The latest set of LLMs can geolocate where a random photo was taken with remarkable accuracy, bellingcat’s tests have found. CC-licensed photo by Andrew Bowden on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Here, really? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Something is very wrong online • The Atlantic
Charlie Warzel:
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Unfired [bullet] cases were also inscribed with hyper-online references, including a series of arrows that, as the gaming publication Polygon pointed out, match the input required to drop a bomb in a popular game called Helldivers 2. Another bullet casing was engraved with the trollish phrase “If you read this you are gay lmao.” The bullet casings are less of a sign of a political affiliation and much more a signal that the shooter was very online. One old Facebook post that’s made the rounds purportedly shows the alleged shooter dressed up in 2018 as an obscure meme that gained popularity in the 2010s on 4chan, Reddit, and Twitter.
This dynamic—a young shooter who seems to have no barriers between fringe online life and the real world—has become an alarming meme unto itself. Just last week, I wrote about the mass shooting at the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis; the shooter there was also extremely online and apparently affiliated with a number of groups that defy normal political ideologies. These groups are better thought of as fandoms—a hybrid threat network of disaffected people that can include Columbine obsessives, neo-Nazis, child groomers, and trolls. They perform for one another through acts of violence and cheer their community on to commit murder. Though these groups might adopt far-right aesthetics, the truth is that their ideology is defined by a selfish kind of nihilism. To them, murder is the ultimate act of trolling, and they want to be remembered for it.
…With their senseless violence, these killers are bringing a part of that networked, online chaos to tangible, life-and-death reality. They know that their violence will be flattened, picked apart, argued over, and, crucially, amplified by the justification machine. In this way, they will get what they’re after. The violence will continue.
There are many overlapping problems at work here: a gun-violence and firearm epidemic; worsening political polarization; social and cultural issues such as loneliness, alienation, and a growing distrust of elites; and disdain for one’s fellow citizens. There is so much anger right now, plenty of it justified. A young father was murdered on a college campus. Few public or private spaces seem to be safe from the specter of a mass shooter. Institutions that once functioned for the benefit of the public are now sclerotic, having been partly dismantled, or seem indifferent to suffering. The economy operates like a casino, and there’s a feeling that traditional pathways to prosperity are gone. People are being rounded up off the streets without due process. The list goes on.
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After Kirk shooting, Utah governor calls social media a “cancer.” Will we treat it like one? • Ars Technica
Nate Anderson:
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The conservative broadcaster/provocateur Charlie Kirk—murdered this week during a visit to a Utah college—had tweeted some life advice this summer: “When things are moving very fast and people are losing their minds, it’s important to stay grounded. Turn off your phone, read scripture, spend time with friends, and remember internet fury is not real life. It’s going to be ok.”
Kirk was not himself always a great role model for staying grounded, thoughtful, or caring to others. He was better known for “look at me” stunts like offering completely unsolicited commentary upon Taylor Swift’s engagement, calling the singer a “cat lady” and telling her to “engage in reality more,” to “reject feminism,” and to “submit to your husband” because “you’re not in charge.”
But his advice itself isn’t all bad. Social media so often feeds most hungrily upon our darker emotions; constant reinforcement of anger, fear, frustration, and even jealously (FOMO, anyone?) cannot possibly be good for us to marinate in so often. Maintaining a connection to the physical world and the physical presence of others can be immensely stabilizing—sometimes even helpfully “boring”—after we become too addicted to the rush of emotions caused by one more Internet outrage.
Kirk was wrong about two things in that tweet, though. First, “Internet fury” is quite clearly real life. And two, things may not “be ok” even after you set down the phone and are sitting beneath a tent in Utah, talking to students.
…I assume Ars readers are divided on this question, given that the Ars staff itself has differing views. One can point, of course, to the successes: The powerless can call out the lies of the powerful, they can gin up “color revolutions” to topple dictators, and they can publish their views with an ease and at a cost that not even the printing press—itself an extremely disruptive technology—could manage. On the flip side, of course, is all the “cancer”: the floods of misinformation and bile, the yelling, the “cancel culture,” the virtue signaling, the scams and hoaxes, the ethnic nationalism, the casual sharing of both gore and pornography, the buffoonish natures of the tech overlords who run too many of these services, and that feeling you get when you log in to Facebook and realize with a shock that your aunt is a closet racist.
The question for me—a live question, one I’m not sure I can answer—is whether all these negative effects will eventually be regulated or suppressed once we acquire more familiarity with the technology, or whether the fundamentally addictive design of social media apps will pose an insoluble challenge to human willpower and flourishing.
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Have LLMs finally mastered geolocation? • bellingcat
Foeke Postma and Nathan Patin:
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An ambiguous city street, a freshly mown field, and a parked armoured vehicle were among the example photos we chose to challenge Large Language Models (LLMs) from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Mistral and xAI to geolocate.
Back in July 2023, Bellingcat analysed the geolocation performance of OpenAI and Google’s models. Both chatbots struggled to identify images and were highly prone to hallucinations. However, since then, such models have rapidly evolved.
To assess how LLMs from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Mistral and xAI compare today, we ran 500 geolocation tests, with 20 models each analysing the same set of 25 images.
Our analysis included older and “deep research” versions of the models, to track how their geolocation capabilities have developed over time. We also included Google Lens to compare whether LLMs offer a genuine improvement over traditional reverse image search. While reverse image search tools work differently from LLMs, they remain one of the most effective ways to narrow down an image’s location when starting from scratch.
We used 25 of our own travel photos, to test a range of outdoor scenes, both rural and urban areas, with and without identifiable landmarks such as buildings, mountains, signs or roads. These images were sourced from every continent, including Antarctica.
…ChatGPT beat Google Lens.
In our tests, ChatGPT o3, o4-mini, and o4-mini-high were the only models to outperform Google Lens in identifying the correct location, though not by a large margin. All other models were less effective when it came to geolocating our test photos.
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That they get anywhere near the correct answer is amazing. I’d like to know the data sources that enable this.
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Why Netflix struggles to make good movies: a data explainer • Stat Significant
Daniel Parris:
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It hasn’t been all bad for Netflix. In its first decade of original content production, the streamer has made some genuinely great movies. As evidence of cinematic competence, I offer the following examples: The Irishman, Hit Man, Rebel Ridge, Maestro, Roma, KPop Demon Hunters, All Quiet on the Western Front, Marriage Story, Society of the Snow—and absolutely not Emilia Pérez. (Under no circumstances should Emilia Pérez qualify.)
The streamer is capable of producing and acquiring quality films, but these cases are outliers. Across IMDb, Letterboxd, and TMDB, the typical Netflix film scores well below the platform average for theatrically released movies.
…Netflix has proven prolific in churning out Christmas movies, low-effort documentaries, formulaic rom-coms, and teen movies. This glut of forgettable films overshadows the platform’s critically acclaimed titles (both statistically and in cultural imagination).
…Netflix frequently casts veteran actors who may be on the downside of their careers (and skew the dataset with their extensive filmographies). In 2025, the streamer produced countless unremarkable films starring well-known performers, including:
• Back in Action: This one starred Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx, and I’m told it was about spies.
• Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F: This one had Eddie Murphy and the music from the “Crazy Frog” ringtone.
• Happy Gilmore 2: Adam Sandler is in this one, accompanied by cameos from every celebrity who has ever lived, and many real-life golfers who are bad at acting.Netflix understands the value of putting Eddie Murphy’s face on a streaming thumbnail (which is a depressing sentence to both type and read). In a sea of content, a recognizable star carries outsized weight.
…After ten years of original content production, many filmmakers are opting out of the great Netflix moviemaking experiment, even when it’s in their best interest financially. The streamer has lost several high-profile bidding wars for top-tier filmmaking projects over the last few years.
• Weapons director Zach Cregger turned down a $50m offer from Netflix for a $37m budget from Warner Bros. and guarantees of a theatrical release.
• Netflix offered a staggering $150m to Emerald Fennell and Margot Robbie for their upcoming adaptation of Wuthering Heights, but lost out to Warner Bros., which promised an $80m budget and a traditional release.«
Confessions of an engagement farmer • The Critic Magazine
Christopher Snowdon:
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Ever since Elon Musk started paying people to tweet, I have wondered whether trolling from a third world country would be a viable lifestyle choice when the ship goes down in Britain. Premium accounts get paid every two weeks and I generally make the best part of $100. Fifty dollars a week isn’t much, but I only have 60,000 followers and I don’t actively try to maximise my earnings. If I lived on a cheap beach in Indonesia, doubled my follower count, and put my back into engagement farming, I reckon I could survive by tweeting pictures of Donald Trump and Keir Starmer with words to the effect of “What do you think of this guy?”
I was having this conversation with my colleague Reem Ibrahim a few weeks ago and we ended up having a bet. We agreed to spend two weeks maximising our Twitter clout and whoever got the smallest payment at the end of it would use the money to buy us both a nice long lunch. I was feeling confident. I have three times as many followers and my last payout was $97 whereas Reem’s was just $27. Game on.
My interest in engagement farming piqued a few weeks earlier when I noticed various accounts tweeting: “A year ago, I was 100% convinced Lucy Letby was guilty. A year later, I’m 100% convinced she’s innocent. Anyone else?” The most successful of these tweets attracted half a million views and 1,500 replies. Not too shabby. The key words, I noticed, were “Anyone else?” The shrewd engagement farmer knows that it is not enough to say something provocative. He must also pretend that he is interested in the opinions of others.
Based on the assumption that engagement = replies, I decided that put questions at the heart of my farming efforts. On Day One, I asked people to nominate their worst Beatles song (52 replies, 10,000 views) and tweeted “A year ago, I was 100% convinced Lucy Letby was innocent. A year later, I’m 100% convinced she’s guilty. Anyone else?” The latter got 115 replies and 38,000 views, not a bad return but not championship winning stuff. Looking back, some of it was too clever by half. “Engagement farming should be banned. What do YOU think?” yielded only 14 replies and 6,100 views despite being accompanied by a photo of a kitten.
…Reem had the same idea, but gained more traction. “What’s one thing you’d like the Government to stop intervening in?” got her 81 replies, while “Abolish all tariffs, quotas, and subsidies. Do you agree?” pulled in 113 replies. But she had one trick up her sleeve that I hadn’t thought of. If you want engagement and can handle abuse, there is no better strategy than winding up pensioners. Reem went straight for the jugular: “Abolish the state pension.”
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An entertaining tale well told. (I follow Snowdon on Twitter/X: he didn’t announce he was doing this, so in that sense it’s a “controlled” experiment.)
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USB-A isn’t going anywhere, so stop removing the port • Pocket Lint
Saeed Wazir:
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After nearly 30 years of USB-A connectivity, the market is now transitioning to the convenient USB-C standard, which makes sense given that it supports higher speeds, display data, and power delivery. The symmetrical connection is also smaller and more user-friendly, as it’s reversible and works with smartphones and tablets. I get that USB-C is inevitable, but tech brands should realize that the ubiquitous USB-A isn’t going anywhere soon and stop removing the ports we need to run our devices.
USB 1.0 was released in 1996 with data transfer rates ranging from 1.5 to 12Mbps. The technology didn’t catch on until Apple adopted version 1.1 on its 1998 iMac G3, which signaled a shift in the market as brands ditched bulky legacy ports and moved toward USB. This standard was superseded by the widely adopted USB 2.0 in 2000, which introduced faster speeds of up to 480Mbps, plug-and-play compatibility, and power transfer capabilities ranging from 5 V to 500 mA. USB 2.0 was a game-changer because users could now connect their phones to their PCs, and the first memory sticks started appearing around this time.
…It’s premature for brands to phase out USB-A when peripheral brands are still making compatible products in 2025. For example, Logitech’s current wireless pro gaming mice connect using a USB-A Lightspeed dongle, and most Seagate external drives still use USB-A as their connection method. The same can be said for other memory sticks, keyboards, wireless headsets, and other new devices that are still manufactured with a USB-A connection.
I have a gaming laptop with two USB-A and USB-C ports, and it’s a constant struggle to connect all my devices simultaneously without needing a hub. I use the two USB-A ports for my mouse and wireless headset dongles, while a phone charging cable and portable monitor take up the USB-Cs. This setup stresses me out because there’s no extra space to connect anything else without losing functionality.
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It sounds to me like the problem is the laptop, or the mouse/wireless headset not having good enough Bluetooth. Also, if you have Thunderbolt, you can run multiple monitors off a single USB-C port. Yes, I’ve thought it’s the worst thing in the world for ages. But USB-A is marginally worse (slower, with that annoying tendency to be the wrong way round), and outdated to boot.
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Stop talking about wealth taxes. Make these reforms instead • Financial Times
Dan Neidle is a former tax lawyer and founder of Tax Policy Associates:
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The UK is never going to have a wealth tax. But the left’s obsession with it means that this parliament isn’t going to see any serious tax reform either. Here’s what we should do instead.
Reform inheritance tax. The measures in the last Budget risk breaking up family farms and businesses while leaving popular tax avoidance strategies untouched. We could fix both problems with a recent proposal from the CenTax research centre, which retains a 100% exemption for farms and small businesses forming 60% or more of an estate’s assets. And, handily, raises at least as much revenue for the Treasury.
Reform capital gains tax — and cut income tax. UK capital gains tax is currently too high and too low. Long-term investors are overtaxed, paying 24% on inflationary gains, meaning sometimes 100% or more on real gain. Short-term investors are undertaxed, as are people who’ve artificially rebadged labour income as capital gains. The answer: align the CGT rate with income tax, but only tax the real return. The proceeds would be enough to raise large sums and cut income tax.
Reform land taxation. Stamp duty is among our most destructive taxes: it makes people miserable, keeps them in the wrong homes and misallocates labour. Replace it with a modest, broad-based land value tax assessed on site value, not buildings. Yes, there are hard questions around deferral (for the “cash poor, asset rich”) and transition (so people don’t get hit twice), but the prize is big enough that we should try to answer them.
Reform corporation tax. When I was a junior lawyer, we sniggered at the useless, overly complex Italian tax system. The Italians had the last laugh. Today the Tax Foundation scores their corporate tax system as more competitive than the UK’s — even though our overall rate is lower. Why? Because of the spiralling complexity of UK corporate tax. Pull out those old Office of Tax Simplification reports and implement them.
Reform national insurance. The tax system taxes employment as if it’s a sin. Scrap employee national insurance and roll it into income tax. Make the change fiscally neutral — so most people get a tax cut (with the notable exception of landlords and retirees). Then begin the really hard task of working out how to cut employer NI over time. Absolutely, definitely, don’t put it up again.
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He has more suggestions, but these are the principal ones. (Reforming VAT is also in there.) As he says, the problem is that the political class just doesn’t want to think too hard about this; ripping out and replacing the financial wiring would meet huge resistance from the Treasury. But at some point, it’s necessary. Such as now.
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Comcast execs memo on MSNBC’s Matthew Dowd comments about Charlie Kirk: “we need to do better” • Variety
Todd Spangler:
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Top execs of Comcast issued a memo to all Comcast and NBCUniversal employees about remarks made by Matthew Dowd, who was fired as an MSNBC contributor after he said on the air that conservative activist Charlie Kirk was a “divisive” figure who pushed “hate speech.” Kirk was shot and killed Wednesday at an event in Utah.
The memo Friday came from Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, Comcast president Mike Cavanagh and Mark Lazarus, who is CEO of Versant, the spinoff company that will include MSNBC (to be renamed MS NOW).
“You may have seen that MSNBC recently ended its association with a contributor who made an unacceptable and insensitive comment about this horrific event,” the memo says. “That coverage was at odds with fostering civil dialogue and being willing to listen to the points of view of those who have differing opinions. We should be able to disagree, robustly and passionately, but, ultimately, with respect. We need to do better.”
On Wednesday, during MSNBC’s live coverage of the Kirk shooting, anchor Katy Tur asked Dowd about “the environment in which a shooting like this happens.”
Dowd responded by saying about Kirk: “He’s been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. And I think that is the environment we are in. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place. And that’s the unfortunate environment we are in.”
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OK, so Dowd is essentially saying Kirk brought it on himself. Which isn’t of itself necessarily true (though being a divisive figure, which he was, does increase the chances someone will take offence, and in a country like the US the form that offence takes can be lethal). The reaction of everyone has been extreme, veering into ridiculous, and if you aren’t going to entertain views like Dowd’s then what even is the point? He didn’t say he wasn’t willing to listen. He just didn’t like what he heard.
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The cold truth about EVs: freezing weather slashes battery mileage • Rest of World
Arsalan Bukhari and Kinling Lo:
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Bashir Ahmad sold his wife’s gold jewellery to buy an electric three-wheeler that would revolutionize his apple business in Kashmir. Then winter arrived and killed it.
On a freezing morning, he pressed the ignition button once, twice — nothing. The Chinese vehicle’s battery had lost 60% of its charge overnight in -5ºC (23ºF) weather, leaving tons of fruit stranded and customers impatient.
Ahmad found a diesel truck to transport his apples to the wholesale market in Kashmir’s capital, Srinagar, some 56 kilometres (35 miles) away. By then, however, the fruit had lost its just-picked freshness that commands premium prices, with every hour of delay eating into his profits.
Ahmad’s dead battery is part of a global crisis nobody anticipated when governments started subsidizing electric vehicles. From Kashmir to Kansas, EVs can lose almost half their driving distance when temperatures drop, and the billions spent on improving technology have failed to fix this fundamental limitation.
In January, Seattle-based Recurrent, a company that tests and analyzes EVs, found an average range loss of 20% in extreme cold. In 2019, the American Automobile Association had first documented a 40% drop.
“I thought this would change my life,” Ahmad told Rest of World, pointing at the three-wheeler now permanently parked in his courtyard. “Instead, it has only caused me to lose.”
Ahmad is among the many early EV adopters who discovered the technology sold to them doesn’t work where they live. While the Indian government covered 40% of his vehicle’s cost of 300,000 rupees ($3,400), it forgot that the lithium-ion batteries — designed for India’s warm plains — would freeze in the Himalayan valley.
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I’m not sure about “global crisis”. The fact of battery chemistry is true, and it’s something people have to keep in mind. But the “fuel” can work out cheaper. It would also be a good idea not to sell EVs to people who don’t know about cold climates. Though the Scandinavians have managed it OK.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 