Like all modern flip phones, the Samsung Z Flip has a deadly enemy: dust. CC-licensed photo by HS You on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Fine, thanks. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Plastics treaty talks collapse without a deal after “chaotic” negotiations • Climate Change News
Matteo Civillini:
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UN talks on creating a global pact to stem plastic pollution collapsed in Geneva with no agreement or clear way forward after a chaotic night of negotiations failed to break a deadlock over whether to include measures aimed at curbing runaway plastic production.
With discussions running into overtime on Thursday night, a last-ditch attempt by the talks’ chair, Ecuadorian diplomat Luis Vayas Valdivieso, to table a new draft proposal for a treaty fell flat. The text, still containing numerous options in brackets, does not include a dedicated section on plastic production, which nearly 100 countries have been calling for.
An opposing group of fossil fuel-producing nations – including Gulf states, Russia and the US – vehemently reject the inclusion in the treaty of any provisions aimed at reducing plastic production, which is set to triple by 2060. The talks, known as INC-5.2, were unable to find a way to bridge those divergent positions.
Several countries voiced disappointment with the process managed by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in a final plenary session which came to an abrupt end on Friday morning with no next steps agreed.
Valdivieso adjourned the 10-day meeting to be resumed “at a later date” yet to be decided after the United States and Kuwait asked him to cut short the last session – with the latter saying it had become “a health issue” as delegates were exhausted from the long hours.
During the closing plenary, many countries signalled their unease with negotiations continuing under the same format that has yet to deliver a deal after two and a half years. The collapse of talks in Geneva came nine months after the failure of what was originally meant to be the final round of negotiations in December 2024.
On Friday, France’s Minister for Ecological Transition Agnès Pannier-Runacher said she was “disappointed and enraged” with the outcome of the talks, which she described as “so chaotic”. “Oil-producing countries and their allies have chosen to look the other way. We choose to act,” she added.
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The Montreal Protocol limiting production and use of CFCs these days feels like something out of an SF novel about an alien planet ruled by sensible beings.
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Dedicated volunteer exposes “single largest self-promotion operation in Wikipedia’s history” • Ars Technica
Nate Anderson:
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Quick—what are the top entries in the category “Wikipedia articles written in the greatest number of languages”?
The answer is countries.
Turkey tops the list with Wikipedia entries in 332 different languages, while the US is second with 327 and Japan is third with 324. Other common words make their appearance as one looks down the list. “Dog” (275 languages) tops “cat” (273). Jesus (274) beats “Adolf Hitler” (242). And all of them beat “sex” (122), which is also bested by “fever,” “Chiang Kai-Shek,” and the number “13.”
But if you had looked at the list a couple months back, something would have been different. Turkey, the US, and Japan were still in the same order near the top of the leaderboard, but the number one slot was occupied by an unlikely contender: David Woodard, who had Wikipedia entries in 335 different languages.
You… haven’t heard of David Woodard?
Woodard is a composer who infamously wrote a “prequiem”—that is, a “pre requiem”—in 2001 for Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who had murdered 168 people with a truck bomb. The piece was to be performed at a church near McVeigh’s execution site in Terre Haute, Indiana, then recorded and played on the radio so that McVeigh would have a chance to hear it.
According to the LA Times, which spoke to the composer, “Woodard’s hope in performing the 12-minute piece, he said, is to ’cause the soul of Timothy McVeigh to go to heaven.'” According to BBC coverage from the time, Woodard “says McVeigh is ’33 and nearly universally despised at the time of his execution’—like Jesus Christ.”
…A Wikipedia editor who goes by “Grnrchst” recently decided to find out, diving deep into the articles about Woodard and into any edits that placed his name in other articles. The results of this lengthy and tedious investigation were written up in the August 9 edition of the Signpost, a volunteer-run online newspaper about Wikipedia.
Grnrchst’s conclusion was direct: “I discovered what I think might have been the single largest self-promotion operation in Wikipedia’s history, spanning over a decade and covering as many as 200 accounts and even more proxy IP addresses.”
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Well, that’s a decade of someone’s work down the drain. Performance art project? Self-aggrandisement scheme? University jape? We still don’t know. Woodard is real. But the reason for all this is unknown.
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The one feature that keeps me from recommending flip phones: dust • The Verge
Allison Johnson:
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I love flip phones. Lots of you love flip phones, too.
Those little specks of dust [which find their way into the crease of the fold] still loom large. Despite substantial improvements to the screens and hinges, and the addition of water resistance, flip phones (and their fold-style siblings) still lack dust resistance. Both Motorola and Samsung’s latest foldables come with an IP48 rating, which only guarantees protection against very small particles, meaning anything smaller than a millimeter could still potentially work its way into the phone and wreak havoc.
Sure, plenty of people own folding phones and never experience problems with dust, which is great! But when every other slab-style phone at the same price point comes with a full IP68 rating, it’s hard to tell the average person to go ahead and spend $1,000 on a flip phone. Fun only goes so far.
I had a burning question for Samsung’s head of smartphone planning, Minseok Kang. Maybe it even bordered on a plea. “Is a dustproof foldable even possible?” I asked following Samsung’s most recent Unpacked.
“I don’t think that it’s not possible,” he said. “But it is difficult.”
Whispers of foldables with the elusive IP68 rating have cropped up around most of the recent folding phone launches, ultimately fizzling when the full specs have been revealed.
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The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly • PNAS
Reese Richardson, Spencer Hong, Jennifer Byrne, Thomas Stoeger and Luis Nunes Amaral:
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Science is characterized by collaboration and cooperation, but also by uncertainty, competition, and inequality. While there has always been some concern that these pressures may compel some to defect from the scientific research ethos—i.e., fail to make genuine contributions to the production of knowledge or to the training of an expert workforce—the focus has largely been on the actions of lone individuals.
Recently, however, reports of coordinated scientific fraud activities have increased. Some suggest that the ease of communication provided by the internet and open-access publishing have created the conditions for the emergence of entities—paper mills (i.e., sellers of mass-produced low quality and fabricated research), brokers (i.e., conduits between producers and publishers of fraudulent research), predatory journals, who do not conduct any quality controls on submissions—that facilitate systematic scientific fraud.
Here, we demonstrate through case studies that i) individuals have cooperated to publish papers that were eventually retracted in a number of journals, ii) brokers have enabled publication in targeted journals at scale, and iii), within a field of science, not all subfields are equally targeted for scientific fraud.
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This is a big paper, and there’s no doubting the work. The reason for the growth in fraud seems to be a symbiotic process: publications which can charge for publication (or subscription) need researchers who will be measured on the quantity rather than quality of publication. Both are driven by volume, not value, of publication.
The question is, therefore, how do you break the symbiosis?
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Every reason why I hate AI and you should too • Malwaretech
Marcus Hutchins:
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One thing that’s certain is that Generative AI is in a bubble. That’s not to say AI as a technology will pop, or that there isn’t genuine room for a lot more growth; simply, the level of hype far outweighs the current value of the tech.
Most (reasonable) people I speak to are of one of three opinions:
1: These technologies are fundamentally unsustainable and the hype will be short-lived
2: There will be some future breakthrough that will bring the technology in line with the hype, but in the meantime everyone is essentially just relying on creative marketing to keep the money flowing
3: The tech has a narrow use case for which they are exceedingly valuable, but almost everything else is just hype.Whenever I’m critical of anything GenAI, without fail I get asked the same question. “do you think every major CEO could be wrong?”
The answer to that is: yes. History is littered with examples of industry titans going nuts, losing more money than the GDP of an entire country, saying “lol, my bad”, then finding something else to do.
I grew up during the fallout from the great financial crisis. I watched first hand as the biggest most prestigious financial institution crashed the entire global economy. Turns out, in the short term playing hot potato with debt derivatives backed by imaginary money and fraud is a great business model. In the long term, not so much.
It’s not even necessarily that corporate executives are being stupid. Sometimes they are, which can result in things like sinking more money that it cost the US government to put the sun in a bomb into the worst VR game ever. But usually it’s just greed and shortsightedness.
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If you’re wondering why Hutchins’s name is familiar, it’s because he’s the guy who stopped the North Korean Wannacry ransomware attack in 2017 by, of al things, registering the domain it was trying to contact. (His About page makes worrying reading for anyone getting into cybersecurity.)
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Nabiha Syed remakes Mozilla Foundation in AI, Trump era • The Register
Thomas Claburn:
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Last May, Nabiha Syed became executive director of The Mozilla Foundation, and a year on, reached out to The Register to share her vision for an organization humbled by layoffs and confronted by stochastic parrots and stochastic politics.
Syed said that the Mozilla Foundation is sworn to defend the open web and has been doing so for the past two decades. But the challenge is different now.
“We sort of knew what the internet was and it went through phases,” said Syed. “But now, with the onslaught of AI slop and surveillance capitalism running amok, we really have to go back to first principles: why do we care about the open internet, the open web?”
The opportunity for the foundation, she said, is to rethink what a positive future looks like and to figure out how to mobilize people to help realize that vision, because change requires community participation.
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This is one of those “would you like to talk to the new head of Mozilla?” interviews that PRs will offer journalists, who will inwardly groan because they know nothing of any consequence will emerge but go through with it anyway in the hope that when some drama occurs, they’ll have the faint chance of getting the inside track.
And so it transpires here. The interview is a big nothingburger, lighter than air. Syed doesn’t, for example, tackle the fact that Mozilla’s principal source of income is Google, which is the company that is contributing mightily to all of AI slop, surveillance capitalism and the non-open web. Very much a case of your income depending on not understanding something, a la Upton Sinclair.
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LinkedIn is the fakest platform of them all • Prospect Magazine
Ben Clark:
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“LinkedIn doesn’t know me anymore,” someone complained to me recently. “What do you mean?” I asked. She explained that the platform has replaced the old “recommended jobs” section, which used to show her quite useful job openings based on her previous searches and CV, with an AI search engine that asks you to describe your ideal job in freeform text. The results it brings up aren’t nearly as relevant.
This is just one of many ways in which the professionals’ social media platform, which has embraced artificial intelligence with ferocious zeal, is being gradually “enshittified”, to borrow tech writer Cory Doctorow’s phrase. Each new embrace of AI tools promises to make hiring, job searching, networking and even posting a bit easier or more fruitful. Instead, AI seems to have made the user’s experience more alienating, and to have helped foster a genre of LinkedIn-speak which bears all the hallmarks of the worst AI writing on the internet.
Let’s start with my opening example—which, to be fair, is in beta testing mode and can be switched off. Instead of the AI assistant being like an intuitive digital servant, pulling up the best jobs based on your ruminations, users are confronted with a new and annoying task: crafting prompts for the AI. But the non-AI search bar worked perfectly well as it was.
Then there is the AI writing assistant, which is available to users who pay for the platform’s £29.99 per month premium service to help them craft their posts. LinkedIn’s CEO Ryan Roslansky recently admitted that users aren’t using the tool as much as he anticipated. It seems that sounding like a human being to your colleagues and clients is put at, well, a premium.
And then there are the ways in which users are deploying outputs from external AI chatbots on the platform, something with which LinkedIn is struggling to cope. According to the New York Times, the number of job applications submitted via the platform increased by 45% in the year to June, now clocking in at an average of 11,000 per minute.
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My new favourite Twitter/X account is LinkedIn Lunatics, which collects random bits of utter madness from its users. It’s the most bizarre place, based on that evidence.
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October 2024: How Intel got left behind in the AI chip boom • The New York Times
Steve Lohr and Don Clark in October 2024:
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In 2005, there was no inkling of the artificial intelligence boom that would come years later. But directors at Intel, whose chips served as electronic brains in most computers, faced a decision that might have altered how that transformative technology evolved.
Paul Otellini, Intel’s chief executive at the time, presented the board with a startling idea: buy Nvidia, a Silicon Valley upstart known for chips used for computer graphics. The price tag: as much as $20bn.
Some Intel executives believed that the underlying design of graphics chips could eventually take on important new jobs in data centers, an approach that would eventually dominate AI systems.
But the board resisted, according to two people familiar with the boardroom discussion who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because the meeting was confidential. Intel had a poor record of absorbing companies. And the deal would have been by far Intel’s most expensive acquisition.
Confronting skepticism from the board, Mr. Otellini, who died in 2017, backed away, and his proposal went no further. In hindsight, one person who attended the meeting said, it was “a fateful moment.”
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You’d have had to have the most crystalline of balls in 2005 to predict how the AI (and graphics) space was going to turn out; bitcoin was still five years from being invented, AI was a niche pursuit of academia, and smartphones weren’t yet a significant thing. I’d predict that Nvidia wouldn’t have sold, but also that if it had, Intel would have screwed it up.
For all that, one can see Intel as being like Microsoft: didn’t get mobile, and effectively got passed by AI (Microsoft has clung on to OpenAI). The two big revolutions of this century in computing, and Intel wasn’t anywhere near them.
Intel, now, is skirting with disaster.
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The $6 revolution: how generic weight loss drugs could save millions of lives • Overmatter
Natasha Loder and Peter Singer:
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In about five months the patent for a key weight loss medication, semaglutide, will lapse in a large number of countries around the world including India, China, Brazil, and Canada —although not in the most lucrative markets. The wider availability of this drug is likely to herald the beginning of a step change in the global treatment of obesity and metabolic diseases. It is a big deal. Obesity alone has risen relentlessly over past decades, more than doubling in adults since 1990. Over a billion people live with obesity, and its health consequences, worldwide.
The potential for generic and cheaper semaglutide for wide use in the treatment of obesity, diabetes, and a range of other conditions is so mind-boggingly large, we think the time is ripe for many governments to start to plan for how to maximise their potential. Firms in China and India, in particular, have been preparing for the expiry of the patent in their territories by developing the capacity to deliver large quantities of what will be cheaper, generic, i.e. biosimilar, versions of this drug. Reports suggest that drugs which today cost over $1,000 a month in America will be manufactured in India for less than $6 a month. Although the price of these drugs is unknown, Indian manufacturers typically work high-volume and low costs. Demand will be global. (Although individuals in countries where the patent has not expired, such as America, UK, Europe, Japan, and Australia, will not be able to buy these generic medicines legally).
For those living in countries where semaglutide (sold under the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy) patents are expiring, as prices tumble, so too will waistlines as demand is expected to soar. Countries could transform the treatment of diabetes, obesity and overweight, along with better outcomes in those with cardiovascular health, poor metabolic health, liver and kidney disease.
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Well this is going to be interesting, isn’t it.
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How a mathematical paradox allows infinite cloning • Quanta Magazine
Max Levy:
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Imagine two friends hiking in the woods. They grow hungry and decide to split an apple, but half an apple feels meager. Then one of them remembers one of the strangest ideas she’s ever encountered. It’s a mathematical theorem involving infinity that makes it possible, at least in principle, to turn one apple into two.
That argument is called the Banach-Tarski paradox, after the mathematicians Stefan Banach and Alfred Tarski, who devised it in 1924. It proves that according to the fundamental rules of mathematics, it’s possible to split a solid three-dimensional ball into pieces that recombine to form two identical copies of the original. Two apples out of one.
“Right away, one sees that it’s completely counterintuitive,” said Dima Sinapova (opens a new tab) of the University of Illinois, Chicago.
The paradox arises from one of the most mind-bending concepts in math: infinity.
…Banach and Tarski realized you can turn one sphere into two by partitioning the uncountably infinite set of points it contains into — get ready for it — an uncountably infinite number of countably infinite sets. The separation occurs through a very specific dissection procedure.
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Why not start the day with a bit of mind-expanding maths? And you get an infinite number of apples as a bonus. (If you can make two from one, you can keep on doing it, after all.)
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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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