What if you could find the most likely restaurant in a town.. or the most unlikely? Data can. CC-licensed photo by Ben Sutherland on Flickr.

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It’s Friday, but no post due at the Social Warming Substack

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

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AI helps find formula for paint to keep buildings cooler • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

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AI-engineered paint could reduce the sweltering urban heat island effect in cities and cut air-conditioning bills, scientists have claimed, as machine learning accelerates the creation of new materials for everything from electric motors to carbon capture.

Materials experts have used artificial intelligence to formulate new coatings that can keep buildings between 5ºC and 20ºC cooler than normal paint after exposure to midday sun. They could also be applied to cars, trains, electrical equipment and other objects that will require more cooling in a world that is heating up.

Using machine learning, researchers at universities in the US, China, Singapore and Sweden designed new paint formulas tuned to best reflect the sun’s rays and emit heat, according to a peer-reviewed study published in the science journal Nature.

It is the latest example of AI being used to leapfrog traditional trial-and-error approaches to scientific advances. Last year the British company MatNex used AI to create a new kind of permanent magnet used in electric vehicle motors to avoid the use of rare earth metals, whose mining is carbon-intensive.

Microsoft has released AI tools to help researchers rapidly design new inorganic materials – often crystalline structures used in solar panels and medical implants. And there are hopes for new materials to better capture carbon in the atmosphere and to make more efficient batteries.

The paint research was carried out by academics at the University of Texas in Austin, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the National University of Singapore and Umeå University in Sweden. It found that applying one of several new AI-enabled paints to the roof of a four-storey apartment block could save electricity equivalent to 15,800 kilowatt hours a year in a hot climate such as Rio de Janeiro’s or Bangkok’s. If the paint were applied to 1,000 blocks, that could save enough electricity to power more than 10,000 air conditioning units for a year.

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AI can be good! Surprisingly.
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How the hottest place in India survives • The New York Times

Mujib Mashal and Hari Kumar:

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The unbearable temperatures that arrive every summer in India are a threat to lives and livelihoods. Medical services become bogged down. Economic output suffers.

For many Indians, there is no true escape from the heat. Air-conditioning is an impossible dream. Work is done outside, under the sun, and not to work means not to eat.

In the face of those realities, the daily rhythms of life are changing in India, the most populous country on a continent that is warming at a rate twice as fast as the global average. We witnessed these new routines when we spent a day earlier this month in Sri Ganganagar, a region in the desert state of Rajasthan that was the hottest place in the country in mid-June.

The temperature on the day of our visit peaked at 47 degrees Celsius, or 117 degrees Fahrenheit. The next day was even worse: 49ºC, or 121ºF. Relative humidity that has been rising over the past decade compounded the misery.

Still, life carried on.

6 a.m., 30°C, 86°F: Work in the fields and on construction sites begins early, even before dawn, to catch as many cooler hours as possible.

Kulwinder Singh and his son Gurveer were out weeding their cotton field. Gurveer then helped his mother prepare food for the cattle. His sister folded the sheets from simple woven beds in the courtyard, where the family sleeps at night to seek some respite in the breeze.

9 a.m., 36°C, 97°F: As temperatures started climbing, a canal on the edge of a village in the district was growing busy, as children jumped in to cool off. Anmol Varma, 16, who works at a car accessories shop, said he made several visits to the canal. “All day,” he said.

…Noon, 43°C, 109ºF: By noon, the laborers at the construction site had paused their plastering of a wall. But there wasn’t much relief as they cooked their lunch under the baking sun. The villages around Sri Ganganagar become largely deserted between midday and late afternoon, with people retreating indoors.

But that was less of an option in the city proper. Roadside carts remained open, and construction work continued in the blistering heat. The fire department tried to cool off the streets by spraying water, and volunteers ran water stands. “The main thing is the laborers and people who work outside,” said Dr. Deepak Monga, who leads the city’s main hospital. “They continue their work, because otherwise they die of hunger.”

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India may be in the front line of the human effects as the wet bulb temperature approaches that where people just can’t survive. How soon? We don’t know.
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Google wipes 350 Android apps tied to major ad fraud scheme • AdWeek

Kendra Barnett:

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An ad fraud scheme, dubbed IconAds, that served out-of-context mobile ads has led Google to pull 352 apps from its Play Store. 

The operation, uncovered by cybersecurity firm HUMAN, was designed to generate revenue through spoofed ad impressions. Users download Android apps—which pose as generic tools like flashlights, file scanners, and photo apps—that disguise their icons on user screens to impede detection. They then display ads on users’ screens, even when the apps in question are not in use.

HUMAN doesn’t have exact numbers of the financial impact, but estimates the impact, including wasted ad spend, is firmly in the seven-figure range. At its height, the apps generated around 1.2 billion ad bid requests per day. Traffic generated by IconAds primarily originated from Brazil, Mexico, and the U.S.

“This is a very uninvestigated, unseen side of the internet where fraudsters are making millions of dollars, and there are not a lot of people that are paying attention or actually mitigating,” said Gavin Reid, HUMAN’s chief information security officer.

Four months ago, a similar Android ad fraud scheme was uncovered by ad verification firm Integral Ad Science, leading Google to remove more than 180 apps from the Play Store. 

Google declined ADWEEK’s request for comment.

…In some examples, impacted apps appeared on users’ home screens as white circles with no name. When a user clicked the white circle, nothing happened. The apps then deploy hidden ad-serving code, serving interstitial ads on the user’s screen, regardless of whether the app is in use or not.

In another instance, an app mimicked the Google Play Store logo. When a user clicked, the app redirected the user to the real Google Play Store—only to work secretly in the background to serve out-of-context ads.

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Firmly into millions of dollars. And that’s just the fraud that’s caught.
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No one likes video meetings. So they’re sending their AI note takers instead • The Washington Post

Lisa Bonos and Danielle Abril:

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Clifton Sellers attended a Zoom meeting last month where robots outnumbered humans.

He counted six people on the call including himself, Sellers recounted in an interview. The ten others attending were note-taking apps powered by artificial intelligence that had joined to record, transcribe and summarize the meeting.

Some of the AI helpers were assisting a person who was also present on the call; others represented humans who had declined to show up but sent a bot that listens but can’t talk in their place. The human-machine imbalance made Sellers concerned that the modern thirst for AI-powered optimization was starting to impede human interaction.

“I want to talk to people,” said Sellers, who runs a content agency for entrepreneurs out of Birmingham, Alabama. “I don’t want to talk to a bunch of note takers,” he said — before adding that he has occasionally himself sent an AI note taker to meetings in his place.

Experiences like Sellers’s are becoming more common as AI tools gain momentum in white-collar workplaces, offering time-saving shortcuts but also new workplace etiquette conundrums.

…Sending an AI bot to experience things in your absence could be the next logical step after social media and smartphones created the expectation that anything that can be recorded, will be.

“We’re moving into a world where nothing will be forgotten,” Allie K. Miller, CEO of Open Machine, which helps companies and executives deploy AI, said in a phone interview last week. Always-on recording is changing human behavior, she said, from college parties to corporate boardrooms.

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Eventually we can just send the bots and they can talk among themselves.
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Stalking the statistically improbable restaurant… with data! • Ethan Zuckerman

Ethan Zuckerman:

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Last summer, I wrote about the statistically improbable restaurant, the restaurant you wouldn’t expect to find in a small American city: the excellent Nepali food in Erie, PA and Akron, OH; a gem of a Gambian restaurant in Springfield, IL.

Statistically improbable restaurants often tell you something about the communities they are based in: Erie and Akron have large Lhotshampa refugee populations, Nepali-speaking people who lived in Bhutan for years before being expelled from their county; Springfield has University of Illinois Springfield, which attracts lots of west African students, some of whom have settled in the area.

The existence of the statistically improbable restaurant implies a statistically probable restaurant distribution: the mix of restaurants we’d expect to find in an “average” American city. Of course, once you dig into the idea of an “average” city, the absurdity of the concept becomes clear.

There are 343 cities in the US with populations of over 100,000 people, from 8.47 million in New York City to 100,128 in Sunrise, Florida (a small city in the Ft. Lauderdale, FL metro area). Within that set are global megacities like New York and LA, state capitols, college towns, towns growing explosively and those shrinking slowly.

I’ve retrieved data about the restaurants in 340 of these cities using the Google Places API. This is a giant database of geographic information from across the world – not only does it include information about restaurants, but about parks, churches, museums and other points of interest. The API was designed to make it easy to search by proximity – “return all restaurants within 2km of this point” – but it’s recently gained an “aggregate” attribute, which allows you to ask questions like “How many Mexican restaurants are there in Wichita Falls, Texas?”.

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Wonder if he would do it for the UK? Smaller dataset, at least.
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That dropped call with customer service? It was on purpose • The Atlantic

Chris Colin:

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In 2023 (the most recent year for which data are available), the National Customer Rage Survey showed that American consumers were, well, full of rage. The percentage seeking revenge—revenge!—for their hassles had tripled in just three years.

I decided to start paying attention. Was the impenetrability of these contact centers actually deliberate? (Buying a new product or service sure is seamless.) Why do we so often feel like everything’s broken? And why does it feel more and more like this brokenness is breaking us?

Turns out there’s a word for it.

In the 2008 best seller Nudge, the legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein and the economist Richard H. Thaler marshalled behavioral-science research to show how small tweaks could help us make better choices. An updated version of the book includes a section on what they called “sludge”—tortuous administrative demands, endless wait times, and excessive procedural fuss that impede us in our lives.

The whole idea of sludge struck a chord. In the past several years, the topic has attracted a growing body of work. Researchers have shown how sludge leads people to forgo essential benefits and quietly accept outcomes they never would have otherwise chosen. Sunstein had encountered plenty of the stuff working with the Department of Homeland Security and, before that, as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. “People might want to sign their child up for some beneficial program, such as free transportation or free school meals, but the sludge might defeat them,” he wrote in the Duke Law Journal.

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I think the fact that there’s a “customer rage survey” tells its own story. In the UK, moneysavingexpert Martin Lewis has been trying to collect data about phone wait times, but I haven’t seen anything from it. Remember: your call is important to these companies, because it means call volumes are higher than expected.
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Racist AI-generated videos are the newest slop garnering millions of views on TikTok • Media Matters

Abbie Richards:

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Racist and antisemitic AI-generated videos are getting millions of views on TikTok. 

These videos — seemingly created with Google’s Veo 3, a publicly accessible text-to-video generator — traffic in racist tropes, such as depicting Black people as monkeys and criminals and featuring imagery of Black people with watermelons and fried chicken. 

Users are also posting misleading AI-generated videos of immigrants and protesters, including videos in which protesters are run over by cars. And in an especially dystopian nightmare, AI-generated videos are reenacting marginalized groups’ historical traumas, depicting concentration camps and Ku Klux Klan attacks on Black Americans. 

TikTok’s community guidelines prohibit videos dehumanizing racial and ethnic groups as well as “threatening or expressing a desire to cause physical injury to a person or a group.” The platform has a long history of struggling to contain hate speech, violent content, and misleading AI-generated content, and the dehumanizing and sometimes violent videos that Media Matters has now identified are seemingly spreading unchecked on the social media platform. 

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I wouldn’t set any story by TikTok’s “community guidelines”. If it weren’t obvious to people that China is happy for it to completely mess up peoples’ heads, maybe this would help cement that. Trump, meanwhile, hasn’t shut it down or forced a sale to a US company, in breach of the law.
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I built The Torment Nexus (Political Podcast Edition) • Techtris

James Ball:

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Zach’s 24-hour polling podcast is his version of the Torment Nexus [an imaginary cautionary tale in SF which tech companies then implement], and he’s the sci-fi author. So I wondered what might happen if I took on the role of the tech company. More specifically, I wondered whether “AI” had advanced enough in the few years since 2019 that I could just ping the webcomic into ChatGPT and ask it to create what was being described therein.

Spoiler warning: it could, sort of. You can listen to the results right here, right now – I am now the proud(?) owner and creator of an entirely AI powered 24/7 podcast in which “Alex” and “Blake” eternally discuss Donald Trump’s approval ratings and the impact recent headlines will have on them.

It’s quite possibly the worst thing I have ever done. I think I love it.

The whole process was also incredibly telling – to me, at least – about the gap between what AI ‘can’ do now in theory and what it can actually do in practice. I tried to follow a rough rule here of asking the AI to give extremely simple, non-technical and step-by-step instructions throughout, which I would then follow and execute (partly because I wasn’t using agentic AI and partly because I wouldn’t trust it with either my card details or various login credentials even if I did).

I also resolved not to fix problems myself: by and large if the AI told me to do something stupid I would do it. When something didn’t work or gave me an error message I fed that back into ChatGPT (I was using o3) and let it deal with the problem. Mostly.

The basics worked well, at least at first. ChatGPT successfully read the comic and understood the 24/7 podcast concept. I had to explain I wanted it to make it, explain every step in detail (including writing all relevant code), and to do so for a running cost of less than $30 a month. I also had to clarify that I wanted it to have the voices discussing real headlines (it initially took “nonsense” literally) and that there should be two characters having a conversation, instead of one character monologuing around the clock, forever.

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I’m going to be that in a few years there will be a serious radio station which does this, with adverts of course.
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The ‘Stop Killing Games’ petition achieves 1 million signatures goal • Inside Gaming

Andrew Highton:

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The movement began in 2024, and the main website states: “‘Stop Killing Games’ is a consumer movement started to challenge the legality of publishers destroying video games they have sold to customers. An increasing number of video games are sold effectively as goods – with no stated expiration date – but designed to be completely unplayable as soon as support from the publisher ends.” [ie when servers for online games are turned off.]

Well over a year later, the main petition has reached one million signatures through the European Citizens’ Initiative. Not only that, but the UK-targeted petition aimed to bring this before the UK government has eclipsed its 100K goal too, standing at over 130,000 signatures and counting.

This now means the EU will likely address the matter and bring in legislation to counteract the practice of gaming publishers: “There is a very strong chance that the European Commission will pass new law that will both protect consumer rights to retain video games that customers have purchased and advance preservation efforts massively.“

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The fact that so many games can just die based on a company’s whims is obviously a big problem. Will the legal systems mandate anything?
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified