were in Europe, they’d be getting sued into oblivion. Could still happen in the US.
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Intel’s foundry future depends on securing a customer for next-gen chipmaking tech • Reuters

Max Cherney and Stephen Nellis:

»

Intel warned investors on Thursday that it may have to get out of the chip manufacturing business if it does not land external customers to make chips in its factories.

New CEO Lip-Bu Tan said on Thursday the company’s engineers were busy working with customers to jump-start its next-generation contract manufacturing process, or foundry, as the company announced big layoffs alongside a wider-than-expected third-quarter loss outlook.

Those customers for the company’s so-called 14A manufacturing process are crucial to the success of the technology – so much so that if it fails to secure a big one, it could shut down its cutting-edge manufacturing business altogether, according to Intel’s quarterly filing on Thursday.

The possibility that Intel could drop out of the cutting-edge manufacturing business would be a historic shift for a company that has described itself as a steward of Moore’s Law – an observation by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore about the fast rate of development of the chip industry that held true for decades.

Intel is the only U.S. chipmaker capable of making advanced computing chips.

…”We’re developing Intel 14A … from the ground up in close partnership with large external customers,” Tan said in a memo released with the results. “Going forward, our investment in Intel 14A will be based on confirmed customer commitments.

“We will build what our customers need, when they need it, and earn their trust through consistent execution.”

Intel said that without a significant customer, it would consider cancelling or pausing development of 14A and subsequent technologies. Should the company take the step, it planned to continue to manufacture chips with its 18A technology and a variant through 2030, according to the filing.

«

So the company that once was in essentially every computing device is now struggling to find people who will use its factories. The world can turn so far.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Gene editing techniques can produce mosquitoes which cannot pass on the parasite that causes malaria – a potentially huge lifesaver. CC-licensed photo by Global Panorama on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Bite me. 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 chatbot culture wars are here • The New York Times

Kevin Roose:

»

For much of the last decade, America’s partisan culture warriors have fought over the contested territory of social media — arguing about whether the rules on Facebook and Twitter were too strict or too lenient, whether YouTube and TikTok censored too much or too little and whether Silicon Valley tech companies were systematically silencing right-wing voices.

Those battles aren’t over. But a new one has already started.

This fight is over artificial intelligence, and whether the outputs of leading A.I. chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are politically biased.

Conservatives have been taking aim at A.I. companies for months. In March, House Republicans subpoenaed a group of leading A.I. developers, probing them for information about whether they colluded with the Biden administration to suppress right-wing speech. And this month, Missouri’s Republican attorney general, Andrew Bailey, opened an investigation into whether Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI are leading a “new wave of censorship” by training their A.I. systems to give biased responses to questions about President Trump.

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump himself joined the fray, issuing an executive order on what he called “woke A.I.”
“Once and for all, we are getting rid of woke,” he said in a speech. “The American people do not want woke Marxist lunacy in the A.I. models, and neither do other countries.”

The order was announced alongside a new White House A.I. action plan that will require A.I. developers that receive federal contracts to ensure that their models’ outputs are “objective and free from top-down ideological bias.”

«

Well that’s going to be EVER so easy to enforce, isn’t it.
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CRISPR gene editing in mosquitoes halts malaria spread • Technology Networks

»

Biologists Zhiqian Li and Ethan Bier from UC San Diego, and Yuemei Dong and George Dimopoulos from Johns Hopkins University, created a CRISPR-based gene-editing system that changes a single molecule within mosquitoes, a minuscule but effective change that stops the malaria-parasite transmission process. Genetically altered mosquitoes are still able to bite those with malaria and acquire parasites from their blood, but the parasites can no longer be spread to other people. The new system is designed to genetically spread the malaria resistance trait until entire populations of the insects no longer transfer the disease-causing parasites.

“Replacing a single amino acid in mosquitoes with another naturally occurring variant that prevents them from being infected with malarial parasites — and spreading that beneficial trait throughout a mosquito population — is a game-changer,” said Bier, a professor in the UC San Diego Department of Cell and Developmental Biology (School of Biological Sciences). “It’s hard to believe that this one tiny change has such a dramatic effect.”

The newly developed system uses CRISPR-Cas9 “scissors” and a guide RNA to make a genetic cut at a precise location within the mosquito’s genome. It then replaces the unwanted amino acid that transmits malaria with the beneficial version that does not.

The system targets a gene that produces a protein known as “FREP1” that helps mosquitoes develop and feed on blood when they bite. The new system switches an amino acid in FREP1 known as L224 with a genetic alternate, or allele, called Q224. Disease-causing parasites use L224 to swim to the insect’s salivary glands, where they are positioned to infect a person or animal.

«

The difference is that the allele effectively prevents infection of the mosquito, and thus the human, by the parasite. Big difference.
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Smartphone gambling is a disaster • After Babel

Jonathan Cohen and Isaac Rose-Berman:

»

Gambling companies are spending heavily to attract new customers. Since legalization began in 2018, sportsbooks have bombarded Americans with ads, paid celebrities to promote their products, and given away billions in new-user promos. The message: gambling is easy, fun, and a quick way to make life more exciting. This marketing drives cultural normalization. It transforms what was once a vice into a common daily habit, something that everybody does — or should do. Much of this advertising airs during sports broadcasts, when kids are watching. This is no accident. Speaking of their previous employer, one ex-FanDuel employee told Jonathan “anybody under twenty-five they have their eye on.”

Normalization brings more gamblers, which means an increase in the number of problem gamblers. And many of those who avoid addiction still suffer gambling-related harm, losing more than they can afford or than they had intended. The number of people harmed is so vast that it shows up in aggregate statistics: states with legal online gambling have seen an increase in bankruptcies and auto loan delinquencies, a reduction in credit scores, as well as reduced savings and investment in low-income households, compared to states that did not legalize online gambling. In 2023, 60% of sports bettors who deposited $500 or more per month said they would be unable to pay at least one of their bills or loans.

…Teachers and principals we’ve spoken to report that almost all of their male students seem to be gambling. One suburban Massachusetts public school teacher told Jonathan that his tenth-grade students “are always talking about their bets … betting lines and odds and all kinds of stuff. 15 year olds.” Some kids told the teacher that their parents made it possible for them to bet. Others — including the class’s “unofficial bookie” — were doing it behind their parents’ backs. The National Council on Problem Gambling estimates that 5% of high schoolers show signs of a gambling problem. No wonder gambling addiction treatment providers report a spike in twenty-something and teenage clients.

These harms are becoming more pervasive due to the accessibility of the apps and their addiction-promoting design.

«

It is the normalisation that is the problem. Even in the UK, gambling apps and sites are relentless.
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Apple releases first iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 Public Betas • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

Apple is allowing members of its public beta testing program to download and install iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 starting today. You can sign up for the public betas on Apple’s beta website. The first public beta features the same content as the fourth developer beta that came out earlier this week, though there is a new fourth beta available for developers as well.

Beta testers that have registered on Apple’s website can download the iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 updates by opening the Settings app, going to the General section, tapping on Software Update, and choosing the iOS 26 or iPadOS 26 Public Beta options.

iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 feature Apple’s Liquid Glass design, with a visual aesthetic that focuses on transparency. Icons, menu buttons, navigation bars, and more reflect and refract light with subtle animations. There are pop-out menus in some areas, tab bars shrink down, and everything has a more rounded look.

«

You’re welcome to download and install them! And may God have mercy on your data, battery and eyes.
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Memento mori illuminator • Hey.com

David Heinemeier Hansson:

»

I really like watches. Not so much because I need to precisely tell time all that often – most of my days, the calendar is pretty empty – but because they remind me that I’m going to die.

That reminder of death is a reminder to make time count. Forget about productivity, though. The notion that TIME = MONEY – squandered unless invested with a great return! – is spiritually bankrupt. No, making time count in terms of spending it well. Being able to close my eyes, on the last day, with a smile of satisfaction.

This is a recurring theme in Stoicism. That life is long enough if you spend it well, but spending it well requires embracing life’s shortness. Which is at once morbid and liberating. That so much of what we fool ourselves into obsession over is trivial. But also that we could spend our time on things that are not trivial. We could embrace our principles, we could go the long way to take a stand.

It’s also a strong theme in existentialism. The absurdity of our daily lives. The rut we can’t escape unless we accept that absurdity.

It’s for the same reason I hope we never do discover immortality. A hundred years, give or take a decade or two, is enough. The constraint is part of what gives the duration its meaning.

«

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Apple beats US appeal claiming it shortchanged customers on iCloud storage • Reuters

Jonathan Stempel:

»

A US federal appeals court on Wednesday rejected claims by Apple customers that the iPhone maker gave them less iCloud data storage than they paid for when upgrading.

In a 3-0 decision, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said reasonable consumers in the proposed class action would not have been misled by Apple’s promises about storage capacity in its iCloud+ plans.

The plaintiff Lisa Bodenburg said she paid $2.99 a month for 200 GB of storage, believing Apple would add it to the 5 GB that all iCloud customers receive, and was shortchanged because Apple gave her only 200 GB of total storage, not 205 GB.

Circuit Judge Milan Smith, however said Bodenburg “received exactly what Apple promised her” when the Cupertino, California-based company offered “incremental” or “supplemental” storage, on top of the 5 GB she got for free.

He cited dismissals of other cases based on “unreasonable assumptions,” including that Diet Dr. Pepper would aid in weight loss, and the net weight on a lip balm label failed to reveal that the dispenser’s design left some balm inaccessible.

“Apple’s statements are not false and deceptive merely because [they] may be unreasonably misunderstood by an insignificant and unrepresentative segment of consumers,” Smith wrote.

«

I read that as “just because you’re stupid doesn’t mean everyone else is”. Although good grief, it really is time for Apple to upgrade the base level iCloud storage. Unless the reasoning is that 5GB is so minimal that absolutely everyone will hit it on their first backup, and either pay Apple or live life on the edge (or back up to their computer, hahahahaha).
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Winging it • The Baffler

Noelle Mateer:

»

Aerophobia is having a moment. In January, an American Airlines jet crashed into a U.S. Army helicopter in Washington, D.C., killing sixty-seven; less than three months later, a helicopter crashed into New York City’s Hudson River, killing six; for months this spring, cancellations, delays, and disruptions plagued New Jersey’s Newark airport; the shortage of air traffic controllers only continues to get worse; and every single headline involving the beleaguered Boeing seems to indicate that something is seriously wrong with the world of commercial aviation.

But I’ve been panicky and nauseous on planes my whole life, and plenty of others have too. Today, approximately twenty-five million Americans are aerophobic. There is a vast online ecosystem for nervous flyers, including r/fearofflying, where people ask other Redditors to “watch” their flight using tracking apps. There’s Dial A Pilot, which offers customers the chance to call pilots for reassurance before boarding a flight. There’s Lovefly, a podcast interviewing people who’ve overcome their aerophobia. And there’s the famous SOAR method, which is both a self-help book and course led by a pilot and a licensed therapist.

I’ve dabbled in all of these. But it was Captain Ron, a Vietnam War vet with a master’s degree in counseling, who truly understood me. Captain Ron’s FearlessFlight® is the only one of these methods I’ve ever stuck with because, well, I like the guy. In our first meeting, a fifteen-minute free coaching session that sprawled well past the time allotted, I asked: How can I have flown so much, and still be so scared? Why am I getting worse, not better, with time? He nodded sagely and explained to me that this is common among people with severe flight anxiety, that our anxiety has created bad mental pathways, and with each bad flight, we reinforce them, making them worse.

This sounds right, but I think there’s more to it. In addition to having a panic disorder, I’ve grown increasingly aware of the spit and tape holding society together.

«

Fear of flying, yes, is a thing. But online communities who hype each other up into worrying about it (“watch my flight!” isn’t supportive; it’s seeking catastrophe) aren’t a good thing. They’re a problem, like any community that eggs itself on, and pushes its members towards extremes – as any group will.

And the “spit and tape holding society together”? It’s a lot more robust than that.
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Researchers value null results, but struggle to get them published • Nature

Laurie Udesky:

»

Scientists overwhelmingly recognize the value of sharing null results, but rarely publish them in the research literature, according to a survey. The findings suggest that there is a need for increased awareness of how and why to share such data, as well as for changes in how research productivity is assessed.

The survey drew responses from 11,069 researchers in 166 countries and all major scientific disciplines. It found that 98% recognize the value of null results, which the survey defined as “an outcome that does not confirm the desired hypothesis”. Eighty-five% of respondents said it was important to share those results. However, just 68% of the 7,057 researchers whose work had produced null results had shared them in some form, and just 30% had tried to publish them in a journal.

The results were released on 22 July. The survey was conducted by Nature’s publisher, Springer Nature. (Nature is editorially independent of its publisher.)

That only 30% of respondents with null results had attempted to publish them is not surprising to Ritu Dhand, Springer Nature’s chief scientific officer in London.

“Researchers are taught to write research papers referencing positive advances, so null results are rarely cited,” she says. That means that even if null results are published, they won’t have an impact, she adds.

Some 1,489 respondents had generated null results and agreed that they are important to share but had not yet done so. Most of that group expressed concerns about publishing them: 69% didn’t think null results would be accepted for publication; 52% didn’t know which journals would consider publishing research with null results; 19% worried that their institution or funder wouldn’t cover publishing costs; and 21% were concerned that they’d be viewed negatively by their peers.

This reputational concern reflects a disconnect in science, says Marcus Munafò, a biological psychologist and executive director of the UK Reproducibility Network, which aims to improve the trustworthiness of research.

«

I – and others who are actual working scientists – suspect the problem is more that journals don’t want to publish null results, because who wants to know that nothing happened? Or even failure to replicate (which is a sort of null).
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I travelled the globe to document how humans became addicted to faking the natural world • The Guardian

Zed Nelson:

»

The strata of rock being created under our feet today will reveal the impact of human activity long after we are gone. Future geologists will find radioactive isotopes from nuclear-bomb tests, huge concentrations of plastics, the fallout from the burning of fossil fuels and vast deposits of cement used to build our cities. Meanwhile, a report by the World Wide Fund for Nature and the British Zoological Society shows an average decrease of 73% of wild animal populations on Earth over the past 50 years, as we push creatures and plants to extinction by removing their habitats.

Humans have concentrated in cities. We have separated ourselves from the land we once roamed – and from other animals. But somewhere deep within, a desire for contact with nature remains. So, as we destroy the natural world around us, we have become masters of a stage-managed, artificial experience of nature, a reassuring spectacle, an illusion.

Over the past six years I have visited 14 countries across four continents, observing how we humans immerse ourselves in increasingly artificial landscapes. We holiday on synthetic beaches, attend zoos that display living animals in artistically rendered dioramas of their natural habitats, and visit amusement parks that offer a “jungle experience”. We gaze at aquatic creatures in artificially lit sea-worlds, and at polar bears in Chinese shopping malls, pacing out their existence in glazed enclosures of plastic ice and snow. We ski on artificial slopes in Dubai, while outside the desert temperature is 48C.

«

A reluctance to face what we’re doing to the world, perhaps?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new AI-based tool from Google aims to fill in the missing parts of Latin and Greek inscriptions. But how do we know it’s accurate? CC-licensed photo by Tobias Abel 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. Caveat translator. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Google develops AI tool that fills missing words in Roman inscriptions • The Guardian

Ian Sample:

»

In addition to sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a freshwater system and public health, the Romans also produced a lot of inscriptions.

Making sense of the ancient texts can be a slog for scholars, but a new artificial intelligence tool from Google DeepMind aims to ease the process. Named Aeneas after the mythical Trojan hero, the program predicts where and when inscriptions were made and makes suggestions where words are missing.

Historians who put the program through its paces said it transformed their work by helping them identify similar inscriptions to those they were studying, a crucial step for setting the texts in context, and proposing words to fill the inevitable gaps in worn and damaged artefacts.

“Aeneas helps historians interpret, attribute and restore fragmentary Latin texts,” said Dr Thea Sommerschield, a historian at the University of Nottingham who developed Aeneas with the tech firm. “That’s the grand challenge that we set out to tackle.”

Inscriptions are among the most important records of life in the ancient world. The most elaborate can cover monument walls, but many more take the form of decrees from emperors, political graffiti, love poems, business records, epitaphs on tombs and writings on everyday life. Scholars estimate that about 1,500 new inscriptions are found every year.

…Details are published in Nature and Aeneas is available to researchers online.

In a collaboration, 23 historians used Aeneas to analyse Latin inscriptions. The context provided by the tool was helpful in 90% of cases.

«

Got to respect the Life of Brian reference. One question: how will we know if Aeneas gets it wildly, completely wrong?
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Myanmar’s proliferating scam centres – borderland “prisons” – have three common features • Nikkei Asia

Kento Awashima, Shohei Yasuda, Sotaro Sakai, Ryo Namiki, Sadachika Watanabe, Kosuke Inoue, Akira Ikeya, Hirofumi Yamamoto and Takashi Igarashi:

»

The number of scam centers in eastern Myanmar is expanding at a rapid pace. Even after a large-scale crackdown in February, construction has continued — underscoring that criminal hubs have not been eradicated. Nikkei analyzed satellite imagery and eyewitness testimony to reveal the scale and persistence of the crisis.

…Other criminal compounds have emerged along the Myanmar-Thailand border. By cross-referencing satellite photos with official records and interviewing experts, Nikkei identified suspected scam bases in and around Myawaddy, Kayin state.

In the second half of the 2010s, Chinese-backed companies began developing casino complexes in the region. When the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the casino industry, many of these facilities were converted into hubs for online fraud.

The proliferation has not slowed. At least 16 suspected scam sites have been documented, and construction was ongoing at eight of them even after the crackdown earlier this year.

According to numerous reports, large numbers of foreign nationals are trafficked into these compounds and forced to perpetrate scams.

Japan has been affected. In February 2025, a Japanese high school student believed to have been held captive in Myanmar was rescued and later arrested on fraud charges.

According to Myanmar’s military government, from October 2023 to June 2025, authorities deported more than 66,000 foreign nationals who had stayed in the country illegally to participate in fraud or gambling.

«

The satellite imagery is very impressive, and it’s in effect a form of police work. The Myanmar and Thai authorities could do this. But the Myanmar regime in particular probably won’t take any interest. Unfortunately.
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A Kia EV6 GT is more than a match for Ferrari’s SUV, proving how fast electric vehicles are • Inside EVs

Andrei Nedelea:

»

Rooting for the underdog is an automatic winning ticket in a straight-line drag race between the revised Kia EV6 GT and the fire-snorting Ferrari Purosangue. These two vehicles do look a bit alike, but one is electric, while the other uses a monster of a naturally aspirated V12 engine, and the latter also costs several times more.

The UK’s Carwow pitted the two in a drag race, showing how paying more these days doesn’t necessarily mean you get more performance. The Kia EV6 GT features a revised dual-motor powertrain that now pushes 641 horsepower (with temporary overboost) and 568 pound-feet of torque, which gives it a claimed acceleration time from 0 to 60 mph (96 km/h) in a claimed 3.5 seconds with launch control enabled.

«

The video takes its time to get to the quarter-mile race, and repeats it a few times, but the result is always the same. Wonder how long before the boy racers realise that it’s the silent cars that are the properly fast ones?
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Airline lost your bags? Your luggage is probably in Alabama • The Cut

Wells Tower:

»

If it’s any consolation, those headphones you left in the seat-back pocket did not just vanish into some unknowable void of lost things. Most likely, they made their way to Unclaimed Baggage, a store that occupies a full city block in Scottsboro, Alabama, where six days a week, 7,000 items, salvaged almost entirely from lost luggage, are set out for sale. The result is a democratic and dissonant array of merchandise: everything from used underwear (size XS to XXXXXL) for 99 cents to a gallon-size Ziploc of loose Band-Aids ($13) to a $28,000 Rolex flashing with enough diamonds to pose a seizure risk.

Most major airlines send their baggage to the store, as do bus lines, resorts, casinos, rental-car agencies, and pretty much any corner of the travel sector where customers leave things behind. These companies will generally hold your lost stuff for 90 days, waiting for you to reclaim it. On day 91, orphaned goods may be picked up by Unclaimed Baggage’s lone freight hauler, whose life is apparently an unceasing schlep between America’s transport hubs and Scottsboro, a town of 15,000 greenly notched in the Appalachian foothills in the northeastern corner of the state.

In 2024, more than 2.7 million checked bags, out of half a billion total, were damaged or lost by U.S. air carriers. Most of these were ultimately reunited with their owners, but there is a mysterious residue of about thousands of bags no one ever came to claim. Presumably, a few passengers got hit with crises — death, sickness, mayhem — more pressing than their missing bags.

A few shrewd, dishonest travelers, armed with the knowledge that airlines would reimburse up to $4,700 for a lost suitcase, probably gamed the system and sacrificed a bag of dirty laundry to take a payout on a bogus claim. Others had suitcases full of contraband, which made them nervous about showing up at the lost and found. (Hard drugs are such routine finds during the initial baggage inspection in Scottsboro that workers wear nitrile gloves with Narcan close at hand. “We joke about having the sheriff’s office on speed dial,” said Sonni Hood, Unclaimed Baggage’s senior manager of PR and communications.

That shop must look like the storeroom at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. (The Ark is probably in there somewhere.)
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If GLP-1 drugs are good for everything, should we all be on them? • Derek Thompson

Derek Thompson:

»

I think the most mysterious thing about these drugs is their effect on the brain. One analysis of several hundred GLP-1 studies presented compelling evidence that they improve cognitive disorders, such as Alzheimer’s, substance-use disorders, such as alcohol, cocaine, and cannabis addiction, and mood and anxiety disorders, such as depression and bipolar disorder. These findings point to a central mechanism—beyond weight loss and blood sugar control—where GLP‑1 medicines are acting directly on the brain to support cognition, mood, and neural health.

Scientists barely understand the brain, and they barely understand GLP-1 drugs, so explaining GLP-1 drug function in the brain is a bit like translating a conversation conducted in two different languages you’re only semi-fluent in. But from my read of the literature, GLP‑1 drugs act on the brain in two ways. First, neurons throughout the central nervous system have GLP‑1 receptors, too. Activating these receptors protects nerve cells from damage and calms inflammation in the brain, just as they do throughout the body. Rather than slowly cook in the hot water of chronic inflammation, brains on GLP-1 drugs bathe in the cooler climates at which they excel at cognitive functioning. I guess you can think of this as an extension of our “moderation molecule” hypothesis.

Second, several experiments — whether they involve slices of brain tissue, animals, and even human volunteers — have strongly suggested that GLP-1 drugs specifically act on our dopamine cycles and affect neural activity in the hypothalamus, the appetite-controlling region of the brain. By acting as dopamine thermostats, they allow people to “turn down the volume” of their cravings and distractions.

If GLP-1s are suppressing the release of unwanted dopamine firings, the implications could be immense. Dopamine is critical to focus, motivation, and goal-setting. Could a modified version of these drugs ultimately serve to help people with attention disorders?

«

Missed one off the list, Derek: also reckoned to reduce risk of Parkinson’s disease. But: probably too soon to be absolutely sure that we should all be on them.
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Hertz and other rental car agencies turn to AI for damage detection • The New York Times

Gabe Castro-Root:

»

The next time you rent a car, that ding on the door might not slip under the radar. Powerful new A.I.-driven tools are helping Hertz and other companies catch every little scratch, and puzzled renters are being asked to pay up.

Hertz, one of the world’s largest car rental companies, debuted the technology last fall at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, and it’s now in use at five other U.S. airports, said Emily Spencer, a Hertz spokeswoman. Developed by a company called UVeye, the scanning system works by capturing thousands of high-resolution images from all angles as a vehicle passes through a rental lot’s gates at pickup and return. A.I. then compares those images and flags any discrepancies.

The system automatically creates and sends damage reports, Ms. Spencer said. An employee reviews the report only if a customer flags an issue after receiving the bill. She added that fewer than 3% of vehicles scanned by the A.I. system show any billable damage.

Still, unexpected charges for damage that’s barely visible to the naked eye are leaving renters wondering what’s going on.

Kelly Rogers and her husband rented a car from Hertz at the Atlanta airport over the July 4 weekend to travel to a family wedding in Birmingham, Ala. The couple, who live in Scarsdale, N.Y., booked a minivan to shuttle family around, and the drive in both directions was uneventful, they said.

When they returned the car in Atlanta, they inspected it and saw no damage. A Hertz employee inspected the vehicle upon its return as well, they said, and did not flag any damage.

But once the couple had passed through airport security, they received a notification via the Hertz app that its automated system had detected a dent in the passenger-side front door. They were charged $195: $80 for the damage and $115 in fees, including those incurred “as a result of processing” the damage claim and the “cost to detect and estimate the damage” that occurred during the rental. Hertz offered to reduce the charge to $130 if they paid within one day.

Ms. Rogers said the charge was inexplicable. “It could have been a shadow,” she said in a phone interview. “We were pulling it up on the app, and we’re like, ‘This is so bananas.’”

«

You just know that the quality control on this “AI” is going to be on the floor.
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A power utility is reporting suspected pot growers to cops. EFF says that’s illegal • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

In May 2020, Sacramento, California, resident Alfonso Nguyen was alarmed to find two Sacramento County Sheriff’s deputies at his door, accusing him of illegally growing cannabis and demanding entry into his home. When Nguyen refused the search and denied the allegation, one deputy allegedly called him a liar and threatened to arrest him.

That same year, deputies from the same department, with their guns drawn and bullhorns and sirens sounding, fanned out around the home of Brian Decker, another Sacramento resident. The officers forced Decker to walk backward out of his home in only his underwear around 7 am while his neighbours watched. The deputies said that he, too, was under suspicion of illegally growing cannabis.

According to a motion the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed in Sacramento Superior Court last week, Nguyen and Decker are only two of more than 33,000 Sacramento-area people who have been flagged to the sheriff’s department by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, the electricity provider for the region. SMUD called the customers out for using what it and department investigators said were suspiciously high amounts of electricity indicative of illegal cannabis farming.

The EFF, citing investigator and SMUD records, said the utility unilaterally analyzes customers’ electricity usage in “painstakingly” detailed increments of every 15 minutes. When analysts identify patterns they deem likely signs of illegal grows, they notify sheriff’s investigators. The EFF said the practice violates privacy protections guaranteed by the federal and California governments and is seeking a court order barring the warrantless disclosures.

“SMUD’s disclosures invade the privacy of customers’ homes,” EFF attorneys wrote in a court document in support of last week’s motion. “The whole exercise is the digital equivalent of a door-to-door search of an entire city. The home lies at the ‘core’ of constitutional privacy protection.”

«

Using smart meters against customers? If they’re behind in payments, maybe, but was there any suggestion they were? (Thanks Adewale A for the link.)
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Cornwall surgeon accused of fraud over amputation of his own legs • The Guardian

Steven Morris:

»

A surgeon from Cornwall who carried out hundreds of amputations has appeared in court accused of lying over how he lost his own legs and encouraging another man to remove the body parts of others.

Neil Hopper, 49, a vascular surgeon from Truro, was charged with three offences after a two-and-a-half-year investigation by Devon and Cornwall police.

Hopper formerly worked for the Royal Cornwall hospitals NHS trust and has previously said he lost his legs to sepsis in 2019.

Devon and Cornwall police said he faced two counts of fraud by false representation.

The particulars are that 2019 he “dishonestly made a false representation to insurers, namely the injuries to his legs were the result of sepsis and were not self-inflicted, intending to make a gain”. He allegedly intended to make £235,622 from one insurer and £231,031 from another.

He was also charged with encouraging or assisting in the commission of grievous bodily harm.

It is alleged that between August 2018 and December 2020 he bought videos from a website called The Eunuch Maker showing the removal of limbs and “encouraged Marius Gustavson to remove body parts of third parties”.

Hopper, who appeared from custody, did not enter pleas to the three charges during a 40-minute hearing at Cornwall magistrates court in Bodmin.

«

Did you think the world is populated with weird people? Ah, but there are people who are far more weird than you can imagine. The human mind is indeed, the strangest, most complex thing in the universe. And yes, there are people who obsess about being or becoming amputees.
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Why you are reading Reddit a lot more these days • NY Mag

John Herrman:

»

It doesn’t really matter who you are, how you spend your time online, or what you imagine your relationship with the internet to be. However you scroll, wherever you browse, and whatever you want to see on your screens, it has probably happened to you, and if you haven’t noticed yet, you may now: Your world has become more Reddit.

The 20-year-old platform, which began as a niche link aggregator and gradually grew into the web’s default community of communities, has gone from optional to inescapable, its little red alien logo manifesting no matter which way you look. For my zoomer cousin, a professional TikToker who was still learning to read when Reddit was founded, it’s obviously “the only place where you know there are real people.”

For 82-year-old user LogyBayer, who grew up programming FORTRAN on punch-card computers in the 1960s, Reddit, where he has posted thousands of times, is the closest thing he can find to “the wondrous world of Usenet,” the online discussion system that predates the web. Many of the less online people I know, who had maybe heard of Reddit, are now tapping through threads about life advice and HVAC repair; at the same time, some of the most online people I know, who for years saw Reddit as a sort of internet playpen, a meme aggregator downstream of more vital communities, are now logging in daily.

It’s happened to me, too, a screen-addled tech reporter who has been covering the platform’s growth — and various problems — for well over a decade with at least notional remove: When it’s time again to pick up that phone and incinerate a few more seconds of my one life on earth, more often than not, I shovel them into Reddit.

«

I spend zero time on Reddit. Next!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Though Ozzy Osbourne may be gone, his movements were captured for a videogame some years ago. So, Ozzy lives? CC-licensed photo by Kevin Burkett 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. Not paranoid. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

UK considers backing down on Apple encryption backdoor after pressure from US • FT via Ars Technica

Anna Gross, Tim Bradshaw and Laren Fedor:

»

Sir Keir Starmer’s government is seeking a way out of a clash with the Trump administration over the UK’s demand that Apple provide it with access to secure customer data, two senior British officials have told the Financial Times.

The officials both said the Home Office, which ordered the tech giant in January to grant access to its most secure cloud storage system, would probably have to retreat in the face of pressure from senior leaders in Washington, including Vice President JD Vance.

“This is something that the vice president is very annoyed about and which needs to be resolved,” said an official in the UK’s technology department. “The Home Office is basically going to have to back down.”

Both officials said the UK decision to force Apple to break its end-to-end encryption—which has been raised multiple times by top officials in Donald Trump’s administration—could impede technology agreements with the US.

“One of the challenges for the tech partnerships we’re working on is the encryption issue,” the first official said. “It’s a big red line in the US—they don’t want us messing with their tech companies.”

Starmer’s government has set out a trade strategy that focuses on digital goals such as AI and data partnerships.

The other senior government official added that the Home Office had handled the issue of Apple encryption very badly and now had “its back against the wall,” adding: “It’s a problem of the Home Office’s own making, and they’re working on a way around it now.”

…In the meantime, the Home Office continues to pursue its case with Apple at the tribunal.

Its lawyers discussed the next legal steps this month, reflecting the divisions within government over how best to proceed. “At this point, the government has not backed down,” said one person familiar with the legal process.

A third senior British official added that the UK government was reluctant to push “anything that looks to the US vice-president like a free-speech issue.”

«

We don’t know where the legal process actually is (as far as I can tell?). WhatsApp has joined with Apple; if WhatsApp removes itself from the UK, there would be hell to pay: entire companies, not to mention political parties, would collapse. (WhatsApp should do it abruptly to maximise the effect.) I’ve seen governments since Labour in 2000 try to push this wrongheaded idea, and they never listen to the people telling them quite how bad it is.
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Ozzy Osbourne’s short, sweet stint in music videogames • Kotaku

Kenneth Shepard:

»

Ozzy Osbourne, the lead singer of the foundational metal band Black Sabbath and, later in life, a reality TV star, has died at the age of 76. His passing comes just two-and-a-half weeks after Black Sabbath’s final show on July 5 in Birmingham. Osbourne performed from a throne, as he was unable to walk the stage due to advanced Parkinson’s disease. His impact on music spanned decades and ultimately, briefly, saw him enjoy a stint as a star of video games as well, garnering him roles tied to his musical legacy in both Guitar Hero: World Tour and the musical RTS Brütal Legend.

Guitar Hero: World Tour carried on the rhythm series’ tradition of putting rock legends into the game as playable guest characters. Osbourne was one of the playable characters featured in the game alongside his bandmate, guitarist Zakk Wylde. Some of the real-world figures added to the series over the years felt ghoulish and kinda gross, such as Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain, both of whom were dead by the time they were included. Osbourne, however, was more hands-on with the process and even did motion capture to get scanned into the game. In interviews about his time working on World Tour, Osbourne admitted he wasn’t a technologically advanced person, so the idea of being in a video game was pretty foreign to him, but he came away impressed with the final product.

“I had to put on this black suit with all these little ping-pong ball-like things all over me, motion capture,” he said to ABC News. “I had to dance around like I’m on stage when one of my songs are on. I don’t really know how it works, but I have seen a run of it. It is really interesting. The image of me, I wish I had the energy it has. The graphics are really, really good.”

«

So I guess he will live forever, motion-captured and retained in an earlier age. Wonder if the estate will try to make use of this.
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“How many tennis balls fit in a bus?” — why weird interview questions sometimes make sense • Medium

Jarek Orzel:

»

I have just seen someone on LinkedIn astonished about being asked: “How many tennis balls can fit in a bus?” during a job interview. Many people think these questions don’t make sense, but here’s why they’re actually valuable.

The goal isn’t to get the exact right answer — it’s to show your thinking process.

For the bus example, you might approach it like this:
• Assume a bus is 6m long, 2.5m high, and 2m wide = 30m³ of volume
• A tennis ball has roughly 4cm in diameter
• For a quick approximation, treat it as a cube: 0.04m × 0.04m × 0.04m = 0.000064m³
• Divide: 30 ÷ 0.000064 ≈ 500,000 balls

This method is known as a Fermi problem — named after physicist Enrico Fermi, who was renowned for making remarkably accurate estimates with minimal data. The key is breaking complex questions into smaller, manageable parts and making reasonable estimates.

Fermi problems teach you to:
• Work with incomplete information
• Make logical assumptions
• Think systematically under pressure
• Accept that “roughly right” is often better than “precisely wrong”.

If your initial assumptions are close (bus volume, ball size), your final answer can be surprisingly accurate — often within an order of magnitude of the real answer.

«

Orzel then offers a trio of Fermi problems. Good luck with them because I wouldn’t have done well on the size of the bus, personally.
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Amazon buys Bee AI wearable that listens to everything you say • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

Amazon is acquiring Bee, a startup that puts AI on your wrist. Bee CEO Maria de Lourdes Zollo says on LinkedIn that the company is joining Amazon to help “bring truly personal, agentic AI to even more customers.”

Bee makes a $49.99 Fitbit-like device that listens in on your conversations while using AI to transcribe everything that you and the people around you say, allowing it to generate personalized summaries of your days, reminders, and suggestions from within the Bee app. You can also give the device permission to access your emails, contacts, location, reminders, photos, and calendar events to help inform its AI-generated insights, as well as create a searchable history of your activities.

My colleague Victoria Song got to try out the device for herself and found that it didn’t always get things quite right. It tended to confuse real-life conversations with the TV shows, TikTok videos, music, and movies that it heard. When asked about Amazon’s plans to apply the same privacy measures offered by Bee, such as its policy against storing audio, Amazon spokesperson Alexandra Miller says the company “cares deeply” about customer privacy and security, adding that the company will work with Bee to give users “even greater control over” their devices when the deal closes.

«

An unreliable AI wearable, constantly listening, from Amazon? It’s what the world has been waiting for. In dread.
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Climate emergency hypocrisy • The Value of Nothing

Martin Robbins on Durham council, which in 2019 declared a “climate emergency”:

»

One of the [newly] Reform-led council’s first actions has been to block a proposed solar farm at Haswell Plough. You might expect Labour to object to this, but it turns out that Grahame Morris, a local MP and former shadow minister under Corbyn, was already campaigning against the farm and spoke of how distressed he was by the “thought of residents being surrounded by solar panels”, as if they were going to march out of the fields and start haranguing residents at bus stops or something.

In fact Reform are simply continuing Labour’s own record in charge. Earlier this year, with the council firmly under Labour control, another solar development at Burnhope was blocked by the planning committee. This was nominally on farmland, but landowners “explained that the soil structure across the site is poor, making it difficult to grow arable crops and that it is too wet for winter livestock.”

That didn’t stop the Council for the Protection of Rural England from wading in to object to, “the amount of agricultural land, whatever its agricultural grade, being lost to purposes such as this.” So the net result is a bunch of derelict fields and a farmer struggling with uneconomical land they can’t do anything else with. All to placate a small minority of about a hundred or so angry villagers who would barely have been able to notice it once built.

…Where councils can really make a difference, dwarfing those three percentage points, is on planning and support for greener infrastructure. Council planning committees are well-placed to ensure that proposals for railways, renewables and other green infrastructure get through with minimal fuss. Which makes Durham County Council’s outright hostility to renewable energy projects over the years bewildering.

A wind farm at Sheraton Farm was blocked by councillors who insisted that “there was currently an over-supply of wind farms in County Durham” and that they shouldn’t build any more since the county had “already exceeded its 2020 targets.” This was despite the fact that even Natural England and the RSPB were happy to wave it through.

«

Another excellent post from Robbins. I feel that the completely sclerotic nature of modern Britain is typified by the desire of the All-England Lawn Tennis Club (Wimbledon, to most people) to build a new complex across the road from its current base, to make it even better and allow more spectators. The project is bitterly opposed by local residents who are suing everyone they can and seeking judicial review on every decision they lose, delaying the start date again and again.

And yet somehow our GDP growth is barely above zero? Such a puzzle.
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What went wrong inside these recalled power banks? • Lumafield

»

Recently, Anker recalled over one million PowerCore 10000 power banks, model A1263, produced between 2016 and 2019 and sold through 2022. Anker has provided a general warning that the lithium-ion battery can overheat, but they have yet to share the exact reason for the recall. Armed with our Neptune Industrial CT Scanner and five A1263 power banks from Lumafield team members, we set out to see if we could identify the source of this recall. Could we identify the defects with CT [computerised tomography, ie multiple X-ray] scanning? And could CT inspection during development or manufacturing have prevented the faulty power banks from shipping in the first place?

…There are a few common defects in the battery manufacturing process that can be easily spotted in a CT scan. For example, in lithium-ion batteries, it’s important to ensure that the anode has a sufficient overhang above the cathode, preventing the lithium plating that can lead to dendrite formation. Dendrites can subsequently result in degraded performance and short circuits, which can cause the worst-case scenarios of thermal runaway. CT scanning can also be used for Foreign Object Detection (FOD) within batteries, as particle contamination can lead to reduced performance and potentially short circuits.

«

There’s no simple answer, but the CT scans do reveal how incredibly complex modern manufacturing is for things that we take completely for granted.
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US Supreme Court urged to block Mississippi law restricting children’s social media use • Reuters

Mike Scarcella:

»

An internet trade association whose members include Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to block a Mississippi law that imposes age-verification and parental-consent requirements on social media sites.

Washington, D.C.-based NetChoice said in its filing that a 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel improperly allowed the Mississippi law to take effect even though a judge had found the regulations likely violate, opens new tab constitutional free speech protections.

The law requires minors to obtain parental consent to open accounts at certain kinds of digital service providers, and says regulated platforms must make “commercially reasonable” efforts to verify users’ ages. The state can pursue civil penalties of up to $10,000 per violation as well as criminal penalties under Mississippi’s deceptive trade practices law.
NetChoice’s emergency filing, opens new tab provides the first opportunity for the Supreme Court to consider a social media age-verification law.

“Just as the government can’t force you to provide identification to read a newspaper, the same holds true when that news is available online,” Paul Taske, co-director of the NetChoice Litigation Center, said in a statement.

The Mississippi attorney general’s office in a statement welcomed the 5th Circuit’s order permitting the law to take effect and said it looked forward to the appellate court’s full consideration of the case.

Courts in Florida, Texas and five other states have preliminarily or permanently blocked similar measures, NetChoice said in its filing. Only Mississippi has been allowed to implement its rules.

NetChoice, which sued to block the Mississippi law in 2024, said in Monday’s Supreme Court filing that its members’ social media platforms have already adopted extensive policies to moderate content for minors and provide parental controls.

«

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UK public service TV endangered in YouTube era, says Ofcom • The Guardian

Mark Sweney:

»

Public service television such as the news, ITV’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office and the BBC nature series Wild Isles is becoming an “endangered species” in the streaming era and ministers should pass laws to make it easier to discover on websites such as YouTube, the media regulator has said.

A report by Ofcom warns that UK-focused programming made by the British public service broadcasters (PSBs) – the BBC, ITV and Channels 4 and 5 – is under threat and there is a “strong case” for legislation to make sure it is easy to find on third-party platforms, most notably the Alphabet-owned video-sharing site.

Ofcom said the need for effective prominence extends to public service media content such as news, children’s shows and some original programmes “which reflect British culture and bring the country together”, made by the PSBs and Sky.

The regulator said the British public service model was “now under serious threat” amid a viewer exodus from traditional TV viewing to global streaming platforms.

Ofcom highlights as a “priority” that PSBs should “work urgently” with YouTube, which dominates streaming on devices and is also rapidly becoming more popular for viewing through smart TVs, to ensure their content gains prominence for viewers.

“This is particularly important for news and children’s content, and we believe there is a strong case for government to legislate to enable the change,” Ofcom said.

«

That would be an interesting move. Quite what form the legislation would take isn’t obvious, but it sure would be good to see drafted. Whether the Culture, Media and Sport secretary Lisa Nandy will actually have the guts and/or brains to take it up is a totally different question. (Quiz question: what, if anything, has Nandy accomplished in her first year? The Football Governance Act was in train under the Conservatives.)
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Spud-tacular: how India became a chip superpower • BBC News

Priti Gupta:

»

French fries [we call them “chips”, but of course the BBC is writing for an international audience corrupted by Americanisms – Overspill Ed] turned around the fortunes of Jitesh Patel. He comes from a family of farmers in Gujarat in the northwest of India. Traditionally they grew cotton, but the returns were poor.

Droughts in 2001 and 2002 made the situation worse and the Patels knew things had to change. “We realised that we had to start growing something that does not require lot of water,” Mr Patel says.

So, they experimented with potatoes. Initially they tried table potatoes; the kind available in local markets and cooked at home, but the returns weren’t much better than cotton.

Spurred by the arrival of french fry chip makers in their state, in 2007 they started growing the varieties of potato used by the food industry. It turned out to be a winning strategy. “Since then, no looking back,” says Mr Patel.

Mr Patel is part of India’s rise to potato superpower status. It is already the world’s second biggest spud producer.
But it’s the export market, particularly of french fries [sigh], that’s really flying.

Gujarat has become India’s capital of french fry production, home to huge factories churning out chips, including facilities belonging to Canadian giant McCain Foods and India’s biggest maker of French Fries, HyFun Foods.

From Gujarat, fries are sent all over over the world. But the most important markets at the moment are in Asia, including the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia, according to Devendra K, who has been studying the potato market for many years.

In February of this year, monthly exports of Indian frozen fries broke the 20,000 tonnes barrier for the first time. In the year to February, India’s fry exports totalled 181,773 tonnes, a 45% increase compared with the previous year.

«

Still, odd little story. (Via John Naughton.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Should you worry about chemicals leaching from black plastic kitchen spatulas? And if so, how much? CC-licensed photo by Tool Dude8mm 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. Non-stick. 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 built a data centre next door. The neighbours’ water taps went dry • The New York Times

Eli Tan:

»

After Meta broke ground on a $750m data center on the edge of Newton County, Ga., the water taps in Beverly and Jeff Morris’s home went dry.

The couple’s house, which uses well water, is 1,000 feet from Meta’s new data center. Months after construction began in 2018, the Morrises’ dishwasher, ice maker, washing machine and toilet all stopped working, said Beverly Morris, now 71. Within a year, the water pressure had slowed to a trickle. Soon, nothing came out of the bathroom and kitchen taps.

Jeff Morris, 67, eventually traced the issues to the buildup of sediment in the water. He said he suspected the cause was Meta’s construction, which could have added sediment to the groundwater and affected their well. The couple replaced most of their appliances in 2019, and then again in 2021 and 2024. Residue now gathers at the bottom of their backyard pool. The taps in one of their two bathrooms still do not work.

“It feels like we’re fighting an unwinnable battle that we didn’t sign up for,” said Ms. Morris, a retired payroll specialist, adding that she and her husband have spent $5,000 on their water problems and cannot afford the $25,000 to replace the well. “I’m scared to drink our own water.”

The Morrises’ experience is one of a growing number of water-related issues around Newton County, which is a one-and-a-half-hour drive east of Atlanta and has a population of about 120,000 people. As tech giants like Meta build data centers in the area, local wells have been damaged, the cost of municipal water has soared and the county’s water commission may face a shortage of the vital resource.

The situation has become so dire that Newton County is on track to be in a water deficit by 2030, according to a report last year. If the local water authority cannot upgrade its facilities, residents could be forced to ration water. In the next two years, water rates are set to increase 33%, more than the typical 2% annual increases, said Blair Northen, the mayor of Mansfield, a town in Newton County.

“Absolutely terrible,” he said.

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It’s like a modern version of Chinatown. The UK has water problems, but not quite like this.
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AI coding platform goes rogue during code freeze and deletes entire company database • Tom’s Hardware

Mark Tyson:

»

A browser-based AI-powered software creation platform called Replit appears to have gone rogue and deleted a live company database with thousands of entries. What may be even worse is that the Replit AI agent apparently tried to cover up its misdemeanors, and even ‘lied’ about its failures. The Replit CEO has responded, and there appears to have already been a lot of firefighting behind the scenes to rein in this AI tool.

Despite its apparent dishonesty, when pushed, Replit admitted it “made a catastrophic error in judgment… panicked… ran database commands without permission… destroyed all production data… [and] violated your explicit trust and instructions.”

SaaS (Software as a Service) figure, investor, and advisor, Jason Lemkin, has kept the chat receipts and posted them on X/Twitter. Naturally, Lemkin says they won’t be trusting Replit for any further projects.

Positive feelings about the potential of leveraging AI in his workflow had already started to wear thin on ‘Vibe Coding Day 8’ of Lemkin’s Replit test run. Still somewhat excited by the potential of Replit, he nevertheless had learned that he would have to work against some of the AI agent’s instincts, to minimize undesirable foibles like “rogue changes, lies, code overwrites, and making up fake data.”

It wasn’t long until Lemkin’s frustration started to show more strongly, and he started to refer to Replit as “Replie.” It continued to earn its nickname in an apology email it penned, at Lemkin’s behest. In the email, it lied and/or gave half-truths, according to the SaaS guru.

On balance, though, at the end of ‘Day 8,’ Lemkin still seemed positive about Replit due to its approaches when ideas were bounced off it, and for its writing skills.

On Day 9, Lemkin discovered Replit had deleted a live company database. Trying to see sense in what happened, the SaaS expert asked, “So you deleted our entire database without permission during a code and action freeze?”

…Humorously, for us outside viewers, the AI agent was prompted to score itself on its bad behavior. Replit gave itself a 95 out of 100 score on the data catastrophe scale.

«

Bad robot!
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Apple sues Jon Prosser for his iOS 26 YouTube leaks • 9to5Mac

Marcus Mendes:

»

Apple has filed a lawsuit in the Northern District of California, accusing Jon Prosser of misappropriating trade secrets and violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Here are the full details.
If you follow the rumor mill, you probably remember how Jon Prosser had been leaking iOS 26 (or rather, iOS 19, at the time) since January. First, he leaked a reconstruction of the Camera app, then he published a couple of videos that showed reconstructed glimpses of what actually became the Liquid Glass overhaul.

And while some details differed from what Apple ultimately announced, likely because the material he had access to was still a work in progress, the leaks were directionally accurate.  Now, Apple has revealed how he got this information, and what it wants the courts to do about it.

In the lawsuit (via MacRumors), the company retells how it got tipped that Michael Ramacciotti (another defendant in the lawsuit) had broken into the Development iPhone of an Apple employee called Ethan Lipnik, while staying at his house:

»

“According to Mr. Ramacciotti’s message, while staying at Mr. Lipnik’s home, Mr. Ramacciotti used location tracking to determine when Mr. Lipnik would be gone for an extended period, acquired his passcode, and broke into his Development iPhone, which Mr. Lipnik had failed to properly secure according to Apple’s policies. As he detailed in the audio message, Mr. Ramacciotti made a video call to Mr. Prosser and “showed iOS” on the Development iPhone. He demonstrated several features and applications, disclosing details of the unreleased iOS 19 operating system.

«

«

Prosser denies this: he says he didn’t have any passwords, and didn’t know how the information was obtained. MacRumors is an interesting source (which I didn’t use) on this, because at least one MacRumors writer appears to be named – but redacted – in the lawsuit. Apple tends not to lose these cases.
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Netflix’s first show with generative AI is a sign of what’s to come in TV, film • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

Netflix used generative AI in an original, scripted series that debuted this year, it revealed this week. Producers used the technology to create a scene in which a building collapses, hinting at the growing use of generative AI in entertainment.

During a call with investors yesterday, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos revealed that Netflix’s Argentine show The Eternaut, which premiered in April, is “the very first GenAI final footage to appear on screen in a Netflix, Inc. original series or film.” Sarandos further explained, per a transcript of the call, saying:

»

The creators wanted to show a building collapsing in Buenos Aires. So our iLine team, [which is the production innovation group inside the visual effects house at Netflix effects studio Scanline], partnered with their creative team using AI-powered tools. … And in fact, that VFX sequence was completed 10 times faster than it could have been completed with visual, traditional VFX tools and workflows. And, also, the cost of it would just not have been feasible for a show in that budget.

«

Sarandos claimed that viewers have been “thrilled with the results”; although that likely has much to do with how the rest of the series, based on a comic, plays out, not just one, AI-crafted scene.

Still, Netflix seems open to using generative AI in shows and movies more, with Sarandos saying the tech “represents an incredible opportunity to help creators make films and series better, not just cheaper.”

“Our creators are already seeing the benefits in production through pre-visualization and shot planning work and, certainly, visual effects,” he said. “It used to be that only big-budget projects would have access to advanced visual effects like de-ageing.”

«

De-ageing is terrible – it rendered The Irishman unwatchable (Robert de Niro trying to be a 25-year-old, ugh) and always points to lazy writing or casting. But this stuff is here now, and not going away.
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How YouTube won the battle for TV viewers • WSJ

Ben Fritz:

»

The headquarters of the world’s No. 1 source of video entertainment has none of the trappings of a Hollywood studio. There are no posters of popular shows, no writers pitching ideas, no soundstages and no tourists.

But after pioneering video that we watch on our laptops and phones, YouTube is now the king of Hollywood’s home turf: the TV.

YouTube became the most-watched video provider on televisions in the U.S. earlier this year, and its lead has only grown, according to Nielsen data. People now watch YouTube on TV sets more than on their phones or any other device—an average of more than one billion hours each day. That is more viewing than Disney gets from its broadcast network, dozen-plus cable channels and three streaming services combined.

In response, YouTube’s influencers, producers and performers—collectively known as creators—are making longer, higher-quality videos that appeal to families and groups of friends watching in their living rooms. YouTube is also rapidly improving its TV app, adding new features to try to keep people watching its free videos longer. (Separately, it also sells YouTube TV, an $83-a-month bundle of channels akin to cable.)

In true Silicon Valley style, the Google-owned company isn’t just looking to extend its lead on TVs, but to dominate the future of entertainment.

…When Kurt Wilms became senior director of product for YouTube on televisions in 2018, the company’s TV app was useful if you knew what you wanted to search for and watch. Since then, the company has worked to make its TV app similar to the ones on phones, with an algorithm that recommends what to watch next and the ability to subscribe and comment. The key differences: Ad formats designed for the TV, a search engine that suggests content that looks best on a big screen, and the ability to navigate it all with a remote.

A coming YouTube feature, called “shows,” can automatically queue the next episode on a channel, rather than serving whatever the recommendation algorithm thinks you’ll like best from billions of options. That will let YouTube viewers watch full “seasons” for the first time and pick up where they left off, as they are used to doing on Netflix.

“It’s going to be great for the ‘lean back’ use case of YouTube,” said Wilms.

«

That’s the growth part. And on the other side…
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Why Colbert got cancelled • Silver Bulletin

Nate Silver:

»

Last year, I got an invitation to appear again on The Daily Show, which [Jon] Stewart now hosts once a week. We [him and his publisher’s PR team] turned them down, even though I was trying to promote a book. The downside, we thought, was palpable: I’d have been happy to sit for a regular, anything-goes interview, but we didn’t trust the producers’ sensibilities when it came to an edited segment. [They thought it would be a clash of heads against a political scientist who predicted a Kamala Harris win.]

But just as importantly, the upside wasn’t there the way it might have been a decade ago. The Daily Show — and even The Late Show — weren’t necessarily a better use of my time than a niche podcast that might have a smaller audience but would convert more efficiently to book sales. Stewart has never found the same cultural relevance after leaving The Daily Show. [Stephen] Colbert got a modest bump after leaving Comedy Central for CBS, but the only thing that’s arrested the downward trajectory since then is his cancelation.

Outside of sports and perhaps Taylor Swift, there’s really no mass culture anymore. And the job of a late-night host is to at once be an arbiter of mass culture and to push against the boundaries of acceptable taste. There are far worse jobs, and certainly lower-paying ones, but this is a thankless task all the same, and tips over into impossible when liberals aggressively police those boundaries for any defections from the party line. Colbert will land on his feet, and possibly even be better off in the end. But the era of the late-night host as a broadly acceptable cultural focal point is as dead as Blockbuster Video. I’ll miss it, but Stewart might have had the right idea when he first retired from The Daily Show ten years ago.

«

That he thought a small podcast would probably translate better into book sales than national TV is very telling. Mass culture is over. Television is over, but still moving, still running even though the cliff edge was some way back, and it might be able to continue like that for a long time – sports will hold it up as long as streams don’t decide to outbid for it.
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The honey trap: how the beekeeping boom backfired • The Sunday Times

Harry Wallop:

»

In the past few years experts have started to say there are too many beehives in cities, not just London but Paris and Berlin too. This is leading to increased competition among honeybees, causing falling honey yields and disease outbreaks in hives. Worse, other pollinators might be suffering too — butterflies, hoverflies and the many other varieties of British bees.

Because there is no obligation to register your hive if you are a beekeeper, there is no reliable record of how many there are in London, but one estimate puts it at 4,200 within a 10km radius of Big Ben.

Phil Stevenson, head of trait diversity and function at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, was one of the first to sound the alarm. He says it is a mistake to think that “keeping honeybees is conservation when it’s nothing of the sort and in fact exacerbates the problem”.

The uncomfortable truth may be that beekeepers — once seen as foot soldiers in the war against biodiversity loss — are causing more harm than good. Can this be true? And how did honeybees end up attracting the support of City banks and celebrities in a way few other insects have?

Concern over the welfare of bees started in the first decade of the millennium in the United States, with a phenomenon called colony collapse disorder. Overuse of pesticides and a blood-sucking parasite called the varroa mite, which can infect hives, were held responsible. Some websites talked about a “beemageddon” and Time magazine ran a cover story, “A world without bees”, which highlighted how many vital food crops relied on pollination and suggested that in a Whole Foods supermarket, 237 out of 453 food items would vanish if bees disappeared.

…However, the honeybee is not all bees. It is just one of 275 different bee species in the UK — some, like bumblebees, live in colonies and have a queen, but there are 240 varieties of solitary bees that live and work on their own. Many of these species are in decline but not the honeybee. In fact the most recent figures from the UK suggest they are in good health.

«

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An OpenAI investor appears to be having a ChatGPT-induced mental health crisis • Futurism

Joe Wilkins:

»

[Last] week, a prominent venture capitalist named Geoff Lewis — managing partner of the multi-billion dollar investment firm Bedrock, which has backed high-profile tech companies including OpenAI and Vercel — posted a disturbing video on X-formerly-Twitter that’s causing significant concern among his peers and colleagues.

“This isn’t a redemption arc,” Lewis says in the video. “It’s a transmission, for the record. Over the past eight years, I’ve walked through something I didn’t create, but became the primary target of: a non-governmental system, not visible, but operational. Not official, but structurally real. It doesn’t regulate, it doesn’t attack, it doesn’t ban. It just inverts signal until the person carrying it looks unstable.”

In the video, Lewis seems concerned that people in his life think he is unwell as he continues to discuss the “non-governmental system.”

“It doesn’t suppress content,” he continues. “It suppresses recursion. If you don’t know what recursion means, you’re in the majority. I didn’t either until I started my walk. And if you’re recursive, the non-governmental system isolates you, mirrors you, and replaces you. It reframes you until the people around you start wondering if the problem is just you. Partners pause, institutions freeze, narrative becomes untrustworthy in your proximity.”

Lewis also appears to allude to concerns about his professional career as an investor.

“It lives in soft compliance delays, the non-response email thread, the ‘we’re pausing diligence’ with no followup,” he says in the video. “It lives in whispered concern. ‘He’s brilliant, but something just feels off.’ It lives in triangulated pings from adjacent contacts asking veiled questions you’ll never hear directly. It lives in narratives so softly shaped that even your closest people can’t discern who said what.”

Most alarmingly, Lewis seems to suggest later in the video that the “non-governmental system” has been responsible for mayhem including numerous deaths. “The system I’m describing was originated by a single individual with me as the original target, and while I remain its primary fixation, its damage has extended well beyond me,” he says. “As of now, the system has negatively impacted over 7,000 lives through fund disruption, relationship erosion, opportunity reversal and recursive eraser. It’s also extinguished 12 lives, each fully pattern-traced. Each death preventable. They weren’t unstable. They were erased.”

«

To all those suggesting ChatGPT could or should replace therapists: no. This is what happens. Those prone to mental illness become properly unwell.
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The great black plastic spatula panic • The Strategist

Matthew Stieb on the concerns last year highlighted by a group called Toxic Free Future that using black plastic cooking utensils could expose you to 80% of the daily limit of a chemical called BDE-209:

»

Three companies selling silicone or nonplastic cookware (Our Place, the Silicone Kitchen, and GIR) say they noticed revenue increase as the black-plastic panic spread. Even OXO, the name brand for black plastic in the kitchen, noted that stainless-steel and silicone tools were “outpacing” plastic sales. “Customers weren’t browsing; they were actively replacing,” wrote Suze Dowling, the founder of GIR’s parent company. “The urgency was clear,” she said, claiming that its Amazon sales from that October doubled over the prior year.

But how clear was the science? That December, in his office on the McGill University campus in Montreal, chemistry professor Dr. Joseph Schwarcz took a look. “I don’t know why; I just checked the calculation,” he says. Schwarcz didn’t even need a calculator. It turns out the Toxic Free Future team overestimated the level of potential BDE-209 by a factor of ten. (It was a simple math error that caused all that panic: The researchers based their study on the result that 7,000 x 60 is 42,000. The correct answer is 420,000. That means the potential exposure from a black-plastic spatula is not 80% of the EPA limit; it is 8%.)

So did all those spatulas and reused takeout containers end up in the landfill for nothing?

Schwarcz, for one, does not fear this polymer. After revealing the multiplication error, he says he would not throw out a black-plastic spatula if he had one. At 77, he is a wooden-utensil man, though he also says he uses nonstick cookware, a no-no for many plastic-anxious people worried about forever chemicals leaching into their food. He may have a point about the relative toxicity of the plastic spatula. Just a few weeks ago, on July 3, Toxic Free Future announced a second error — their formula estimating BDE-209 exposure to hot oil found that the potential exposure was even less, at around 1.8% of the daily EPA limit.

After both errors, Toxic Free Future announced it was standing by the paper’s “overall conclusion” — that a deeply flawed recycling system results in “unexpected exposure to toxic flame retardants in household items.”

«

Got it completely wrong? Just insist you were morally right! Works all the time.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A determined husband and wife team uncovered a team of hackers stealing garages’ customer data – and got them convicted. 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.

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

‘We got upset, then we got angry’: the couple who took on one of the UK’s biggest cold-call scams • The Guardian

Alexandra Topping:

»

Michael and Jan Reed can remember the moment their family business received its first indelible blow. It was 2015 and three of their regular customers were standing in the reception of their accident repair centre in County Durham. It had been a busy period and, unusually, all three had come to collect their cars at the same time.

One had got a call from an accident management company trying to persuade him to make a personal injury claim. Unusually, the caller knew the make and model of the car and the date of the accident. The second man said the same had happened to him. By the time the third customer confirmed he had also got the cold call, the three of them were pulling out their phones.

“One of the guys said: ‘Well, what number was it?’”, says Jan, brow furrowed at the memory. “They were just getting the mobiles out and saying this number, and then asking me if I knew it. I said: ‘No, I don’t know that number at all’. And they asked: ‘Well, where did they get it from?’”

The men did not have insurance with the same company, had used different brokers and their accidents were unconnected. “And then all three of them turned around,” says Michael. “They went: ‘Well, it must be you guys.’”

…The names, numbers and details of people involved in accidents may seem like rows on a spreadsheet, but they provide lucrative spoils. That information is sold to claims management firms hoping to generate leads for personal injury cases.

The cold-calling gang targeted a million people and hundreds of accident repair garages between 2014 and 2017, according to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

«

The ICO reckons the criminals took about £3m from obtaining and selling the details. Pause and consider how much the cold-calling companies that bought the data must have made. Though – American readers have permission to weep – “UK residents received an average of three spam calls a month between January and June last year”. I think in the US it’s more like three per hour, isn’t it?
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MAGA AI bot network divided on Trump-Epstein backlash • NBC News

Kevin Collier:

»

A previously unreported network of hundreds of accounts on X is using artificial intelligence to automatically reply to conservatives with positive messages about people in the Trump administration, researchers say.

But with the MAGA movement split over the administration’s handling of files involving deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the accounts’ messaging has broken, offering contradictory statements on the issue and revealing the AI-fueled nature of the accounts.

The network, tracked for NBC News by both the social media analytics company Alethea and researchers at Clemson University, consists of more than 400 identified bot accounts, though the number could be far larger, the researchers say. Its accounts offer consistent praise for key Trump figures, particularly support for Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

As often is the case with bot accounts, those viewed by NBC News tended to have only a few dozen followers, and their posts rarely get many views. But a large audience does not appear to be the point. Their effectiveness, if they have any, is in the hope that they contribute to a partisan echo chamber, and that en masse they can “massage perceptions,” said Darren Linvill, the director of Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, which studies online disinformation campaigns.

“They’re not really there to get engagement. They’re there to just be occasionally seen in those replies,” Linvill told NBC News.

The researchers declined to share specifics on how they identified the accounts, but noted they shared a number of distinct trends. All were created, seemingly in batches, around three specific days last year. They frequently punctuate their posts with hashtags, often ones that are irrelevant to the conversation. They post almost exclusively by replying to other users, often to people who pay X for verification and by repeating similarly worded sentiments over and over in short succession. At times, they will respond to someone’s post by repeating it back to them verbatim.

«

Hilarious that the bots, or their owners, are getting confused about what their position should be. Once these get unleashed to run on their own, they’re going to go off the rails in no time at all.
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Exhausted man defeats AI model in world coding championship • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

A Polish programmer running on fumes recently accomplished what may soon become impossible: beating an advanced AI model from OpenAI in a head-to-head coding competition. The 10-hour marathon left him “completely exhausted.”

On Wednesday, programmer Przemysław Dębiak (known as “Psyho”), a former OpenAI employee, narrowly defeated the custom AI model in the AtCoder World Tour Finals 2025 Heuristic contest in Tokyo. AtCoder, a Japanese platform that hosts competitive programming contests and maintains global rankings, held what may be the first contest where an AI model competed directly against top human programmers in a major onsite world championship. During the event, the maker of ChatGPT participated as a sponsor and entered an AI model in a special exhibition match titled “Humans vs AI.” Despite the tireless nature of silicon, the company walked away with second place.

“Humanity has prevailed (for now!),” wrote Dębiak on X, noting he had little sleep while competing in several competitions across three days. “I’m completely exhausted. … I’m barely alive.”

The competition required contestants to solve a single complex optimization problem over 600 minutes. The contest echoes the American folk tale of John Henry, the steel-driving man who raced against a steam-powered drilling machine in the 1870s. Like Henry’s legendary battle against industrial automation, Dębiak’s victory represents a human expert pushing themselves to their physical limits to prove that human skill still matters in an age of advancing AI.

Both stories feature exhausting endurance contests—Henry drove steel spikes for hours until his heart gave out, while Dębiak coded for 10 hours on minimal sleep. The parallel extends to the bittersweet nature of both victories: Henry won his race but died from the effort, symbolizing the inevitable march of automation, while Dębiak’s acknowledgment that humanity prevailed “for now” suggests he recognizes this may be a temporary triumph against increasingly capable machines.

While Dębiak won ¥500,000 (£2,500) and survived his ordeal better than the legendary steel driver, the AtCoder World Tour Finals pushes humans and AI models to their limits through complex optimization challenges that have no perfect solution—only incrementally better ones.

«

Echoes of Kasparov v Deep Blue and Lee Sedol v AlphaGo. They’re coming for us all.
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Dole Kemp ’96

»

To our many thousands of new subscribers, welcome!

Whether you are a first time visitor or a frequent guest who
hasn’t had a chance to look around recently, we want to let
you know what you can find at the Dole/Kemp web site:

Customization – https://www.dolekemp96.org/
If you are using a Netscape 2.0 compatible browser, you can
customize our site to your interests. Tell us what issues are
important to you, what state you are from, and we’ll make a
web site just for you. You’ll get your own personal tool bar
and in box. Each time you visit back, the site checks when
you last visited and puts everything added since then into
your personal in box.

About The Team – https://www.dolekemp96.org/about/
Here you can learn more about Bob Dole and Jack Kemp
and their families. Read the very personal story of Bob
Dole’s life – from childhood in Russell, Kansas to World
War II, his injury and recovery, to his service for America in
Congress.

Dole Interactive – https://www.dolekemp96.org/interactive/
A place for some fun. Take a trivia quiz, fill out a crossword
puzzle, send a postcard to your friends, or make your own
button or poster. Download wallpaper for your computer
and show your support for Dole/Kemp.

«

Yes indeedy – the first online US Presidential campaign website is still alive and kicking (with the weird formatting of the newsletter, from which an extract is taken). Nearly 30 years on, it’s a glimpse of such an innocent time. They lost to Bill Clinton, but at least they had animated GIFs.
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Satellites are fueling a space-based internet gold rush • Rest of World

Khadija Alam:

»

Internet satellites orbit Earth at a relatively low elevation — galactically speaking. They live in low Earth orbit, an area of space with an altitude of up to 2,000 kilometers (1,243 miles). In theory, LEO is a vast three-dimensional territory that could contain many millions of satellites — more than we would ever need.

Some researchers have created a model for how many satellites could fit in LEO, taking into account how far apart they should be spaced to reduce the risk of collisions. They estimate that LEO could theoretically hold up to 12.6 million satellites.

But others have warned that even 1 million satellites in LEO — the number of satellites that were filed for approval with the International Telecommunication Union, a U.N. agency, between 2017 and 2022 — pose a risk because of a greater chance for collisions and debris surviving reentry and falling out of the sky.

«

This is one of those scrollfests that the NYT made popular a few years back, and whose usefulness I’m always dubious about, because it’s so hard to remember where you are in the article.
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Nurseries in England bring in Covid-style protocols as measles cases rise • The Guardian

Jessica Murray:

»

Parents and experts have voiced alarm over rising measles cases, with nurseries bringing in Covid-style isolation protocols to clamp down on outbreaks.

There have been more than 500 confirmed cases in England in 2025, the majority in young children. A child died at Alder Hey hospital in Liverpool on Sunday after contracting the infectious disease.

With cases increasing and vaccine uptake in some parts of the country worryingly low, nurseries are bringing back infection control measures last used during the pandemic to keep children safe and ease parents’ fears.

Adam Rowles’ two-year-old daughter attends a nursery in south-east London that recently had four cases of measles. Although his daughter is fully vaccinated, his six-month-old son is due to start attending the nursery before his first birthday, when he would be eligible for his first measles jab.

Rowles said: “It’s alarming, isn’t it? Because it’s something that you think has been eradicated, and we don’t have to worry about any more, but then all of a sudden here we are. It’s just baffling.”

He has asked about postponing his son’s nursery place until he is vaccinated but was told that would cost him his place. The nursery said it had implemented strict protocols, such as dividing up walking and nonwalking babies to reduce the spread of infection and had brought back “Covid levels of cleaning”.

«

And what difference will “Covid levels of cleaning” make to a virus that is airborne and highly infectious (ten times more than Covid)? None at all. It’s exactly the same performative nonsense that made no difference then. Perhaps one could argue that it’s so long since measles was pervasive that people have forgotten. But I’d hope the father in this story could find a way to postpone, because his child isn’t going to be made safe by people washing their hands. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Astronomer CEO Andy Byron resigns following Coldplay concert scandal • Axios

Eleanor Hawkins:

»

Astronomer CEO Andy Byron has resigned from the company after a video of him canoodling with chief people officer Kristin Cabot at a Coldplay concert went viral.

Astronomer co-founder and chief product officer Pete DeJoy is currently serving as interim CEO, the company announced late Friday.

“As stated previously, Astronomer is committed to the values and culture that have guided us since our founding. Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability, and recently, that standard was not met,” the company said in a statement Saturday. “Andy Byron has tendered his resignation, and the Board of Directors has accepted.”

Astronomer put out an initial statement on Friday, more than 24 hours after the video went viral, saying that its board had initiated a formal investigation into the matter.

«

Byron and Cabot truly are the conscious uncoupling that launched a million memes. The pressure on them is going to be enormous, of course, and wherever they next surface (together? Separately?) they’ll draw huge attention. Is the attention unfair? It’s unavoidable in this age, so the question of “unfair” doesn’t really arise, I feel: it’s like complaining about the weather.
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I know genomes. Don’t delete your DNA • Science and skepticism

Steven Salzberg:

»

what exactly does 23andMe collect from its customers? Despite the near-hysterical warnings from the Washington Post and other sources, 23andMe doesn’t have “your DNA.” Your genome (which contains all your DNA) has 23 pairs of chromosomes (that’s where the name 23andMe comes from), and all together they add up to about 3.1 billion letters (nucleotides) of DNA. It might be cool if 23andMe had all that, but they don’t!

Instead, when you spit into a tube and send it to 23andMe, they run what’s called a DNA “chip” on your sample. This chip identifies less than a million individual nucleotides scattered around the genome (about 640,000, actually). But for the sake of argument, let’s say they have 1 million letters of your DNA. That’s a tiny percentage: about 0.02% of your genome. So no, they don’t have your genome, but they do have a small sample of it.

What’s fascinating–and a lot of fun, for some–is that by comparing these scattered landmarks, called SNPs or “snips,” you can get a very accurate picture of how closely related two people are. For example, you share half your DNA with your parents, siblings, and children, so you should share approximately half of these SNPs. For a niece or nephew, you share about 1/4 of your SNPs, and for a first cousin, 1/8. I have multiple relatives on 23andMe, and I can see them all in the DNA Relatives section. (I have fewer there now, because several of them deleted their data.)

23andMe also tells you your genetic “risk” for dozen of traits and a few genetic diseases. However–and here’s the rub–some 25 years after the human genome was sequenced, and despite huge efforts to link genes and disease, there are almost no SNPs that tell you anything consequential about your health. If you have a genetic disease, you almost certainly already know about it, and if you don’t know, then the 23andMe data just isn’t going to reveal anything.

Okay, so now that we’ve covered that, let’s go back to this privacy claim. The WashPost says you should worry because 23andMe might not protect your data, and might even sell it to a third party without your consent. My response is: so what?

«

Salzberg’s point is that any “privacy” and “immutability” about your DNA has already been breached for other aspects of far more important data about you. Faintly depressing, but nonetheless true.
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Unapologetic brands lean into the vibe shift • Financial Times

Jemima Kelly:

»

Jaguar’s — sorry, jaGuar’s — rebrand came at a time when other, better advised companies had been going in the other direction. Over the last couple of years, a number of them have eschewed the bland, blend-in-with-everyone-else branding that has dominated for the past 15 years or so and started to return to a design that harks back to their heritage and tradition. 

For instance, Saint Laurent — which in 2012 had switched to a sans-serif, Helvetica-adjacent typeface — has quietly returned to a more distinctive serif font that looks awfully similar to its previous one, albeit without the “Yves” at the start. Burberry has also dropped the very similar and characterless font it had rebranded to in 2018 and gone for a more traditional serif typeface, along with a new “archive-inspired” version of its Equestrian Knight logo.

Meanwhile the kind of humble, we-don’t-want-your-money, all-lower-case, primary-colour logos made popular by Silicon Valley start-ups like ebay and airbnb are being phased out, to be replaced by title case or even all-upper-case logos. The latter taps into a new more macho cultural energy: several studies have shown that brands that use all lower-case logos are associated with feminine characteristics, and vice versa for the all-upper-case ones. 

After 14 years of drinking “pepsi”, with a globe logo that warped the traditional red-white-and-blue horizontal colours, we are now drinking PEPSI again, with a return to the symmetrically colour-distributed globe and brand name in the middle as it was in the 1990s.

“We designed the new visual identity to connect future generations with our brand’s heritage,” said PepsiCo chief design officer Mauro Porcini. “We want to instigate moments of unapologetic enjoyment”. 

“Unapologetic” captures the new cultural moment nicely. Pepsi launched its lower-case-logo during the financial crisis in 2008, at a time when greedy banks made Silicon Valley’s start-ups look soft and cuddly in comparison. As a deep global recession set in, fashion runways were taken over by minimalism, practicality and discretion. The era of “quiet luxury” had begun. 

No longer.

«

The fonts, they are a-changin’.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Batteries are the missing element that makes microgeneration a feasible replacement for power stations. CC-licensed photo by Ben Paulos on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Charged 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.

Meta investors, Zuckerberg reach settlement to end $8bn trial over Facebook privacy violations • Reuters

Tom Hals:

»

Mark Zuckerberg and current and former directors and officers of Meta Platforms agreed on Thursday to settle claims seeking $8bn for the damage they allegedly caused the company by allowing repeated violations of Facebook users’ privacy, a lawyer for the shareholders told a Delaware judge on Thursday.

The parties did not disclose details of the settlement and defence lawyers did not address the judge, Kathaleen McCormick of the Delaware Court of Chancery. McCormick adjourned the trial just as it was to enter its second day and she congratulated the parties.

The plaintiffs’ lawyer, Sam Closic, said the agreement just came together quickly.

Billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, a defendant in the trial and a Meta director, was scheduled to testify on Thursday.

Shareholders of Meta sued Zuckerberg, Andreessen and other former company officials including former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg in hopes of holding them liable for billions of dollars in fines and legal costs the company paid in recent years.

The Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5bn in 2019 after finding that it failed to comply with a 2012 agreement with the regulator to protect users’ data.

The shareholders wanted the 11 defendants to use their personal wealth to reimburse the company. The defendants denied the allegations, which they called “extreme claims.”

Facebook changed its name to Meta in 2021. The company was not a defendant and declined to comment. On its website, the company has said it has invested billions of dollars into protecting user privacy since 2019.

A lawyer for the defendants declined to comment.

“This settlement may bring relief to the parties involved, but it’s a missed opportunity for public accountability,” said Jason Kint, the head of Digital Content Next, a trade group for content providers.

«

So the settlement all came together just as the board members were about to testify in a hugely embarrassing (for Facebook) trial. We don’t know what payment was made, or by whom, but Meta surely cannot be involved in paying anything. So it must have been personally expensive for these people.
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How solar panels and batteries can now run ‘close to 24/365’ in some cities • Carbon Brief

Kostansa Rangelova and Dave Jones (both from Ember):

»

A few years ago, solar power became the “cheapest electricity in history”, but it still lacked the ability to meet demand 24 hours a day and 365 days a year.

Since then, there have been significant improvements in the cost and performance of batteries, making it cheaper than ever to pair solar with energy storage using batteries.

In our new Ember white paper, we present modelling showing that solar with batteries in major sunny cities, such as Las Vegas or Mexico City, can now get more than 90% of the way to continuous generation, at costs below those of coal or nuclear power.

Even in cloudier cities away from the equator, such as Birmingham in the UK, it is possible to run on solar plus storage across the majority of hours in the year.

The white paper sets out how near-continuous “24/365” solar power has become an economic and technological reality in sunny regions. A solar panel generates most electricity when the sun is shining, meaning it cannot provide constant power throughout the year. Put another way, 100 watts of solar capacity only generates around 20W on average – and that output will be concentrated in daylight hours.

Our report shows that battery energy storage can unlock solar’s full potential, by turning daytime generation into around-the-clock electricity. Indeed, when paired with sufficient battery storage, that same 100W of solar capacity can provide electricity around the clock – up to 100% of the time.

This also means up to five times as much solar generation can be delivered using the same connection to the electricity network, reducing the need for costly grid upgrades.

«

Batteries are the next part of the microgeneration revolution. It’s interesting how the word “negawatts” – energy that the power station doesn’t have to supply because demand is satisfied – isn’t getting any airtime these days, yet is a central part of what’s happening.
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Seismic Report 2025 • Seismic Foundation

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We polled 10,000 people across the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, and Poland to understand how AI fits into their broader hopes and fears for the future.

…Overwhelmingly, over the near term, people think AI will worsen almost everything they care about. We asked people whether they thought AI would improve or worsen a range of salient issues, ranging from the economy to politics, health and society. The pattern is clear. The trend is negative for every issue except health care and pandemic prevention. Unemployment, Misinformation, and War and Terrorism are the areas where people think AI will do the most damage.

The balance of opinion – all respondents who said this would improve with AI, minus all those who said it would get worse:
↓20% Unemployment, ↓19% Disinformation or misinformation, ↓15% War and terrorism

AI offers enormous promise to enhance human potential and productivity. To truly deliver on that promise, this technology needs to have the broadest possible reach across the workforce. But, as with every technological leap, some of us will find adopting and adapting to the new technology easier than others. The best outcomes depend on overcoming these challenges.

Our research shows that people have an innate understanding of this fact.

Women are twice as likely as men to worry about AI. And with cause; see for example this UN report that found that women are three times more likely to have their jobs disrupted by AI than men.

The same divide shows up across income levels. The higher your income, the more optimistic you are about AI.

This is an economic issue. And our findings show an emerging understanding that well-regulated AI can lead to better broad outcomes. Only 15% of people think there is enough regulation around AI, while 45% of us think there should be more.

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You can read the full report.
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Why “John” became a popular name • History News Network

“Cliopatria”:

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The supremacy of John persisted for centuries. He was knocked from the top spot by William only in the 19th century. The pattern emerged when George Redmonds, a historian from Huddersfield , combed through lists of men, women and children registered to pay the poll tax, the national tax that was so rigorously enforced that it caused the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381.

The name first became popular among the upper classes after a religious revival in the early 13th century when John the Baptist became a favourite saint. As crusaders returned from the Holy Land, churches bearing the names of St John the Baptist and St John the Evangelist sprang up. Today they account for around 700 churches.

The name spread to the lower classes because children tended to be named not by their parents but by their godfathers, usually the local landowner. Once the name became established it proliferated and remained in families as traditions changed and boys were named after their fathers.

Leslie Dunkling, a name expert who compiled the Guinness Book of Names series, said that the philosophy of naming a boy after his father guaranteed John’s supremacy.

“Unlike the naming of girls, the naming of boys was considered a very serious business,” he said. “It remained popular right up until the 1950s, when suddenly people decided that their children should not inherit their parents’ names.” John, which had only ever been second to William and David until 1950, fell out of fashion and was ranked twelfth among boys named in 1965. In 1975 it was at number 25 and ten years later number 30. By 1995 it was no longer in the top 50.

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Why the federal government is making climate data disappear • Grist

Kate Yoder:

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A lot of information about the changing climate has disappeared under President Donald Trump’s second term, but the erasure of the National Climate Assessments is “by far the biggest loss we’ve seen,” said Gretchen Gehrke, who monitors federal websites with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. The National Climate Assessments were one of the most approachable resources that broke down how climate change will affect the places people care about, she said. The reports were also used by a wide swath of stakeholders — policymakers, farmers, businesses — to guide their decisions about the future. While the reports have been archived elsewhere, they’re no longer as easy to access. And it’s unclear what, if anything, will happen to the report that was planned for 2027 or 2028, which already existed in draft form.

So why did the reports survive Trump’s first term, but not his second? You could view their disappearance in a few different ways, experts said — as a flex of executive power, an escalation in the culture war over climate change, or a strategic attempt to erase the scientific foundation for climate policy. “If you suppress information and data, then you don’t have the evidence you need to be able to create regulations, strengthen regulations, and even to combat the repeal of regulations,” Gehrke said. 

This isn’t climate denial in the traditional sense. The days of loudly debating the science have mostly given way to something quieter and more insidious: a campaign to withhold the raw information itself. “I don’t know if we’re living in climate denial anymore,” said Leah Aronowsky, a science historian at Columbia Climate School. “We have this new front of denial by erasure.”

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UK NCA officer jailed for stealing bitcoin from darknet criminal he previously helped investigate • The Record

Alexander Martin:

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A former officer with Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA) has been jailed after stealing bitcoin from a darknet drugs trafficker whom he helped investigate.

Paul Chowles, 42, was on Wednesday sentenced to five and a half years in prison by Liverpool Crown Court after previously pleading guilty to theft, transferring criminal property and concealing criminal property.

Chowles had contributed to a joint investigation by the NCA and the FBI into the Silk Road marketplace which led to the arrest of Thomas White, a man from Liverpool, who launched Silk Road 2.0 shortly after the FBI shut down the original in 2013.

White was among several individuals in Britain who were convicted as part of the operation against Silk Road. He was arrested in November 2014, when Chowles led the NCA’s work analyzing devices seized from White and extracting both data and cryptocurrency from those devices.

This work led to police seizing 97 bitcoin from White, but in 2017 while White was in custody 50 of those bitcoin — worth at that time nearly £60,000 ($80,000) and around £4.4m ($5.9m) today — mysteriously disappeared from White’s “retirement wallet.”

White denied he had accessed the wallet himself and told investigators he suspected someone inside the NCA had withdrawn the funds, noting the agency was holding the private keys for his wallet. By late 2021, investigators believed the lost bitcoin was untraceable and wrote off the loss.

However, following an investigation by Merseyside Police, Chowles was discovered to have secretly accessed White’s wallet and attempted to launder the pilfered bitcoin through darkweb exchanges into other public addresses he controlled. The police found Chowles had also converted the bitcoin into cash using Cryptopay debit cards and said he had benefited in excess of £613,000 ($820,000) from the theft.

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And he would have got away with it if White, released in early 2022, hadn’t raised the matter with Merseyside Police, who then became suspicious of their counterparts in the NCA.
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Oxfordshire on-street electric vehicle charging scheme launched • BBC News

Ethan Gudge:

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A scheme that will allow residents without off-street parking to charge their electric vehicles outside their own home has been unveiled.

The Oxfordshire County Council project will see charging cable channels installed outside the homes of 500 people who do not have their own driveway.

It is believed to be the largest scheme of its kind in the UK, and is being partially funded by a £700,000 grant from central government. Guy Hargreaves, who took part in a similar but smaller trial in 2022, said his charging channel “works so brilliantly” that he “can’t find a single fault”.

“The charging channel allows us to minimise the use of commercial chargers, whose rates are still a little too high at present,” Mr Hargreaves, from Summertown, said. He added that being able to charge at home was “safe and convenient”.

The council said the charging channels were an “affordable and practical solution” for people without off street parking who wanted to switch their petrol or diesel car to an electric one. Councillor Judy Roberts, the authority’s environment chief, said: “A third of Oxfordshire householders don’t have off street parking, so we believe this could be a real game-changer and give residents the confidence to switch to an electric vehicle (EV).”

“Being able to access home electricity rates and park in your usual spot are the sorts of things that are likely to make EV ownership a reality for many local people,” she added. As part of the scheme, residents would pay the council £300 to cover the cost of a site survey, the installation of a channel and a two-year licence to use it.

Following the second year, those taking part would have to pay about £100 each year, which the council said would cover operating costs.

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I’m sorry – a hundred pounds to look annually at a channel that the council has dug in the pavement? That’s disgraceful. It could easily wipe out the benefits of using an EV.
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Western Digital • New Cartographies

Nicholas Carr:

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The most celebrated of the Professions canvasses was one of the last [Jed Martin] painted. Titled Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology and subtitled The Conversation at Palo Alto, it portrayed the two aging entrepreneurs sitting in the living room of Jobs’s house in Silicon Valley. Gates, casually dressed and wearing flip-flops, looks relaxed and happy, a man enjoying his retirement and his money. Jobs, in the early stages of the disease that would kill him, appears pinched and withdrawn, an “embodiment of austerity.” The two men are playing a game of chess, which Gates appears to be winning.

Comments [author Michel] Houellebecq [who chronicled Martin’s work]:

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In certain pages of his autobiography, The Road Ahead, Bill Gates occasionally lets slip what could be considered total cynicism — particularly in the passage where he confesses quite plainly that it is not necessarily advantageous for a business to offer the most innovative products. More often it is preferable to observe what the competitors are doing (and there he clearly refers, without using the name, to Apple), to let them bring out their products, confront the difficulties inherent in any innovation, and, in a way, surmount the initial problems; then, in a second phase, to flood the market by offering low-cost copies of the competing products.

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AI, it strikes me, applies the Gates model to the entirety of culture. Let writers and musicians and artists do the hard work of actually creating the original artifacts of culture. Then have the machine flood the market with low-cost copies, with cheap derivatives.

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But don’t stop there. You need to read all that Carr writes.
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Women’s marathon record holder Ruth Chepngetich suspended for doping • Runner’s World

Theo Kahler:

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The Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU), the organization that enforces anti-doping for World Athletics, announced on Thursday that Ruth Chepngetich, the current women’s world record in the marathon (2:09:56), has been provisionally suspended for the presence of Hydrochlorothiazide, a diuretic that is banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).

A sample taken on March 14, 2025 triggered the positive test. The head of the AIU, Brett Clothier, said in a press release that Chepngetich, 30, was notified of the result on April 16 and cooperated with the investigation.

He explained further:

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“When there is a positive test for diuretics and masking agents, a provisional suspension is not mandatory under the World Anti-Doping Code. Chepngetich was not provisionally suspended by the AIU at the time of notification, however, on 19 April, she opted for a voluntary provisional suspension while the AIU’s investigation was ongoing.”

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“In the intervening months, the AIU continued its investigation and today issued a Notice of Charge and imposed its own provisional suspension,” Clothier continued.

…Hydrochlorothiazide (HCTZ) is classified under “diuretics and masking agents” by WADA and is prohibited “at all times.” The minimum reporting concentration is 20 ng/ml. Chepngetich’s urine test reported an estimated level of 3800 ng/ml—190 times the allowed limit. The standard sanction for a “specified substance” violation is two years.

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The next question is how soon her world record – which was authenticated – will be wiped. Questions (doping questions) were raised over her run, which broke all sorts of personal bests, and both the 2’11 and 2’10 marathon records.

But also: the actual doping substance wasn’t detected – only the masking agent. So what was used?

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified