When you test the Apple Watch against other exercise monitors, how does it fare at calorie counting? CC-licensed photo by Shinya Suzuki on Flickr.

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There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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A selection of 10 links for you. Eat 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.

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Napster is back—and it’s betting big on holographic avatars • Fast Company

Marty Swant:

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Copyright lawsuits and ethical debates have led some to say the AI industry is in its “Napster era.” Now, Napster itself is reentering the chat with its own AI bet.

Last month, the former dot-com darling launched a conversational AI platform with dozens of “AI companions” trained with topical expertise to help users learn, collaborate, create, and problem-solve. Napster also unveiled the View, a 2.1in display that attaches to a laptop as a “second screen” for two-way 3D holographic video chats.

Unlike in the 1990s, the file-sharing pioneer is no longer a first mover. The nostalgia-laden brand joins an already crowded field of AI agents and competing devices from both giants and startups.

Napster’s platform used frontier AI models from OpenAI and Gemini to develop a new “large persona model” (LPM) trained on 30 psychometric characteristics mined from organizational psychology, says Napster chief technology officer Edo Segal. Each companion embodies some sort of profession as a topical expert, along with therapists, doctors, nutritionists are chefs, architects, engineers, and educators. Business-minded offerings help with everything from financial planning and tax strategy to legal issues and public policy.

The goal is to allow users to explore endless customizable personalities, each with distinct voices, Segal tells Fast Company: “We’ve made it possible to effectively explore building these endless universes of these personas.” Napster’s platform is based on tech developed by Touchcast, a startup founded by Segal that Infinite Reality acquired for $500m this spring.

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Napster really is a zombie company: all the really remains is the brand, because everything that it was, everything that made it special for those few precious months in the late 1990s, has rotted away. So now it tries to ride the coattails of whatever’s new or buzzy every time the tech cycle renews.

Don’t believe me? In 2022 it was going to offer a crypto token – and NFTs. How did that go, do you think?
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Threads is nearing X’s daily app users, new data shows • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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Instagram Threads is close to catching up to top competitor X in terms of mobile app users, according to new data from market intelligence provider Similarweb. In June 2025, Threads’ mobile app for iOS and Android saw 115.1 million daily active users, representing 127.8% year-over-year growth; X reached 132 million daily actives, as its year-over-year growth declined by 15.2%.

By comparison, decentralized social network Bluesky grew a sizable 372.5% year-over-year as of June, but its worldwide daily active users remain a fairly small figure: just 4.1 million daily active users as of June, the firm’s estimates indicate. (In total, Bluesky has over 37 million registered users at this time, its own data shows.)

Bluesky had benefited greatly late last year following the US presidential elections, as users left X in protest of its owner, Elon Musk, becoming closely allied with President Trump. That initial surge began slowing earlier this year. More recently, Bluesky has been on the receiving end of a number of complaints that it’s become too much of a left-leaning echo chamber, which could have pushed some users back to Threads.

While Bluesky still has long-term potential because of how its infrastructure enables a more open, user-configurable form of social networking, the current race now is between Threads and X.

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I don’t experience Bluesky or Threads intruding into the broader discourse. Haven’t logged onto Threads for a long time. The relative size of Bluesky to the other two, though, is borne out by how busy it feels – along with the woeful algorithm that it uses for its “Discover” tab. Can’t have social media without proper outrage!
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The newsbrands most hit by increased zero-click searches from Google • Press Gazette

Charlotte Tobitt:

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Mail Online is among the most-impacted major newsbrands by the arrival of Google’s AI Overviews, according to Press Gazette analysis of new Similarweb data.

Of the top 100 search keywords driving traffic to dailymail.co.uk (which redirects to a .com URL in certain countries), 32 triggered AI Overviews in May 2025.

In 68.8% of searches for these keywords where an AI Overview was present in May, no click was made by the user to go to the site (compared with 54.9% of searches not driving a click overall when looking at the site’s top-100 search terms).

It was a similar story in April (69.2% of zero clicks for AI Overviews keywords versus 56.1% overall) and March (71.3% with an AI Overview and 56% overall).

In May 2024, when AI Overviews was widely launched in the US mid-month, Mail Online had a zero-click search rate of 48% – indicating there has been a huge increase since the feature arrived.

The latest Similarweb data shared with Press Gazette looks at the 100 biggest websites in its news and media category, the top 100 search keywords for each and how many of those triggered an AI Overview.

It then compared the average occurrence of zero-click searches where an AI Overview Google summary of the article was present versus the overall rate of zero-click searches.

…Outside of solely looking at the top-100 dataset, Similarweb has found that zero-click news searches in Google increased from 56% when AI Overviews were first launched in May 2024 to almost 69% in May this year.

The fact that the dramatic increase in zero-click searches was less marked when looking only at the top 100 news websites globally and in the US could suggest that people are more likely to click through to well-known brands that they know and trust.

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At the same time, it also means that smaller sites are losing out even worse than the big ones from AI Overview. Every change in the web – well, Google – seems to concentrate power in a smaller and smaller group of bigger and bigger sites.
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Why you should never trust a fitness watch to count how many calories you’re burning • Daily Mail Online

Harry Wallop:

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First, I needed to have my basal metabolic rate (BMR) measured. This is the number of calories you burn even when you are lying down because breathing and pumping blood requires lots of energy.

[Sports entrepreneur Oewn] Hutchins performed various tests on me, including a Dexa scan to get my body fat percentage, which is needed to get an accurate BMR. He also measured how much oxygen I burn just by breathing.

Wearables do not have access to your BMR. All they have is the data you supply to them when you first register and set up your device: your age, height and weight. This allows them to calculate your body mass index (BMI) – which is a loose substitute for body fat percentage.

The gadget companies then use various equations – many of which were developed more than a century ago and are not very accurate – to estimate your BMR with the information they have.

After these initial tests came the main part: a VO2 max test to measure the amount of oxygen your body can absorb and use when exercising. This involved me being strapped to an exercise bike wearing an accurate heart monitor strap and a mask that measured how much oxygen I breathed in and out.

“The difference is what your body absorbs. For every 207 milliliters of oxygen your body has consumed, you’ve burned one calorie”, Hutchins explained. “For calorie counting, this test is the most accurate. It is literally measuring how much energy you are burning, based on the amount of oxygen you are absorbing.”

While being measured by Hutchins’ machines, I was also using my wearables. So, how did they do when it came to assessing my calorie burning? We have displayed the accuracy of each device as a percentage – how much they were above or below the accurate score.

A score of 90% means the device underestimated how many calories I was using, potentially leading me to cut out too much food if I was on a diet. A score of, say, 110% means they overestimated how much I was burning, potentially leading me to eat too much.

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Apple Watch: 92%. Fitbit: 72%. Oura ring: 86%. Garmin: 112%. That’s quite surprising for the Apple Watch, which was the closest of those tested. And even then it’s shortchanging you on how much work you’ve done!
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The Mediterranean Sea is experiencing a record-smashing heatwave • The Washington Post

Ben Noll and Chico Harlan:

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The most extreme heat event on the planet right now is happening not on land but at sea.
A prolonged, record-smashing marine heat wave is scorching the Mediterranean, where water temperatures have hit levels unprecedented for the early summer. The Mediterranean’s average temperature is currently 26ºC (78.8ºF), compared with a long-term average of 23ºC (73.4ºF) at this time of year.

On a gradient map showing ocean temperature anomalies, the Mediterranean is a deep, blazing red.
In certain parts of the sea, particularly the western basin around Spain, France and Italy, temperatures are more than 7 ºC (12.6ºF) above the average.

“For large water bodies that’s ludicrous,” Jeff Berardelli, a US meteorologist, said on social media.

For most people, the event might not seem as obvious as the brutal heat wave hitting the region on land. Europe this week baked under an intense heat dome that led the Eiffel Tower to close its summit. But elevated marine temperatures can have extensive and dangerous consequences.

They can raise temperatures and humidity in coastal communities. They can provide extra moisture to the atmosphere, fueling stronger storms. And they can upend ecosystems, bleaching coral and triggering mass mortality events of certain species — such as sea grasses and sponges — that cannot escape to cooler waters.

…Sea temperatures in the Mediterranean Sea have been record-breaking on more than 50 days so far in 2025.

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Measles cases surge to record high since disease was declared eliminated in the US • CNN

Deidre McPhillips:

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Falling childhood vaccine coverage and a large, smoldering outbreak that was kindled in an undervaccinated pocket of West Texas have driven the United States to a troubling new milestone: There have been more measles cases in the US this year than any other since the disease was declared eliminated a quarter-century ago.

There have been at least 1,277 confirmed cases of measles reported in the US in 2025, according to data from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Outbreak Response Innovation. Just halfway through the year, the case tally has already surpassed the last record from 2019, when there were a total of 1,274 cases.

Experts say this year’s cases are likely to be severely undercounted because many are going unreported. Three people have died from measles this year – two children in Texas and one adult in New Mexico, all of whom were unvaccinated – matching the total number of US measles deaths from the previous two and a half decades.

Measles was declared eliminated in the US in 2000, meaning there has not been continuous transmission for more than a year at a time. Reaching this status was “a historic public health achievement,” according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, possible in large part because of vaccine development.

…Before this year, there have been an average of about 180 measles cases reported each year since the disease was declared eliminated, according to CDC data.

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Canada: we’ve got a huge outbreak in Alberta!
US: hold our unpasteurised unvaccinated beer. (Thanks Joe S for the pointer.)
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Kerrville didn’t have weather sirens used by other cities • KXAN Austin

Matt Grant and Dalton Huey:

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At a Friday news conference, Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said he “can’t answer” why camps weren’t evacuated but acknowledged: “We do not have a warning system.”

“We didn’t know this flood was coming,” Kelly told reporters. “Rest assured, no one knew this kind of flood was coming. We have floods all the time. This is the most dangerous river valley in the United States and we deal with floods on a regular basis. When it rains, we get water. We had no reason to believe that this was going to be anything like what’s happened here. None whatsoever.”

Nicole Wilson, 42, watched the news conference from her home in San Antonio and was “blown away.” Wilson told KXAN two of her friends have daughters that were at Camp Mystic and one had a son at Camp La Junta. All three children are accounted for. One of the girl’s cousins, however, is still missing, she said.

“Just not having those plans in place is crazy to think about,” she said.  “That they wouldn’t have risk mitigation in place when you’re surrounded by water.”

While the National Weather Service issued flash flood warnings and the city of Kerrville’s Facebook pages warned to “move to higher ground immediately,” the young campers at Camp Mystic likely wouldn’t have seen that since cell phones, smart watches, iPads and anything with Wi-Fi capability were considered “unacceptable electronic devices” to bring and “not allowed,” according to a recent list of instructions sent to parents.

Camp Mystic is located less than 20 miles west of Kerrville in Hunt, which is in Kerr County.

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Another explanation given was that people wouldn’t pay the taxes that would enable this. Yet another that funding for the sirens was blocked (of course by Republicans who refuse to shell out on anything).

One hopes that everyone now understands that Facebook is not a useful alarm system for deadly weather events – including those where climate change played a role.
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The Velvet Sundown “spokesman” admits he is not affiliated with the AI band • Stereogum

Abby Jones:

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The plot has thickened tremendously. On Wednesday Rolling Stone ran an interview with Andrew Frelon, a guy who claimed to be a spokesperson and “adjunct” member of the Velvet Sundown, a “band” made with AI whose songs have now garnered over a million streams total on Spotify. In that phone interview, Frelon admitted to orchestrating an “art hoax” with the Velvet Sundown, explaining: “It’s trolling. People before, they didn’t care about what we did, and now suddenly, we’re talking to Rolling Stone, so it’s like, ‘Is that wrong?’” What is wrong, at least in my humble opinion, is tricking Rolling Stone into interviewing you; turns out that’s what Frelon did.

According to his blog and the Velvet Sundown’s Spotify bio, he’s not actually affiliated with the project after all.

In a lengthy and illuminating post to his Medium, Frelon — who’s using a pseudonym in all of this — explained that he has a background in web privacy, and he’s used generative AI “to uncover vulnerabilities in order to fix them.” He’s also used generative AI for his own creative pursuits outside of his day job.

He says that on June 29, a day after Stereogum published this news post about the Velvet Sundown, he started seeing coverage about this AI “band,” and he decided he wanted in on it. “A year ago with a friend, we attempted much the same formula as TVS seemed to be using as an experiment on Spotify to see if we could get an entirely AI-generated band to trend and earn money,” he writes.

“Because of those experiences, I completely understood TVS as a phenomenon. I also noticed based on media coverage that there were not really any social media accounts associated with the band, apart from an Instagram account with a few obvious AI-generated images of the band on it. Suddenly, I had the crazy idea, what if I inserted an extra layer of weird into this story? What if I re-purposed an old Twitter account I’d barely used for another project, and made that into an ‘official’ looking account for TVS?”

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As Ryan Broderick points out, there’s no copyright in AI-generated content, so a real human band could go out and play its songs and get paid for the gigs and not need to pay royalties. Easy money! If enough people like the music, that is.
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‘F1’ overtakes ‘Napoleon’ as Apple’s highest-grossing film, with $293m box office • Variety

Rebecca Rubin:

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Yet the ticket sales for “F1” are at least a step in the right direction for the fledgling studio’s theatrical ambitions. After Apple siphoned off a string of commercial misfires (with budgets at or above $200m, neither “Killers of the Flower Moon” nor “Napoleon” [$158m and $221m box office respectively] were in danger of turning a theatrical profit), “F1” was considered an inflection point for the tech giant. There was a growing internal sense that if a crowd-pleaser like “F1” didn’t work on the big screen, Apple would be better off abandoning the movie business in favor of television.

After all, the company has fielded plenty of small screen successes on AppleTV+ including “Severance” and “Ted Lasso.”

Apple’s future film strategy won’t hinge solely on the success of “F1.” And more importantly, the racing drama isn’t close to climbing out of the red. “F1” cost more than $250m to produce and roughly $100m more to market, which means the tentpole will require multiple laps around the track to justify its massive price tag. But these ticket sales, which are encouraging for any adult-skewing original film, at least give Apple a reason to stay the course. Oh yeah, it also helps that Apple has a $3 trillion market cap and doesn’t face the same financial pressure of traditional studios.

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The $293m figure agrees with (or comes from) Box Office Mojo. Given this is only the second week, and we’re in summer, I’d say F1 has a decent chance of breaking even, even after the marketing budget. So while I thought it looked formulaic, clearly it has appealed to a lot of people. Question: how many bought tickets because Apple advertised them through its Wallet or TV app?
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Stop making me log in to everything • Embedded

Kate Lindsay:

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Whenever I go to Google something on my phone (recent searches: the name of the ex girlfriend of a friend’s situationship, “mexico outlet plug,” and “whats wrong with Halo Top”), my mobile browser prompts me to “Try more ways to search in the Google app.” I’m presented with two options, but there’s only one they put in a blue button, and that’s “continue.” Continue, one would assume, with what I’m already doing, which is getting the identical experience in a mobile browser. Unless, of course, you read the other option, the one in a white button that blends into the background: “Stay in browser.” It’s only the existence of “stay in browser” that defines what “continue” actually means in this context, but it’s already too late. I am stupid, the “continue” button is blue, and this is all on purpose.

Not only do I now find myself in the App Store, but I am UNABLE to return to the browser page I was on without being immediately forced off again. By pressing “continue,” that tab has been sentenced to an infinite loop of sending me back to the App Store. The only way to stop this from happening is to quickly close the tab entirely before it can boot you off again. I’m always so angry about this that, even if I would have downloaded the app, I won’t now.

I have similar experiences everywhere online now. You can hardly access anything without logging in, and if you can access the reddit thread or article or what have you, you will be prompted to open or download the app, which will then require you to log in. As someone who deleted their Twitter and Facebook accounts, I can no longer view even a public profile in its entirety. If I want to watch a TikTok on my browser (because I’m on my laptop or trying to get the link), I have to navigate the worst UX imaginable. These platforms will allow you to see something without logging in—Twitter, for instance, will show you a user’s most popular posts—but their message to casual browsers is clear with every App Store pop up and tedious design choice: we fucking hate you.

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This is so true. Also: would it kill you, browser tab, to remember that I logged in last time the machine was awake, and hang on to that tiny realisation so I don’t have to do it again? (Looking very hard at you, New Yorker. But also others.)
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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