The humphead parrotfish is one of the large fish species being killed off by overfishing in the Indian Ocean. CC-licensed photo by NOAA Photo Library on Flickr.

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

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

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

Law360 mandates reporters use AI “bias” detection on all stories • Nieman Journalism Lab

Andrew Deck:

»

A new policy at Law360, the legal news service owned by LexisNexis, requires that every story pass through an AI-powered “bias” detection tool before publication.

The Law360 Union, which represents over 200 editorial staffers across the 350-person newsroom, has denounced the mandate since it went into effect in mid-May. On June 17, unit chair Hailey Konnath sent a petition to management calling for the tool to be made “completely voluntary.”

“As journalists, we should be trusted to select our own tools of the trade to do our information-gathering, reporting and editing — not pressured to use unproven technology against our will,” reads the petition, which was signed by over 90% of the union.

Law360 currently reaches over 2.8 million daily newsletter subscribers with breaking legal news and analysis. At the end of last year, the newsroom began experimenting with a suite of AI tools built in-house by LexisNexis to streamline story production. One of those tools analyzes the overall “bias” of article drafts and picks out lines of copy that should be edited to sound more “impartial.”

…On June 12, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration’s decision to deploy the National Guard in Los Angeles in response to anti-ICE protests was illegal. Law360 reporters were on the breaking story, publishing a news article just hours after the ruling (which has since been appealed). Under Law360’s new mandate though, the story first had to pass through the bias indicator.

Several sentences in the story were flagged as biased, including this one: “It’s the first time in 60 years that a president has mobilized a state’s National Guard without receiving a request to do so from the state’s governor.” According to the bias indicator, this sentence is “framing the action as unprecedented in a way that might subtly critique the administration.” It was best to give more context to “balance the tone.”

«

American journalism, already so flat in tone that it might have been ironed, is now being turned into porridge by AI. What an endpoint.
unique link to this extract

The Concorde-and-caviar era of Condé Nast, when magazines ruled the earth • The New York Times

Michael Grynbaum with an extract from his book about Condé Nast:

»

To sell his magazines’ upper-class fantasies to the masses, Mr. [Si] Newhouse — a mercurial connoisseur who collected Rothkos and wore sweatshirts to the office — bankrolled a kind of dream life for the workers in his employ. When Art Cooper, the editor of GQ, hosted dinners in Milan in the 1990s, he flew out his food critic for the sole purpose of selecting the wine pairings. Ron Galotti, the Condé adman who inspired Mr. Big from “Sex and the City,” shipped his Ferrari Testarossa to Colorado to impress an advertiser. The photographer Irving Penn smashed a hundred Cartier glasses in pursuit of the perfect shard.

Outsiders who scoffed at this profligacy misunderstood the masquerade. Condé’s editors were the original influencers, their lives a top-to-bottom marketing campaign for the company that hired them. All those limousines and Concorde flights serviced an illusion: that the readers who subscribed and the brands that advertised could possess a piece of this glamorous world. The decadence was the point — and when it dwindled, so did the power of Condé Nast.

Today, the company is a husk of its former self. Many of its magazines have closed or been riddled by layoffs; its authority has been all but demolished by the web. When Mr. Carter’s successor at Vanity Fair, Radhika Jones, abruptly stepped down this spring, questions swirled over whether the job, once a crown jewel of journalism, was still desirable. (Some prominent editors like Janice Min said no.)

…After Condé Nast purchased the pioneering tech magazine Wired in 1998, its editor, Katrina Heron, flew to New York to meet her new bosses. She was immediately chastised for booking a room at a modest Midtown hotel. At an executive’s urging, she switched to the St. Regis on Fifth Avenue, which was several times the price.

“Good,” the executive told her. “When people have breakfast with you, they want you to be staying at the St. Regis.”

Writers on assignment were encouraged to FedEx luggage to their destination, rather than schlep it on the plane. A Vanity Fair writer, reporting a story in London, lived for a month with her husband and children at the Dorchester, the prestigious hotel overlooking Hyde Park; a separate room was reserved for their nanny on the Newhouse dime.

The original influencers, perhaps, but the money spent is eye-watering, and almost upsetting.
unique link to this extract

US founder calls out Indian techie for “scamming” multiple startups: “I fired this guy in one week” • Hindustan Times via MSN

Sanya Jain:

»

Suhail Doshi, co-founder and former CEO of Mixpanel, has accused an Indian man of working at multiple startups simultaneously under false pretences. In a post on X, San Francisco-based Doshi identified Soham Parekh as a “scammer” who has allegedly duped several companies. He warned other founders to steer clear of him.

Doshi, who is also the founder of Playground AI, claimed that Parekh was briefly employed at his company. He said Parekh was fired within a week and warned against moonlighting – but the warning seems to have fallen on deaf ears as the Indian man continued to work with multiple startups.

“PSA: there’s a guy named Soham Parekh (in India) who works at 3-4 startups at the same time. He’s been preying on YC companies and more. Beware,” the US-based entrepreneur posted on X this afternoon. “I fired this guy in his first week and told him to stop lying / scamming people. He hasn’t stopped a year later. No more excuses,” he added.

Doshi shared the ex-employee’s CV on X. According to the CV, Soham Parekh has worked at companies like Dynamo AI, Union AI, Synthesia and Alan AI in various technical roles. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Mumbai and a master’s degree from Georgia Institute of Technology, as per the CV.

However, while sharing the CV publicly, Doshi warned that it is “Probably 90% fake and most links are gone.”

The Playground founder further claimed that he tried to talk sense into Parekh but failed. “I want to also say that I tried to talk sense into this guy, explain the impact, and give him a chance to turn a new leaf because sometimes that’s what a person needs. But it clearly didn’t work,” he wrote. Doshi also said he corroborated this account with more than six companies before shaming Parekh publicly.

«

There are lots of amusing results on a search where Parekh seems to have been interviewed as some sort of great worthy on various topics. There’s a 2021 Hacker News post where he boasted about being on $1m+ revenue run rate from doing ten remote jobs where desperate companies were hiring him and he did nothing until they fired him.
unique link to this extract

FaceTime in iOS 26 will freeze your call if someone starts undressing • 9to5Mac

Ryan Christoffel:

»

When Apple unveiled iOS 26 last month, it mentioned a variety of new family tools coming for child accounts. One of those announcements involved a change coming to FaceTime to block nudity.

Communication Safety expands to intervene when nudity is detected in FaceTime video calls, and to blur out nudity in Shared Albums in Photos.

However, at least in the iOS 26 beta, it seems that a similar feature may be in place for all users—adults included.

As discovered by iDeviceHelp on X, FaceTime in iOS 26 freezes your call’s video and audio when it detects nudity.
The app will then show the following warning message: “Audio and video are paused because you may be showing something sensitive. If you feel uncomfortable, you should end the call.” (Options: Resume audio and video; End call.)

As you can see, FaceTime provides the option of immediately resuming audio and video, or ending the call.

It’s unclear whether this is an intended behavior, or just a bug in the beta that’s applying the feature to adults when it should only apply to child accounts.

«

Prudish phones! And yet.. there are a few careers that might have been saved by this. Oh well, too late now. It’s off by default. Maybe some people ought to think about enabling it.
unique link to this extract

Microsoft to lay off about 9,000 employees in latest round • The Seattle Times

Alex Halverson:

»

Microsoft is kicking off its fiscal year by laying off thousands of employees in the largest round of layoffs since 2023, the company confirmed Wednesday.

In an ongoing effort to streamline its workforce, Microsoft said as much as 4%, or roughly 9,000, of the company’s employees could be affected by Wednesday’s layoffs. It’s unclear how many are based in [the state of] Washington [where its Redmond headquarters are based].

Microsoft said the cuts would include multiple divisions across the company but did not specify early Wednesday which teams would bear the brunt. Reports over the past two weeks from Bloomberg said sales and marketing employees, as well as gaming workers, would be heavily affected.

The Verge reported Wednesday that Xbox chief Phil Spencer confirmed to employees that the gaming division would be hit. The cuts would, Spencer said, “end or decrease work in certain areas of the business and follow Microsoft’s lead in removing layers of management to increase agility and effectiveness.”

Wednesday’s move follows two waves of layoffs in May and June, which saw Microsoft fire more than 6,000 employees, almost 2,300 of whom were based in Washington.

During May’s round of layoffs, Microsoft emphasized that it wanted to flatten management layers. But data from Washington state showed only about 17% of the cuts in Redmond were designated as managers.

Microsoft had over 228,000 employees worldwide as of June 2024.

«

Gets bigger! Gets smaller! There must be an internal pattern to this – presumably all the AI stuff is getting bigger? Or is that OpenAI’s job? – but it just looks like an endless accordion of employment from the outside.
unique link to this extract

Vanishing giants: the Indian Ocean’s biggest fish need saving • Mongabay

Melita Samoilys:

»

My latest research, spanning 27 coral reef sites across seven countries and done in collaboration with scientists from the U.K. and France, paints a stark picture. The population study, which used visual surveys via scuba, recorded many “zero sightings” instances — where once-abundant predatory sharks, tunas, barracudas, giant groupers (Epinephelus lanceolatus) and other large-bodied groupers, as well as the humphead parrotfish and humphead wrasse, were missing.

Overfishing and insufficient protected area management have driven many of these species toward local extinction. Even in marine reserves where protection is legislated, enforcement is often too weak or the size of the reserves is too small. Some of these large-bodied fishes, which include the largest fish in the world, are now globally endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

…Across the western Indian Ocean, many of these large fish species that once thrived in these waters are now either critically depleted or absent. Even remote regions like the Chagos Archipelago, where protection from fishing is strong, shark abundance is far lower than it should be. Particularly concerning is the near total absence of species like the humphead wrasse, humphead parrotfish and giant grouper. We’re seeing local extinctions unfold in real time, with a guaranteed domino effect.

Ineffective protected areas and overfishing due to lack of enforcement and continued use of destructive fishing equipment are driving these declines in the western Indian Ocean. Many large-bodied species are particularly vulnerable because they grow slowly and take years to reproduce, like groupers, or produce very few young per year, like sharks. Gill nets, which are widely used across the region, are unselective and will capture everything within their mesh size. The largest mesh size gill nets, the size of a large cooking pot lid, are particularly effective at snagging sharks and rays. Even within designated marine protected areas (MPAs), illegal fishing often goes unchecked due to a lack of enforcement.

«

unique link to this extract

Google ends recipe pilot that left creators fearing web-traffic hit • Bloomberg via MSN

Julia Love and Davey Alba:

»

Google has ended tests of a feature that would have let users open a snapshot of cooking-recipe content directly in web search results — a development welcomed by creators and food bloggers who were concerned about eroding traffic to their sites.

In recent months, Alphabet Inc.-owned Google has tested Recipe Quick View, which showed some food bloggers’ content in search. The company framed the feature as an attempt to help users determine whether they are interested in a recipe before visiting a website. But some bloggers said they feared that the product would keep users from clicking through to their sites, depriving them of traffic and ad revenue.

Google on Tuesday confirmed it ended the trial. “We continually experiment with ways to make it easier for people to find helpful information on Search,” a spokesperson for Google said in a statement. “Learnings from these experiments help to inform future development and efforts.”

The company’s retreat on the recipe feature comes amid a larger debate about whether the terms of engagement between the search giant and publishers should be renegotiated as generative AI remakes the web.

«

This is reaching some sort of endpoint. So many recipe sites – so many sites – are full of flannel to try to hit as many possible search terms as they can. Then you have to wade through the flannel to get to what you want. Brevity on web pages is dying in the face of AI generation: Google wants more brevity, web page writers need less. The tug-of-war is eternal.
unique link to this extract

Heathrow considering legal action against National Grid over fire • BBC News

Ben King and Raarea Masud:

»

Heathrow Airport is considering legal action against National Grid after a report found the fire which caused the airport to shut down was a result of a known fault at an electrical substation.

An investigation found that National Grid, which owns the substation which supplies Heathrow, had been aware of a problem since 2018 but failed to fix it. There were numerous opportunities to rectify moisture affecting electrical parts at the North Hyde substation, but maintenance was repeatedly deferred, the report said.

Airlines based at Heathrow have said the closure on 21 March cost carriers between £80m to £100m. Heathrow told the BBC that National Grid “could and should” have prevented the fire and that it expected it to “take accountability for those failings”, which it said “resulted in significant damage and loss for Heathrow and our airlines.”

National Grid said it had taken action since the fire on 20 March, but said such events were “rare” and that Britain had “one of the most reliable networks in the world”. It has not yet responded to Heathrow’s potential legal case.

Following the report being released on Wednesday, energy watchdog Ofgem has launched its own investigation into National Grid. Heathrow, the UK’s biggest airport, shut down as a result of the power cut, which led to thousands of cancelled flights and stranded passengers.

The National Energy System Operator (Neso) said moisture entering electrical components at the substation caused the blaze. It said “elevated” moisture had been detected in July 2018 and that under National Grid’s guidance, such readings indicate “an imminent fault and that the bushing should be replaced”. Bushing is insulating material used around electrical parts.

«

Hard to see how the National Grid gets out of this one.
unique link to this extract

iPhone fold is in testing, due in 2026 • Apple Insider

William Gallagher:

»

After seven years of rolling rumours saying that it was for sure coming next year, the iPhone Fold is now in its production prototyping phrase, ahead of an expected launch in 2026.

Unsurprisingly after so many years of designing and manufacturing iPhones, Apple has a very specific process of prototyping that it follows, as exclusively revealed by AppleInsider. Now, according to DigiTimes, the iPhone fold prototype is in its first round of testing.

DigiTimes says that this testing is earlier than expected, but it appears to fit with recent claims that Apple expected mass production to begin in summer 2026. While this fits with those most recent other reports, it’s still the case that the iPhone fold has been reportedly about to launch for many years. It’s even been reported before that Apple has had not just one, but two folding iPhone prototypes — and possibly more. That is, if Apple hasn’t abandoned the whole idea.

…Overall, though, despite concrete examples of Apple’s interest such as patents covering complex hinges for folding devices, the only constant has been that the iPhone fold is always a year away.

«

Also says that plans for an iPad Fold have been abandoned. Does one really need a foldable iPad? I don’t think so – the longer crease would just be an invitation for dust and gunk. Safer just to have it fixed and put a case on it.

(Though I still don’t get the attraction of foldables.)
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Does playing chess consume as much energy as running a marathon? No. So why do some think it does? CC-licensed photo by Ben Schumin on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Forked. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Sam Altman slams Meta’s AI talent-poaching spree: ‘missionaries will beat mercenaries’ • WIRED

Zoë Schiffer:

»

OpenAI’s chief research officer, Mark Chen, told staff that it felt like “someone has broken into our home and stolen something.”

Altman struck a different tone about the departures in his note on Monday.

“Meta has gotten a few great people for sure, but on the whole, it is hard to overstate how much they didn’t get their top people and had to go quite far down their list; they have been trying to recruit people for a super long time, and I’ve lost track of how many people from here they’ve tried to get to be their Chief Scientist,” he wrote. “I am proud of how mission-oriented our industry is as a whole; of course there will always be some mercenaries.”

He added that “Missionaries will beat mercenaries” and noted that OpenAI is assessing compensation for the entire research organization. “I believe there is much, much more upside to OpenAl stock than Meta stock,” he wrote. “But I think it’s important that huge upside comes after huge success; what Meta is doing will, in my opinion, lead to very deep cultural problems. We will have more to share about this soon but it’s very important to me we do it fairly and not just for people who Meta happened to target.”

Altman then made his pitch for people to remain at OpenAI. “I have never been more confident in our research roadmap,” he wrote. “We are making an unprecedented bet on compute, but I love that we are doing it and I’m confident we will make good use of it. Most importantly of all, I think we have the most special team and culture in the world. We have work to do to improve our culture for sure; we have been through insane hypergrowth. But we have the core right in a way that I don’t think anyone else quite does, and I’m confident we can fix the problems.”

“And maybe more importantly than that, we actually care about building AGI in a good way,” he added. “Other companies care more about this as an instrumental goal to some other mission. But this is our top thing, and always will be. Long after Meta has moved on to their next flavor of the week, or defending their social moat, we will be here, day after day, year after year, figuring out how to do what we do better than anyone else. A lot of other efforts will rise and fall too.”

«

Lots of noise about the huge golden hellos that Zuckerberg is offering, but if they’re going to add huge value to a company, then it makes sense, doesn’t it. Rather like hiring a huge sports star for a team because you know they’ll score. Not sure about the missionaries/mercenaries suggestion, though.
unique link to this extract

Wimbledon 2025: how has the introduction of electronic line-calling gone? • BBC Sport

Jess Anderson:

»

The absence of line judges at Wimbledon on day one of the Grand Slam has certainly been noticeable.

For the first time electronic line calling has been introduced at the All England Club with the well-dressed line judges replaced by AI.

In the absence of the 300 line judges that have been used for the past 148 years, up to 18 cameras, developed by HawkEye, are situated around each court to track the progress of the ball and determine whether it is in or out.

The technology is already in operation at the US and Australian Opens but its introduction at SW19 has been a topic of discussion. The emptiness of the courts is noticeable on Centre Court and Court One, where the vast space behind the baseline is now occupied only by the ball kids.

Britain’s Cameron Norrie said it “looks cool” with the line umpires in place and contributes to the “tradition” of the tournament. “Obviously there’s a lot of jobs and people that love tennis, which will definitely be missed from them,” he said. But while many players agree line judges are part of the spectacle, few can argue with the accuracy of the calls. “As a player it’s pretty black or white with the calls,” added Norrie. “In, out… there’s no mistake, nothing happening. Definitely you’ve got to feel for those linesmen and those people. That’s a bit tough for them, but it’s pretty black or white with the calling.”

The theatre of players challenging the calls has also been a notable absence with fans unable to get involved with the drama of a close call being replayed on the big screen. American 12th seed Frances Tiafoe said he would have liked to see Wimbledon keep line judges. “I actually like [it] with them [line judges] on the court, because I think for fanfare it’s better,” he said. “If I were to hit a serve on a big point, you go up with the challenge, is it in, is it out? The crowd is, like, ‘ohhh’. There’s none of that. Now if I hit a good serve and they call it out, you may still think it’s in, but it doesn’t matter. I think that kind of kills it.”

«

There aren’t any really good explanations of how it works, but this one is decent. And, of course, Wikipedia.
unique link to this extract

No, chess grandmasters do not burn 6000 calories per day • A Note On The Production of Facts

Adam Strandberg:

»

I work on metabolism and have some interest in neurons, so I have on several occasions run into the claim that chess grandmasters burn 6000 calories per day during tournaments. I found this implausible and decided to investigate where it came from. While I am not the first person on the internet to express skepticism of such a large number, nobody seems to have worked out the precise source of the claim. I assumed when I dug into it that I would find a specific methodological error. But while methods enter the story, the real problem is that the number was completely made up.

As far as I can tell, the “patient zero” that caused this claim to become so widespread is this 2019 ESPN article:

»

Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day. Based on breathing rates (which triple during competition), blood pressure (which elevates) and muscle contractions before, during and after major tournaments, Sapolsky suggests that grandmasters’ stress responses to chess are on par with what elite athletes experience.

«

This story was then picked up by many outlets…

«

The game of academic telephone that was played to produce this crazy number (which is comparable with running more than two marathons) is quite entertaining, if it hadn’t produced this zombie statistic. What it suggests is: nobody checks anything for sense.
unique link to this extract

Scientists identify culprit behind biggest-ever US honey bee die-off • Science

Joanna Thompson:

»

U.S. beekeepers had a disastrous winter. Between June 2024 and January 2025, a full 62% of commercial honey bee colonies in the United States died, according to an extensive survey. It was the largest die-off on record, coming on the heels of a 55% die-off the previous winter.

As soon as scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) caught wind of the record-breaking die-offs, they sprang into action—but their efforts were slowed by a series of federal funding cuts and layoffs by President Donald Trump’s administration. Now, six months later, USDA scientists have finally identified a culprit.

According to a preprint posted to the bioRxiv server this month, nearly all the dead colonies tested positive for bee viruses spread by parasitic mites. Alarmingly, every single one of the mites the researchers screened was resistant to amitraz, the only viable mite-specific pesticide—or miticide—of its kind left in humans’ arsenal.

Tracking the rise of miticide resistance is critical, experts say. Honey bees pollinate more than 90 commercial crops in the United States, generate between $20bn and $30bn in agricultural revenue, and play a key role in keeping the US food supply stable.

“There is a lot at stake,” says Danielle Downey, the executive director of Project Apis m., the nonprofit that conducted the bee die-off survey. USDA did not provide comment on its research to Science after multiple inquiries spanning nearly three weeks, with one spokesperson citing a need “to move [the request] through agency clearance.”

Miticide-resistant varroa mites have been a growing issue for beekeepers for years, so much so that breeders have sought to develop mite-resistant bee varieties. Since the 1980s, the parasites have evolved global resistance to at least four major classes of miticide. Unfortunately, effective new compounds are notoriously difficult to develop, and amitraz represented one of the best remaining treatments. But the preprint suggests amitraz could soon fall by the wayside.

«

It’s always bad news with the bees, unfortunately.
unique link to this extract

Trump’s tariff threat pushes Canada to scrap digital services tax • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

In a sudden reversal, Canada has caved and will remove its digital services tax after trade talks with the US suddenly fell apart this weekend.

Blocked just hours before taking effect, the controversial digital services tax (DST) would have charged big US tech companies like Apple, Google, and Meta a 3% tax on all digital services revenue earned from Canadian users. Frustrating US tech giants, Canada also sought to collect retroactive taxes dating back to 2022.

Over the weekend, President Donald Trump claimed the tax was a “direct and blatant attack” on US tech companies and terminated the trade talks, while threatening to impose a new tariff rate on Canadian goods by July 4.

On Sunday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney seemingly bowed to Trump’s pressure campaign, abruptly doing an “about turn” after previously refusing to pause the DST despite Trump’s opposition, NBC News reported.

But it wasn’t just Trump pushing Carney to reconsider the tax. A nonprofit representing CEOs and leaders of some of Canada’s biggest businesses, the Business Council of Canada, had warned that Carney defending the tax risked “undermining Canada’s economic relationship with its most important trading partner,” Al Jazeera reported.

If Trump were to impose new tariffs on Canada, it could have “large ripple effects across both economies,” the Council warned, potentially disrupting markets for automobiles, minerals, energy, and aluminum.

«

Every effort to impose a “digital tax” seems to run into the ground in North America. The picture in Europe seems confused – the UK and other European OECD countries have laws for them but the road to implementation is long.
unique link to this extract

Using AI to humiliate women: the men behind deepfake pornography • Der Spiegel

Marvin Milatz and Max Hoppenstedt:

»

Nudify apps are not hidden in obscure forums or on pornography platforms, rather they are freely available on the internet. The only limitation: Many of these services only work with women’s bodies. The AI programs they use have apparently never been trained to produce naked pictures of men. Images of women in underwear are usually free, with faked photos of subjects in typical pornographic poses available for a price of just a few euros.

Clothoff is one of the leading apps on the market. In just the first six months of 2024, the website received 27 million visitors, with an average of 200,000 pictures being produced by the program each day, according to the company. Thousands of women have likely become victims of the app. The creators of Clothoff are among the most unscrupulous nudify operators and offer photo montages with schoolgirl outfits and pregnant women in sex poses. The app has recently begun marketing the ability to create fake videos with a picture. According to company information, the function has already been used over a million times.

In August 2024, public officials in San Francisco, California went public with a lawsuit against Clothoff and several other nudify apps. They demanded that the services cease operation due to the distribution of child and youth pornography. The investigators from the heart of Silicon Valley were likely also motivated by the fact that cases had become public at several schools in the state in which AI-generated nude images of girls had been circulated. Thus far, however, officials have experienced only moderate success in identifying the people behind the apps or getting them to suspend their services. The operators of Clothoff, in any case, seem unimpressed by the lawsuit.

Just how lucrative Clothoff’s business has become can now be seen by the statements of a whistleblower who has access to internal company information. Working for the app, he says, initially felt like being part of an exciting startup. “But over time, people became just cynical and obsessed with money.” For his own safety and out of concern that the company may seek to retaliate, his identity cannot be revealed. He, too, initially joined the project in the hopes that it would turn out to be profitable, but he now feels partly responsible for what Clothoff has become. Which is why he is going public with his information.

«

unique link to this extract

How plug-in solar panels could help Britons save 30% on energy bills • The Independent

Howard Mustoe:

»

Britons could soon buy cheap solar panels which can be put on balconies, sheds and terraces to cut their energy bills.

The plan, using so-called plug-in solar modules which typically cut bills by 30% in countries where they are already used, has been announced by the government as part of a broader plan to step up solar power access.

Using balconies for solar panels is already common in Germany, where 1.5 million homes use the technology. Locals have named it balkonkraftwerk, or balcony power plant.

Using solar panels this way is a lot cheaper than installing them on a roof, where scaffolding and hiring specialist workers means that even a modest eight-panel array will cost about £5,000.

It will also unlock solar power for many of Britain’s 5.4 million households which rent. Presently, only homeowners can opt to fit solar panels unless they agree a deal with their landlord. Even then, if they moved, they would lose their panels. The proposed system is portable.

This so-called plug-in power plant also means no expensive fitting is required. Instead, the panels are attached to an inverter, which steps up the voltage to the 240V used by your home’s mains supply. It is then attached by a regular plug. To avoid electric shock, the inverters detect when they are unplugged and isolate the plug and its exposed electrical pins.

The government is investigating whether a similar safe system can be deployed in the UK.

Unlike a full rooftop solar system, no power can be sold back to the grid with plug-in panels. Instead, the aim is to cut electricity bills during the day from appliances like fridges, freezers and computers used by home workers.

«

At last something useful. As solar prices come down, small and convenient systems like this become more useful to deploy just anywhere.
unique link to this extract

Scaling human judgment in Community Notes with LLMs • Arxiv

Haiwen Li and others from MIT and X.com:

»

The core tasks of a Community Notes contributor—researching a claim, synthesizing diverse sources, and drafting a neutral, well-evidenced summary—are capabilities at which “Deep Research” LLMs show promise. Indeed, work from 2024 has demonstrated that a fully automated pipeline for generating Community Notes with LLMs can, under certain circumstances, produce notes that are of similar quality to human-written notes—at a fraction of the time and effort. LLM-written CNs have the potential to be faster to produce, less effort to generate, and of high quality, hence are an attractive direction to pursue.

While LLM-written CNs are compelling, critical questions remain: can LLMs consistently produce accurate notes that are well-received across perspectives? If yes, can we use them to accelerate the addition of informative context in a way that is valued and trusted across viewpoints, while avoiding the fate of becoming just a new version of top-down fact-checking that can lack broad trust? We believe both are possible.

Rather than replacing humans, LLMs can complement and enhance their work. Trust in CN stems not from who drafts the notes, but from who evaluates them. It is the collective judgment of a diverse and engaged community that grounds people’s trust in CN.

This paper argues for a new paradigm for Community Notes in the LLM era: an open ecosystem where notes from both human writers and LLMs are submitted into a single pool, and the decision of which notes are helpful enough to show remains in the hands of the people. The system’s legitimacy is still upheld by its foundational principle: a community of diverse human raters that collectively serve as the ultimate evaluator and arbiter of what is helpful.

«

Getting an LLM to help write the advisory notes sounds good, though the real problem with Community Notes remains how long it takes for them to be “approved”. There’s no indication of how many approvals are needed for a Note to appear, but it seems to be a long time. And meanwhile the false claims circulate unchecked.
unique link to this extract

Google kills the fact-checking snippet in search results • Nieman Journalism Lab

Clara Jiménez Cruz:

»

Hidden in a developer blog earlier this month, Google announced that it will stop using the fact-checking snippets in search.

For a decade, the fact-checking snippet, under the name of ClaimReview, has been a way to protect users worldwide by showcasing fact-checked information when a Google user searched explicitly for an already debunked claim. It exposed citizens to reliable information first by enhancing search results for fact-check articles.

ClaimReview enabled Google to expose fact-checked content to over 120 million European Union citizens in the first half of 2024 (see data by country).

I am the founder and CEO of fact-checking foundation Maldita.es and chair of the European Fact-Checking Standards Network. Google did not inform fact-checkers that the 10-year collaboration was coming to an end, let alone consult with us on the decision to stop using the fact-checks that we provided for free.

The company says its data shows the fact-checking snippet is “not commonly used in Search” and no longer provides “significant additional value for users,” but did not share the data or analysis that led it to make this decision.

This year’s Reuters Institute Digital News Report asked 92,000 online news consumers in 46 markets which sources they look for in search results when they’re checking information they suspect may be fake. The Reuters Institute’s independent data does not match Google’s analysis: 25% of news consumers globally said they’re looking for a fact-check when they conduct a search, including 38% in the U.S.

«

In the blogpost, Google talks about “simplification”, but it’s hard not to think that the fact checking could contradict the AI chunks at the top of the search results, which would never do. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
unique link to this extract

Three-dimensional time: a mathematical framework for fundamental physics • Reports in Advances of Physical Sciences: Vol 09

Gunther Kletetschka:

»

This paper introduces a theoretical framework based on three-dimensional time, where the three temporal dimensions emerge from fundamental symmetry requirements. The necessity for exactly three temporal dimensions arises from observed quantum-classical-cosmological transitions that manifest at three distinct scales: Planck-scale quantum phenomena, interaction-scale processes, and cosmological evolution.

These temporal scales directly generate three particle generations through eigenvalue equations of the temporal metric, naturally explaining both the number of generations and their mass hierarchy. The framework introduces a metric structure with three temporal and three spatial dimensions, preserving causality and unitarity while extending standard quantum mechanics and field theory.

«

Just thought I’d bring this to your attention, in case you needed an explanation for being late: “the time shape was wrong for the train, unfortunately.”
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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.

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. 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:

»

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.

«

There’s more analysis of this – including the obvious question, is it correct? – at this climate Substack. The answer: yes, it is.
unique link to this extract

If Congress passes NOAA’s budget, people will die • Weathering Climate Change

Chris Gloninger:

»

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.

«

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.
unique link to this extract

Half a million Spotify users are unknowingly grooving to an AI-generated band • Ars Technica

Ryan Whitwam:

»

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.”

«

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.
unique link to this extract

Apple loses bid to dismiss US smartphone monopoly case • Reuters

Jody Godoy:

»

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.

«

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?
unique link to this extract

Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri in major reversal • Bloomberg via Yahoo News

Mark Gurman:

»

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.

«

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.
unique link to this extract

AIs have a favourite number, and it’s not 42 • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

»

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.

«

Unrandom randomness. You’d expect nothing else.
unique link to this extract

The axion may help clean up the messy business of dark matter • Ars Technica

Paul Sutter:

»

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.

«

The search for a new particle! It feels like the 1960s, when they were popping into existence all over the place.
unique link to this extract

Tesla first driverless delivery new car to customer • CNBC

Lora Kolodny:

»

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.)

«

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.
unique link to this extract

He thought an employee stole crypto. The FBI says it was a North Korean scammer • WSJ

Robert McMillan:

»

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.

«

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.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified