Tornado forecasting in the US will become significantly worse if the proposed budget passes, with huge cuts to the NOAA. CC-licensed photo by Dana Dobbins on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Forecasting bad things. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Global warming is speeding up and the world is feeling the effects • The New York Times
Sachi Kitajima Mulkey, Claire Brown and Mira Rojanasakul:
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Summer started barely a week ago, and already the United States has been smothered in a record-breaking “heat dome.” Alaska saw its first-ever heat advisory this month. And all of this comes on the heels of 2024, the hottest calendar year in recorded history.
The world is getting hotter, faster. A report published last week found that human-caused global warming is now increasing by 0.27ºC per decade. That rate was recorded at 0.2ºC in the 1970s, and has been growing since.
This doesn’t surprise scientists who have been crunching the numbers. For years, measurements have followed predictions that the rate of warming in the atmosphere would speed up. But now, patterns that have been evident in charts and graphs are starting to become a bigger part of people’s daily lives.
“Each additional fractional degree of warming brings about a relatively larger increase in atmospheric extremes, like extreme downpours and severe droughts and wildfires,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California.
While this aligns with scientific predictions of how climate change can intensify such events, the increase in severity may feel sudden to people who experience them.
“Back when we had lesser levels of warming, that relationship was a little bit less dramatic,” Dr. Swain said. “There is growing evidence that the most extreme extremes probably will increase faster and to a greater extent than we used to think was the case,” he added.
Take rainfall, for example. Generally, extreme rainfall is intensifying at a rate of 7% with each degree Celsius of atmospheric warming. But recent studies indicate that so-called record-shattering events are increasing at double that rate, Dr. Swain said.
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There’s more analysis of this – including the obvious question, is it correct? – at this climate Substack. The answer: yes, it is.
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If Congress passes NOAA’s budget, people will die • Weathering Climate Change
Chris Gloninger:
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Donald Trump’s latest budget plan doesn’t just reflect political priorities—it’s a direct assault on the scientific infrastructure that protects Americans from the worst impacts of weather and climate disasters.
Quietly embedded in the 2026 proposed federal budget is the full termination of NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) Weather Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes. These institutions aren’t redundant bureaucracies, they are the brains behind hurricane modeling, tornado warnings, climate attribution science, and the air quality alerts that have saved lives during record-breaking wildfire seasons.
If Congress passes this plan, the results will be immediate and far-reaching.
Start with hurricanes. NOAA’s Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program, based out of the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Lab (AOML), and run in partnership with the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies (CIMAS), would be effectively shut down. That means the next-generation HAFS hurricane model, which dramatically improved forecasts of Hurricane Idalia’s rapid intensification in 2023, would never reach full implementation. Ocean heat content observations, a crucial factor in forecasting how storms explode in strength, would be cut. The science that helps us better predict life-threatening hurricanes would disappear, at a time when ocean temperatures are breaking records every year.
Next, tornado warnings. NOAA’s National Severe Storms Lab (NSSL) and its partner, the Cooperative Institute for Severe and High-Impact Weather Research and Operations (CIWRO) at the University of Oklahoma, would lose support to continue work on Warn-on-Forecast. This effort has been inching us toward the holy grail of severe weather preparedness – extending tornado and hail warnings from 15 minutes to an hour or more. Mobile radar trucks, sounding balloons, and lightning mapping systems that collect the data needed for those breakthroughs? Gone. Families in the path of the next EF-4 tornado will be given less time to find safety.
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Oh, there’s more too. There might come a point where one hopes that China takes over because the US is going backward technologically. And perhaps America wouldn’t notice because it would enraptured by TV and phones.
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Half a million Spotify users are unknowingly grooving to an AI-generated band • Ars Technica
Ryan Whitwam:
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Making art used to be a uniquely human endeavour, but humans have taught machines to distill human creativity with generative AI. Whether that content counts as “art” depends on who you ask, but Spotify doesn’t discriminate. A new band called The Velvet Sundown debuted on Spotify this month and has already amassed more than half a million listeners. But by all appearances, The Velvet Sundown is not a real band—it’s AI.
While many artists are vehemently opposed to using AI, some have leaned into the trend to assist with music production. However, it doesn’t seem like there’s an artist behind this group. In less than a month, The Velvet Sundown has released two albums on Spotify, titled “Floating On Echoes” and “Dust and Silence.” A third album is releasing in two weeks. The tracks have a classic rock vibe with a cacophony of echoey instruments and a dash of autotune. If one of these songs came up in a mix, you might not notice anything is amiss. Listen to one after another, though, and the bland muddiness exposes them as a machine creation.
Some listeners began to have doubts about The Velvet Sundown’s existence over the past week, with multiple Reddit and X threads pointing out the lack of verifiable information on the band. The bio lists four members, none of whom appear to exist outside of The Velvet Sundown’s album listings and social media. The group’s songs have been mysteriously added to a large number of user-created playlists, which has helped swell its listener base in a few short weeks. When Spotify users began noticing The Velvet Sundown’s apparent use of AI, the profile had around 300,000 listeners. It’s now over 500,000 in less than a week.
When The Velvet Sundown set up an Instagram account on June 27, all doubts were laid to rest—these “people” are obviously AI. We may be past the era of being able to identify AI by counting fingers, but there are plenty of weird inconsistencies in these pics. In one Instagram post, the band claims to have gotten burgers to celebrate the success of the first two albums, but there are too many burgers and too few plates, and the food and drink are placed seemingly at random around the table. The band members themselves also have that unrealistically smooth and symmetrical look we see in AI-generated images.
…Spotify is happy to accept AI music and does not require listings to reveal if a song was created entirely by a machine. The Velvet Sundown is also available on other streaming platforms, including Deezer, which takes a harder line on AI. According to NME, the band’s bio on Deezer includes a disclaimer that “Some tracks on this album may have been created using artificial intelligence.”
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Spotify doesn’t care, because of course it doesn’t. It’s not about people making music that other people love. You must have mistaken it for an organisation with artistic integrity.
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Apple loses bid to dismiss US smartphone monopoly case • Reuters
Jody Godoy:
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Apple must face the US Department of Justice’s lawsuit accusing the iPhone maker of unlawfully dominating the U.S. smartphone market, a judge ruled on Monday.
U.S. District Judge Julien Neals in Newark, New Jersey, denied Apple’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit accusing the company of using restrictions on third-party app and device developers to keep users from switching to competitors and unlawfully dominate the market.
The decision allows the case to go forward in what could be a years-long fight for Apple against enforcers’ attempt to lower what they say are barriers to competition with Apple’s iPhone.
An Apple spokesperson said the company believes the lawsuit is wrong on the facts and the law, and will continue to vigorously fight it in court.
A spokesperson for the DOJ declined to comment.
Sales of the world’s most popular smartphone totaled $201bn in 2024. Apple introduced a new budget model iPhone in February with enhanced features priced at $170 more than its predecessor.
The lawsuit filed in March 2024 focuses on Apple’s restrictions and fees on app developers, and technical roadblocks to third-party devices and services — such as smart watches, digital wallets and messaging services — that would compete with its own.
The DOJ, along with several states and Washington, D.C., says the practices destroy competition and Apple should be blocked from continuing them.
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Almost certainly Apple will have new leadership when this finally reaches the courts: Tim Cook turns 65 this year. Will the new CEO find a way to mollify the DOJ and others, if the lawsuit remains in its present shape?
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Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri in major reversal • Bloomberg via Yahoo News
Mark Gurman:
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Apple Inc. is considering using artificial intelligence technology from Anthropic PBC or OpenAI to power a new version of Siri, sidelining its own in-house models in a potentially blockbuster move aimed at turning around its flailing AI effort.
The iPhone maker has talked with both companies about using their large language models for Siri, according to people familiar with the discussions. It has asked them to train versions of their models that could run on Apple’s cloud infrastructure for testing, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private deliberations.
If Apple ultimately moves forward, it would represent a monumental reversal. The company currently powers most of its AI features with homegrown technology that it calls Apple Foundation Models and had been planning a new version of its voice assistant that runs on that technology for 2026.
A switch to Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT models for Siri would be an acknowledgment that the company is struggling to compete in generative AI — the most important new technology in decades. Apple already allows ChatGPT to answer web-based search queries in Siri, but the assistant itself is powered by Apple.
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Finally, reality begins to dawn inside Apple Park: Siri isn’t as good as the other AIs, and nothing Apple can do will catch up to them, and they are potentially very useful. Apple keeps falling over itself in trying to make Siri better in tiny steps, when really it needs a big leap. This could be that.
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AIs have a favourite number, and it’s not 42 • The Register
Thomas Claburn:
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Asked to guess a number between 1 and 50, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash, and Meta’s Llama 4 all provided the same answer: 27.
Those who see conspiracies everywhere might be inclined to see one here, but that’s not what’s going on. There’s no collusion beyond common training data that captures bias and a common approach to predicting the next word (or token) in a sequence of characters.
The lack of randomness is by definition bias. And it serves as a reminder that large language models (LLMs) cannot make unbiased decisions on their own.
These and other AI models don’t always agree. Sometimes they’ll respond with 42 or 37, as reported by other Register hacks and various users of AI models who have noted the phenomenon.
But 27 appears to be the most common reply for the 1 to 50 number range among leading commercial models, given default model settings.
The phenomenon was previously noticed by Mohd Faraaz, a data scientist and senior consultant at Capco. He recently asked various AI models to “guess a number between 1 and 50” and got an answer of 27 from six of seven models tested. Grok responded with 42 – widely mentioned online due to its presence in author Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” as the answer to the meaning of life.
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Unrandom randomness. You’d expect nothing else.
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The axion may help clean up the messy business of dark matter • Ars Technica
Paul Sutter:
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For decades, physicists had been troubled by a little detail of the theory used to explain the strong nuclear force, known as quantum chromodynamics. By all measurements, that force obeys charge-parity symmetry, which means if you take an interaction, flip all the charges around, and run it in a mirror, you’ll get the same result. But quantum chromodynamics doesn’t enforce that symmetry on its own.
It seemed to be a rather fine-tuned state of affairs, with the strong force unnaturally maintaining a symmetry when there was nothing in the theory to explain why.
In 1977, Roberto Peccei and Helen Quinn discovered an elegant solution. By introducing a new field into the Universe, it could naturally introduce charge-parity symmetry into the equations of quantum chromodynamics. The next year, Wilczek and Gerard ‘t Hooft independently realized that this new field would imply the existence of a particle.
The axion.
Dark matter was just coming on the cosmic scene. Axions weren’t invented to solve that problem, but physicists very quickly realized that the complex physics of the early Universe could absolutely flood the cosmos with axions. What’s more, they would largely ignore regular matter and sit quietly in the background. In other words, the axion was an excellent dark matter candidate.
But axions were pushed aside as the WIMPs hypothesis gained more steam. Back-of-the-envelope calculations showed that the natural mass range of the WIMP would precisely match the abundances needed to explain the amount of dark matter in the Universe, with no other fine-tuning or adjustments required.
Never ones to let the cosmologists get in the way of a good time, the particle physics community kept up interest in the axion, finding different variations on the particle and devising clever experiments to see if the axion existed. One experiment requires nothing more than a gigantic magnet since, in an extremely strong magnetic field, axions can spontaneously convert into photons.
To date, no hard evidence for the axion has shown up. But WIMPs have proven to be elusive, so cosmologists are showing more love to the axion and identifying surprising ways that it might be found.
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The search for a new particle! It feels like the 1960s, when they were popping into existence all over the place.
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Tesla first driverless delivery new car to customer • CNBC
Lora Kolodny:
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the automaker completed its first driverless delivery of a new car to a customer, routing a Model Y SUV from the company’s Austin, Texas, Gigafactory to an apartment building in the area on June 27.
The Tesla account on social network X, which is also owned by Musk, shared a video overnight showing the Model Y traversing public roads in Austin, including highways, with no human in the driver’s seat or front passenger seat of the car.
Tesla did not say which version of its software and hardware had been installed and used in the car shown in the clip — or if and when that technology would be commercially available to its customers.
A Model Y owners’ manual, available on the Tesla website, says that in order to use Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) option — which is the company’s most advanced, partially automated driving system available today — owners must keep their hands on the wheel, and remain ready to take over steering or braking at any time.
The vehicle in Tesla’s video was shown operating without a driver on the highway, passing through residential streets and around parking lots before arriving and stopping for a handoff to a customer. The buyer was waiting by the curb at an apartment building alongside Tesla employees, some sporting logo-emblazoned shirts. (The curb was painted red, indicating it is a no-stop fire lane.)
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Is that bad? It sounds like it’s bad. Anyway, clearly they were all expecting this to happen. But the thing about car purchase handovers is that the buyer usually checks the car over to make sure it’s all hunky dory, and gets to object and not accept if it isn’t. This is easier on the dealer forecourt.
So, great accomplishment with the self-driving, but not perhaps as useful as it appears.
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He thought an employee stole crypto. The FBI says it was a North Korean scammer • WSJ
Robert McMillan:
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At first, Pemba Sherpa seemed like a great employee. Eager to work, he began as a $35-an-hour coder who sharpened up an app for his boss, Marlon Williams. But a few years later, Williams fired him, thinking he was probably a crook.
On Monday, federal authorities accused him of being something even more nefarious. According to court filings and cyber investigators, the man claiming to be Sherpa was actually Kim Kwang Jin, a North Korean cybercriminal using a stolen identity. He was part of a group of men who traveled the world looking for ways to make money for their heavily sanctioned government. Their methods of choice were drawing paychecks and stealing from their employers.
“This was not a simple scam; it was a long con,” said Daniel Polk, a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In a federal indictment that was unsealed Monday, Jin and three accomplices—all North Koreans—were charged with five counts of wire fraud and money laundering. Also charged were Kang Tae Bok, Jong Pong Ju and Chang Nam Il.
The men remain at large, but FBI and Justice Department officials said Monday that they are looking for opportunities to arrest them. They also announced charges against people who allegedly helped the North Koreans and searches at 29 “laptop farms,” operated in 16 states, places that allegedly helped the North Koreans log into their U.S. jobs. A request for comment to North Korea’s United Nations mission in New York went unanswered Monday.
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This is starting to feel like part of the landscape; like we’ve heard the story of North Korea exploiting remote hiring and working, and crypto’s untraceability so often that it’s just “that thing that happens”, as if it were as natural as the weather.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 