Don’t throw away that disposable vape – you could use its internals to power a web server. CC-licensed photo by Vaping360 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. Not inhaling. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

US and China reach deal to transfer TikTok ownership, trade officials say • The Guardian

Joseph Gedeon:

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Jamieson Greer, a US trade representative, said on Monday that Washington and Beijing have struck a framework agreement on transferring TikTok to US-controlled ownership.

Speaking after emerging from negotiations with Chinese officials, Scott Bessent said the deal was coming but declined to reveal the commercial terms.

“We have a framework for a TikTok deal,” the treasury secretary told reporters after coming out of high-level talks in Madrid. “We’re not going to talk about the commercial terms of the deal. It’s between two private parties, but the commercial terms have been agreed upon.” Bessent added that the Chinese team had made “aggressive asks” during negotiations, but did not explain what they were.

Li Chenggang, the top Chinese trade negotiator, confirmed later on Monday that two sides had reached a basic framework consensus on resolving issues related to TikTok through cooperation, reducing investment barriers and promoting trade. Li said friction between the two economic giants was normal, but warned Washington against continued “suppression” of Chinese companies.

“We would like to stress that the outcomes of the trade and economic consultations are hard won, and the US side should not, on the one hand, ask China to accommodate its concerns, whilst at the same time continue to suppress Chinese companies,” Li said in Madrid.

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The strong suspicion is that ownership will be transferred to Oracle. We will have to wait for the details to come out.
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Welcome to the ‘Turbulent Twenties’ • NOEMA

Jack Goldstone and Peter Turchin:

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Almost three decades ago, one of us, Jack Goldstone, published a simple model to determine a country’s vulnerability to political crisis. The model was based on how population changes shifted state, elite and popular behavior. Goldstone argued that, according to this Demographic-Structural Theory, in the 21st century, America was likely to get a populist, America-first leader who would sow a whirlwind of conflict.

Then ten years ago, the other of us, Peter Turchin, applied Goldstone’s model to U.S. history, using current data. What emerged was alarming: the U.S. was heading toward the highest level of vulnerability to political crisis seen in this country in over a hundred years. Even before Trump was elected, Turchin published his prediction that the U.S. was headed for the “Turbulent Twenties,” forecasting a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe.

Given the Black Lives Matter protests and cascading clashes between competing armed factions in cities across the United States, from Portland, Oregon to Kenosha, Wisconsin, we are already well on our way there. But worse likely lies ahead.

Our model is based on the fact that across history, what creates the risk of political instability is the behavior of elites, who all too often react to long-term increases in population by committing three cardinal sins. First, faced with a surge of labor that dampens growth in wages and productivity, elites seek to take a larger portion of economic gains for themselves, driving up inequality. Second, facing greater competition for elite wealth and status, they tighten up the path to mobility to favor themselves and their progeny. For example, in an increasingly meritocratic society, elites could keep places at top universities limited and raise the entry requirements and costs in ways that favor the children of those who had already succeeded.

Third, anxious to hold on to their rising fortunes, they do all they can to resist taxation of their wealth and profits, even if that means starving the government of needed revenues, leading to decaying infrastructure, declining public services and fast-rising government debts.

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This stuff puts me in mind of Isaac Asimov’s “psychohistory” in his Foundation and Empire series – predicting the shape of future events based on a mathematical-ish model.

And yet: this was written in September 2020.

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Is the U.S. likely headed for still greater protests and violence? In a word, yes. Inequality and polarization have not been this high since the nineteenth century. Democrats are certain that if Donald Trump is re-elected, American democracy will not survive. Republicans are equally certain that if Trump loses, radical socialists will seize the wealth of elites and distribute it to underserving poor and minorities, forever destroying the economy of the United States.

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What’s a four-year delay between friends, or enemies?
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UK ministers probe ‘child-protection’ Online Safety tweaks • The Register

Carly Page:

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The House of Lords is about to put the latest child-protection plans of UK regulator the Office of Communications (Ofcom) under the microscope.

On Tuesday, the Lords Communications and Digital Committee will hear from three prominent online safety advocates as it probes the regulator’s proposed new measures under the Online Safety Act (OSA). Andy Burrows of the Molly Rose Foundation, Rani Govender from the NSPCC, and Baroness Kidron OBE of 5Rights will be asked whether the changes will actually deliver more safety – or just more compliance burden, privacy nightmares, and unintended consequences.

Ofcom’s amendments aim to beef up the OSA with a fresh set of obligations for platforms. This includes more aggressive age-assurance rules to determine when users are children, new restrictions on livestreaming that require platforms to disable comments, virtual gifts, and reactions when minors are involved, as well as blocking viewers from recording children’s livestreams altogether.

The regulator also wants sites to deploy hash-matching to spot known illegal content – everything from CSAM to non-consensual intimate images – and roll out automated tools to flag grooming, fraud, self-harm, and suicide content.

The House of Lords says it will quiz the online safety campaigners about the likely effectiveness of Ofcom’s proposed new protections and whether the proposed new protections around livestreams are adequate, or if children should be banned from livestreaming altogether. 

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It’s been such an elephantine pregnancy getting the OSA into law, and it still creates problems. This latest suggestion is just another bad one. Regulating the internet turns out to be incredibly hard; harder, arguably, than regulating people.
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Who will save the dictionary? • The Atlantic

Stefan Fatsis:

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In 2015, I settled in at the Springfield, Massachusetts, headquarters of Merriam-Webster, America’s most storied dictionary company. My project was to document the ambitious reinvention of a classic, and I hoped to get some definitions of my own into the lexicon along the way. (A favourite early drafting effort, which I couldn’t believe wasn’t already included, was dogpile : “a celebration in which participants dive on top of each other immediately after a victory.”)

Merriam-Webster’s overhaul of its signature work, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged—a 465,000-word, 2,700-page, 13.5-pound doorstop published in 1961 and never before updated—was already in full swing. The revision, which would be not a hardback book but an online-only edition, requiring a subscription, was expected to take decades.

Not long after my arrival, though, everything changed. Pageviews were declining for Merriam-Webster.com, the company’s free, ad-driven revenue engine: Tweaks to Google’s algorithms had punished Merriam’s search results. The company had always been lean and profitable, but the financial hit was real. Merriam’s parent, Encyclopedia Britannica, was facing challenges of its own—who needed an encyclopedia in a Wikipedia world?—and ordered cuts. Merriam laid off more than a dozen staffers. Its longtime publisher, John Morse, was forced into early retirement. The revision of Merriam’s unabridged masterpiece was abandoned.

…Dictionary.com couldn’t match Merriam’s history or reputation. Instead, the company was trying to position itself to “capture language at the pace of change,” to be “hipper and more experimental, but also rigorous AF,” Kelly said. (Dictionary.com added the slang initialism for as fuck ; Merriam still has not.)

The piecemeal efforts improved the dictionary’s quality and cool quotient. Barrett also loved the work: He was surrounded by colleagues who cared about language and how it was presented, verbally and visually. For a time, [the lexicographer Grant] Barrett could plug his fingers in his ears and tune out the sobering reality: Although he and his colleagues were getting paid well, “the dictionary business was crumbling,” he said. “So ride it ’til the wheels fall off. And the wheels fell off.”

Not long after Rock Holdings took over, the industry grew more challenging. Google’s “knowledge boxes” were hogging the top of search pages with definitions licensed from the British dictionary publisher Oxford, including synonyms, antonyms, and, eventually and predictably, AI-generated summaries of words’ meanings. The proprietary clutter pushed down traditional-dictionary links, and Dictionary .com’s traffic fell by about 40%. At the same time, the pandemic drained advertising revenue. The site tried to stanch the decline with more ads, only to create a worse user experience.

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Another industry flattened by search engines – particularly Google – and with no idea how to make the future work.
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Hosting a website on a disposable vape • BogdanTheGeek’s Blog

Bogdan Ionescu:

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For a couple of years now, I have been collecting disposable vapes from friends and family. Initially, I only salvaged the batteries for “future” projects (It’s not hoarding, I promise), but recently, disposable vapes have gotten more advanced. I wouldn’t want to be the lawyer who one day will have to argue how a device with USB C and a rechargeable battery can be classified as “disposable”. Thankfully, I don’t plan on pursuing law anytime soon.

Last year, I was tearing apart some of these fancier pacifiers for adults when I noticed something that caught my eye, instead of the expected black blob of goo hiding some ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) I see a little integrated circuit inscribed “PUYA”. I don’t blame you if this name doesn’t excite you as much it does me, most people have never heard of them. They are most well known for their flash chips, but I first came across them after reading Jay Carlson’s blog post about the cheapest flash microcontroller you can buy. They are quite capable little ARM Cortex-M0+ micros.

Over the past year I have collected quite a few of these PY32 based vapes, all of them from different models of vape from the same manufacturer. It’s not my place to do free advertising for big tobacco, so I won’t mention the brand I got it from, but if anyone who worked on designing them reads this, thanks for labelling the debug pins!

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So: it had a 24MHz CPU, 24Kb of flash storage, 3Kb of RAM. And yes, he absolutely managed to do it. Even while software companies are spending the rapid expansion of resources – CPU, GPU, RAM, storage – like drunken sailors, it is still possible to do a lot with a very little.
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Americans crushed by auto loans as defaults and repossessions surge • Carscoops

Chris Chilton:

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Many Americans love the feeling of driving a new car, but the price of that thrill is pushing household budgets to the edge. Auto loan delinquencies are spiraling, the nation now owes a staggering $1.66 trillion in auto loans, and some figures show scary similarities to the period right before the 2008 financial crash.

That’s according to a new report titled “Driven to Default: The Economy-Wide Risks of Rising Auto Loan Delinquencies” from the Consumer Federation of America (CFA). It describes auto finance in the US as being “at breaking point,” and criticizes Congress and the country’s federal watchdogs for stepping back, despite evidence showing they’re needed more than ever to protect buyers from unscrupulous dealers.

One of the reasons owners are struggling to keep their heads above water is the high cost of monthly car payments, caused in part by high interest rates. Figures show the typical monthly payment is $745 and 20% of buyers are saddled with monthly bills of at least $1,000. Things could get worse quickly because the $7,500 EV tax credit is due to disappear imminently.

And this time it’s not just subprime borrowers who are feeling the heat. Car buyers with above-average credit scores are twice as likely to fall behind on payments as they were before the pandemic. Younger buyers are hitting the payment skids in high numbers and the repossession rate across all age groups jumped by 43% between 2022 and 2024, according to Cox data.

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There have been similar gloomy “it’s like 2008!” warnings a few times in previous years, but it feels like they’re getting closer together, and perhaps worse.
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Three random words • NCSC.GOV.UK

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Combine three random words to create a password that’s ‘long enough and strong enough’.

Weak passwords can be cracked in seconds. The longer and more unusual your password is, the harder it is for a cyber criminal to crack.

A good way to make your password difficult to crack is by combining three random words to create a password (for example applenemobiro). Or you could use a password manager, which can create strong passwords for you (and remember them).

Avoid the most common passwords that criminals can easily guess (like ‘password’). You should also avoid creating passwords from significant dates (like your birthday, or a loved one’s), or from your favourite sports team, or by using family and pet names. Most of these details can be found within your social media profile.

If you’re thinking of changing certain characters in your password (so swapping the letter ‘o’ with a zero, for example), you should know that cyber criminals know these tricks as well. So your password won’t be significantly stronger, but it will be harder for you to remember.

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Or you could even use four, such as “correct horse battery staple”. No, wait, is it correct horse staple battery? (And how many are now using that?) Good to see the UK’s National Security Centre finally offering some useful advice, after the XKCD cartoon from which the advice is taken appeared some time in 2011.
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My first year without an iPhone • RAYON

Katie Lowe:

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This is mainly a guide for people who are using smartphones now and are interested in switching as I am focusing on the parts of life that are either amenable or totally incompatible with life disconnected. I’ll be honest about the parts of life that I simply have to live without, and I’ll be transparent about the techie workarounds but to be clear, I do not have a secret smart phone that I use everyday, lol. The last iPhone I had was a 12, and I lost it somewhere in the streets of Portland last winter when I was still carrying it around for my bus pass.

Some of you are absolutists, and that’s not going to work here. We can’t turn back time. You can absolutely live completely and fully without the internet, but you have to really change your life. You can totally live ethically with a smartphone, but you will also face struggles. In my opinion, living ethically in either path requires a lot of self-discipline and intentionality.

I work as an editor and marketer of books, and as long as I get my work done, I am not obligated to carry an iPhone for my job. Sure, there are apps like two-factor authentication that we use, and occasionally there’s social media marketing that I can’t do on a desktop, but those are pretty easy to work around, and I’ll explain how.

The other caveat is that I am still spending no less than 8 hours a day with access to the internet. I don’t want to make it sound for one second that I don’t spend a ton of time on the internet, because I do. I have wifi at home, I have wifi at work, and I spend 40 hours a week looking at screens (well, maybe 20% of that time I’m in meetings or reading printed manuscripts). With that said, when people talk about phone addiction or wanting to reduce screen time, I’m pretty sure they’re talking about how they use their phone in their leisure time. (Although of course, phone habits affect work and productivity, which I’ll get into below.)

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So if you properly want to rewind to roughly 2006, this is how. Might not be for everyone. Clearly works for her: she gave up her smartphone a year ago.
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Donald Trump calls for US companies to ditch quarterly reporting • Financial Times

Zehra Munir, Alexandra White and George Steer:

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Donald Trump has called for US companies to stop reporting quarterly results, adding that a shift to publishing figures twice a year will save them cash and allow executives to focus on their businesses.

The US president issued his call in a post on his Truth Social network on Monday, contrasting standard practice in the US with what he depicted as China’s more long-term approach.

Most publicly listed US companies are required to file quarterly and annual financial filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, known respectively as 10-Q and 10-K disclosures.

“Subject to SEC Approval, Companies and Corporations should no longer be forced to ‘Report’ on a quarterly basis . . . but rather to Report on a ‘Six (6) Month Basis’,” Trump said.

“This will save money, and allow managers to focus on properly running their companies.”

He added: “Did you ever hear the statement that, ‘China has a 50 to 100 year view on management of a company, whereas we run our companies on a quarterly basis???’ Not good!!!”

…Markets including the EU and Singapore have already dropped mandatory quarterly reporting, with many groups disclosing their financials on a semi-annual basis.

“European companies report semi-annually, and I don’t know why President Trump would want to emulate Europe,” said Barry Bannister, chief equity strategist at US bank Stifel.

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Stopped clocks and all that. The quarterly focus has been a problem for companies, though you can imagine that if it shifted to every six months then the quarterly madness to close sales would just be replaced by a six-monthly madness to close sales – but even more intense because they’ll have fallen behind in the previous three months.
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Does xenon really help you climb Everest faster? • Outside Online

Alex Hutchinson:

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In May, four British men climbed Mount Everest in an ultra-rapid expedition that took them from London to the summit and back in less than a week. The trip was organized by Lukas Furtenbach, an accomplished and sometimes controversial guide from Austria who has long sought to speed up Everest trips from their typical six- to eight-week duration. The breakthrough in this year’s expedition, according to media reports, was that the men inhaled xenon gas two weeks before they left in order to prepare their bodies for the rigors of high altitude.

The news prompted a flood of criticism, much of it focused on ethics and mountaineering culture. “Why not just fly up there in a helicopter and touch the top so you said you did it?” the American guide Garrett Madison asked. Those criticisms take for granted that xenon actually works—but scientists aren’t so sure. A new paper in the journal High Altitude Medicine & Biology takes a critical look at the claims and evidence for xenon as a mountaineering aid.

…First, the climbers reportedly spent ten weeks before the expedition sleeping in altitude tents at simulated elevations of up to 23,000 feet (compared to Everest’s peak of just over 29,000ft). There’s plenty of evidence that this really does trigger adaptations, for example enabling you to maintain higher levels of oxygen in your blood once you begin climbing and reducing the risk of altitude illness. Furtenbach has been using this technique with clients since 2017 for three-week Everest climbs.

The other aid is the generous use of supplemental oxygen while climbing. On the three-week expeditions, Furtenbach’s clients are each accompanied by two sherpas, so they have the capacity to carry plenty of spare oxygen.

…Using one litre of oxygen per minute drops the effective altitude from 8,848m to 7,185m; using two litres drops is to 4,489m, which is already below the elevation of base camp. These numbers assume you’re at rest; you need to inhale more oxygen to maintain your blood levels if you’re exercising. For example, doing light exercise while getting two litres per minute of oxygen bumps the effective altitude back up to 6,442m. The solution? Turn the oxygen up even higher. Furtenbach’s website promises “unlimited oxygen” with equipment capable of delivering up to eight litres per minute.

…To Luks and his colleagues, these two factors—pre-acclimatization in altitude tents, then high levels of oxygen flow—are enough to explain how the one-week expedition succeeded.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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.

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.

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.

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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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.”

«

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:

»

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.

«

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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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Playing Tetris has been shown to be an effective way to take your mind off disturbing content you might have seen online. CC-licensed photo by 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.

I was going to write a post at the Social Warming Substack – but it wasn’t about Charlie Kirk, and the noise from that has been overwhelming. So, next week.

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

AirPods Live Translation blocked for EU users with EU Apple accounts • MacRumors

Tim Hardwick:

»

Apple’s new Live Translation feature for AirPods will be off-limits to millions of European users when it arrives next week, with strict EU regulations likely holding back its rollout.

Apple says on its feature availability webpage that “Apple Intelligence: Live Translation with AirPods” won’t be available if both the user is physically in the EU and their Apple Account region is in the EU. Apple doesn’t give a reason for the restriction, but legal and regulatory pressures seem the most plausible culprits.

In particular, the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) both impose strict requirements for how speech and translation services are offered. Regulators may want to study how Live Translation works, and how that impacts privacy, consent, data-flows, and user rights. Apple will also want to ensure its system fully complies with these rules before enabling the feature across EU accounts.

Apple’s Live Translation feature, unveiled during its AirPods Pro 3 announcement, is also coming to older models including AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation and AirPods Pro 2.

«

Slight inconvenience for all those French users going to Germany, or Italy, and all manner of vice-versa. But as long as it works for Americans coming to Europe, that’s probably all that’s needed. (And Britons going to Europe – who, mirabile dictu, will also get working translation because they’re outside the EU. You mean Brexit brought a benefit?)
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The logical endpoint of 21st-century America • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

»

Regardless of the motive, the shooting was clearly staged to maximize impact on social media. Even though footage of mass death is an inescapable feature of the internet now, there was something especially haunting about the videos of Kirk being struck down. The uniquely parasocial terror of seeing a person who seemed so untouchable from behind their armor of internet fame be reduced to just another fragile human being.

If 9/11 was the pinnacle of political violence for the TV age, Kirk’s death should be seen as an inverted mirror image, a perfect spectacle for the social media era. A darkly fitting end for the premier digital propagandist of the Trump administration. The same algorithms he relied on to create narratives for the MAGA movement now turning his death into a dizzying torrent of content. Shitposts, memes, conspiracy theories, and delirious right-wing lust for civil war have spun together online over the last 24 hours more intensely than we’ve ever seen before. The logical endpoint of 21st-century America: An influencer shot to death at a school in front a crowd of smartphones.

The mania online that Kirk’s death has generated is best exemplified by a now-deleted video filmed by TikTok user @eldertiktok11, seconds after the shooting, which ends with the user signing off with, “make sure you subscribe to elder TikTok.” As X user @taste_of_tbone wrote, “A disturbing synthesis: the subject, the medium, the message, the messenger — the call to subscribe between striking a pose and shouting out Jesus… His later apology and promise to ‘be a better content creator.’”

The dark new America that Kirk dedicated his life to manifesting has finally arrived. A complete collapse of the online and the offline, where political violence is simply just another opportunity to grow your personal brand if you can turn your phone on fast enough and make it out alive.

«

There’s plenty more to the article, though this is the part that strikes hardest. The peculiar resonance of it happening just the day before the 24th anniversary of the terror attacks on the US, which were so hard for everyone to get updated news about, is very hard to ignore.
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Charlie Kirk was shot and killed in a post-content-moderation world • WIRED

Lauren Goode:

»

Minutes after conservative political activist Charlie Kirk was shot yesterday at a speaking engagement at Utah Valley University, jarring videos of the incident began circulating on apps like TikTok, Instagram, and X. In the immediate aftermath, the majority of the videos viewed by WIRED did not contain content warnings. Many began autoplaying before viewers had the option to consent. And on X, an AI-generated recap of the incident falsely indicated that Kirk had survived the shooting.

Researchers tracking the spread of the shooting videos on social media say that major social platforms are falling short in enforcing their own content moderation rules, at a moment when political tensions and violence are flaring. And the video of Kirk being fatally shot is somehow falling into a policy loophole, threading the needle between allowable “graphic content” and the category of “glorified violence” that violates platform rules.

“It’s unbelievable how some of these videos are still up. And with the way this stuff spreads, it is absolutely impossible to take down or add warnings to all of these horrific videos if you don’t have a robust trust and safety program,” says Alex Mahadevan, the director of MediaWise at the Poynter Institute.

Over the past two years, social platforms like X, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram have scaled back their content moderation efforts—in some cases eliminating the work of human moderators who previously acted as a crucial line of defence to protect users from viewing harmful content.

…“I don’t think it is possible to prevent the initial distribution, but I think platforms can do better in preventing the massive distribution through algorithmic feeds, especially to people that did not specifically search for it,” says Martin Degeling, a researcher who audits algorithmic systems and works with organizations like the non-profit AI Forensics.

«

I think it probably depends strongly on your location. In the UK, I didn’t see the video (still haven’t 🤞) but have no doubt this is absolutely right: the social networks now either don’t care or can’t figure out how to care about a video showing a killing. It used to be an all-hands-on-deck process to try to stop the uploading of videos of shootings. Now it’s “fill yer boots.”
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Trauma, treatment and Tetris • Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience

Oisin Butler et al:

»

Methods: We recruited patients with combat-related PTSD before psychotherapy and randomly assigned them to an experimental Tetris and therapy group (n = 20) or to a therapy-only control group (n = 20). In the control group, participants completed therapy as usual: eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) psychotherapy. In the Tetris group, in addition to EMDR, participants also played 60 minutes of Tetris every day from onset to completion of therapy, approximately 6 weeks later. Participants completed structural MRI and psychological questionnaires before and after therapy, and we collected psychological questionnaire data at follow-up, approximately 6 months later. We hypothesized that the Tetris group would show increases in hippocampal volume and reductions in symptoms, both directly after completion of therapy and at follow-up.

Results: Following therapy, hippocampal volume increased in the Tetris group, but not the control group. As well, hippocampal increases were correlated with reductions in symptoms of PTSD, depression and anxiety between completion of therapy and follow-up in the Tetris group, but not the control group.

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If you’ve been shown disturbing content on social media, playing Tetris really might help you get over any effects. Just a thought.
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Taiwan increases defensive patrols around 24 undersea cables — closely monitoring “96 blacklisted China-linked boats” with 24-hour operations • Tom’s Hardware

Mark Tyson:

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Taiwan has intensified patrols around the 24 undersea cables that connect it with the global internet. For the most efficient use of Taiwan’s limited coast guard resources, it is paying particular attention to “96 blacklisted China-linked boats,” reports Reuters. The strategy update is hoped to address what is seen as an increasingly popular gray-zone warfare tactic, namely the threat of sabotaging undersea connections.

For its exclusive report on the state of the subsea communications cable threat around the island, Reuters took a trip on the 100-ton Taiwan Coast Guard Ship PP-10079. We mentioned this exact vessel in our report on the severing of Chungwha Telecom’s TP3, by the Togo-registered (but Chinese-crewed) Hong Tai back in February.

PP-10079 monitored and eventually apprehended the Hong Tai after it became apparent its suspicious movements could be associated with the TP3 cable damage. The Chinese captain of Hong Tai was found guilty of deliberately severing TP3 in legal proceedings this summer.

On board the PP-10079, the Reuters reporter was told by the captain that suspected China-backed incursions “have severely undermined the peace and stability of Taiwanese society.” Of course, internet connectivity is also a key resource that is vital for government, businesses, and personal users, too.

«

Just while the US is distracted.
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Exclusive: US warns hidden radios may be embedded in solar-powered highway infrastructure • Reuters

Jana Winter and Raphael Satter:

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US officials say solar-powered highway infrastructure including chargers, roadside weather stations, and traffic cameras should be scanned for the presence of rogue devices – such as hidden radios – secreted inside batteries and inverters.

The advisory, disseminated late last month by the US Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration, comes amid escalating government action over the presence of Chinese technology in America’s transportation infrastructure.

The four-page security note, a copy of which was reviewed by Reuters, said that undocumented cellular radios had been discovered “in certain foreign-manufactured power inverters and BMS,” referring to battery management systems.

The note, which has not previously been reported, did not specify where the products containing undocumented equipment had been imported from, but many inverters are made in China.

There is increasing concern from US officials that the devices, along with the electronic systems that manage rechargeable batteries, could be seeded with rogue communications components that would allow them to be remotely tampered with on Beijing’s orders.

«

Would China really want to mess around with traffic cameras in the US? Make roadside weather stations report the wrong temperatures? It seems a bit overdone. But they did find the radios..
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Google is shutting down Tables, its Airtable rival • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

Google Tables, a work-tracking tool and competitor to the popular spreadsheet-database hybrid Airtable, is shutting down.

In an email sent to Tables users this week, Google said the app will not be supported after December 16, 2025, and advised that users export or migrate their data to either Google Sheets or AppSheet instead, depending on their needs.

Launched in 2020, Tables focused on making project tracking more efficient with automation. It was one of the many projects to emerge from Google’s in-house app incubator, Area 120, which at the time was devoted to cranking out a number of experimental projects. Some of these projects later graduated to become a part of Google’s core offerings across Cloud, Search, Shopping and more.

Tables was one of those early successes: Google said in 2021 that the service was moving from a beta test to become an official Google Cloud product. At the time, the company said it saw Tables as a potential solution for a variety of use cases, including project management, IT operations, customer service tracking, CRM, recruiting, product development and more.

…Area 120, meanwhile, was the victim of a Google re-org in 2022, when the company cancelled half its projects and informed staff that a reduction in force would cut the in-house R&D division to half its size. The division that remained would focus on AI projects, Google said.

«

The Google Cemetery, a third-party observer of how these things pass away, puts the average lifespan of any Google product at four years, so this was pretty much dead on. (Aha.) Though the figure might be different – the Google Cemetery stopped being updated in 2019. Do you think it’s dead?

Bit inconvenient if you have a project going past December.
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US regulator launches inquiry into AI “companions” used by teens • Financial Times

Cristina Criddle, Hannah Murphy and Stefania Palma:

»

The US Federal Trade Commission has ordered leading artificial intelligence companies to hand over information about chatbots that provide “companionship”, which are under intensifying scrutiny after cases involving suicides and serious harm to young users.

OpenAI, Meta, Google and Elon Musk’s xAI are among the tech groups hit with demands for disclosure about how they operate popular chatbots and mitigate harm to consumers. Character.ai and Snap, which aim their services at younger audiences, are also part of the inquiry.

The regulator’s move follows high-profile incidents alleging harm to teenage users of chatbots. Last month, OpenAI was sued by the family of 16-year-old Adam Raine who died by suicide after discussing methods with ChatGPT.

Character.ai is also being sued by a mother who claims the platform, which offers different AI personas to interact with, had a role in the suicide of her son.

The FTC on Thursday said: “AI chatbots can effectively mimic human characteristics, emotions and intentions, and generally are designed to communicate like a friend or confidant, which may prompt some users, especially children and teens, to trust and form relationships with chatbots.”

The FTC’s action comes as US lawmakers and state attorneys-general have also launched inquiries and voiced concern over chatbots’ impact on young people — especially around mental health and sexual content — heaping pressure on tech companies.

«

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How Silicon Valley enabled China’s digital police state • AP News

Dake Kang and Yael Grauer:

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Over the past quarter century, American tech companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known, an Associated Press investigation found. They sold billions of dollars of technology to the Chinese police, government and surveillance companies, despite repeated warnings from the U.S. Congress and in the media that such tools were being used to quash dissent, persecute religious sects and target minorities.

Critically, American surveillance technologies allowed a brutal mass detention campaign in the far west region of Xinjiang — targeting, tracking and grading virtually the entire native Uyghur population to forcibly assimilate and subdue them.

U.S. companies did this by bringing “predictive policing” to China — technology that sucks in and analyzes data to prevent crime, protests, or terror attacks before they happen. Such systems mine a vast array of information — texts, calls, payments, flights, video, DNA swabs, mail deliveries, the internet, even water and power use — to unearth individuals deemed suspicious and predict their behavior. But they also allow Chinese police to threaten friends and family and preemptively detain people for crimes they have not even committed.

For example, the AP found a Chinese defense contractor, Huadi, worked with IBM to design the main policing system known as the “Golden Shield” for Beijing to censor the internet and crack down on alleged terrorists, the Falun Gong religious sect, and even villagers deemed troublesome, according to thousands of pages of classified government blueprints taken out of China by a whistleblower, verified by AP and revealed here for the first time. IBM and other companies that responded said they fully complied with all laws, sanctions and U.S. export controls governing business in China, past and present.

«

It’s the surveillance aspect and the predictive policing element that makes these sales questionable. If they were just cameras, just computers, no blame could be attached. It’s the analysis that makes the difference. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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The remorseless rule of my fitness tracker • Financial Times

Tim Harford:

»

Like any good performance metric, my watch provides me with structure and helps me optimise my running. I can feed in a goal — a distance, a time — and it will generate a training program. Once-difficult tasks, such as running at a consistent pace, become straightforward.

Yet like many performance metrics, the watch can also nudge me into counter-productive activity such as overtraining to the point of injury. The sleep-tracking function tempts many people into thinking too much about sleep, which is the sort of thing that can make it hard to drift off. There’s a term of art, “orthosomnia”. It means that you’re losing sleep because you’re worried that your sleep tracker is judging you.

There is another subtle effect at work, something called “quantification fixation”. A study published last year by behavioural scientists Linda Chang, Erika Kirgios, Sendhil Mullainathan and Katherine Milkman invited participants to choose between a series of two options, such as holiday destinations or job applicants. Chang and her colleagues found that people consistently took numbers more seriously than words or symbols. Whether deciding between a cheap, shabby hotel or an expensive swanky one, or between an intern with strong management skills or one with strong calculus skills, experimental subjects systematically favoured whatever feature had a number on it, rather than a description such as “excellent” or “likely”. Numbers can fixate us.

“A key implication of our findings,” write the researchers, “is that when making decisions, people are systematically biased to favour options that dominate on quantified dimensions. And trade-offs that pit quantitative against qualitative information are everywhere.”

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I have not yet been contradicted in my assertion that sleep tracking is pointless. (If you don’t have an FT account, these articles typically appear on timharford.com in a couple of weeks.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

For $30m, OpenAI thinks it can make an AI-generated feature-length animated film. Toy Story cost the same 30 years ago. Which will be better? CC-licensed photo by Ken Yamaguchi 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.

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

Learning lens blur fields • MIT/University of Toronto/ Adobe

Esther Lin et al:

»

Optical blur is an inherent property of any lens system and is challenging to model in modern cameras because of their complex optical elements. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a high‑dimensional neural representation of blur—the lens blur field—and a practical method for acquisition.

The lens blur field is a multilayer perceptron (MLP) designed to (1) accurately capture variations of the lens 2‑D point spread function over image‑plane location, focus setting, and optionally depth; and (2) represent these variations parametrically as a single, sensor‑specific function. The representation models the combined effects of defocus, diffraction, aberration, and accounts for sensor features such as pixel color filters and pixel‑specific micro‑lenses.

We provide a first‑of‑its‑kind dataset of 5‑D blur fields—for smartphone cameras, camera bodies equipped with a variety of lenses, etc. Finally, we show that acquired 5‑D blur fields are expressive and accurate enough to reveal, for the first time, differences in optical behavior of smartphone devices of the same make and model.

«

Find this puzzling? Let’s boil it down a little.

»

Every lens leaves a blur signature—a hidden fingerprint in every photo. A Lens blur field captures this device-specifc blur. It can be used to tell apart “identical” phones by their optics, deblur images, and render realistic blurs.

Two smartphones of the same make can have subtly different PSFs—your phone has its own blur signature. We show this with the lens blur fields of two iPhone 12 Pros. [Diagram omitted, but in paper.]

«

What this boils down to, even further: 1) you could verify that a specific smartphone camera took a particular photo 2) you could verify, through the absence of microscopic blur, that something was, for example, AI-generated. It’s very interesting. (Thanks Adewale A for the link.)
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Johnson backs Virginia wind project in break with Trump • POLITICO

Kelsey Brugger:

»

House Speaker Mike Johnson is going to bat for an offshore wind project near Virginia Beach at a time when the Trump administration has halted the construction of similar projects and the president has warned that support for the industry could cost politicians their careers.

The Louisiana Republican told POLITICO’s E&E News on Tuesday that he voiced support to Cabinet secretaries about the nearly complete Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project. It’s the largest planned offshore wind venture in the country and has thus far escaped the administration’s wrath.

The speaker was responding to a question about his efforts to relay support for a project important to a vulnerable House Republican from the party’s more moderate wing.

“Yes, I’ve talked to the Trump team and there are ongoing conversations about that,” the speaker said. “I understand the priority for Virginians and we want to do right by them, so we’ll see.”

Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-Va.), who represents the competitive Virginia Beach area, raised her concerns with the speaker on the House floor last week, as soon as Congress returned from the August recess. She said the project was “important to Virginia” due to its ties with a major naval base there.

«

Unexpected. (This is a different location from the one that Orsted is suing to get restarted, which is off Rhode Island and Connecticut.) The Trump admin is doing insane things to wind projects – pointless, stupid things which basically waste huge amounts of money – and it’s frankly astonishing to see Johnson doing something sensible.

But those are the times we live in: sensible government is a surprise.
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Snapchat allows drug dealers to operate openly on platform, finds Danish study • The Guardian

Miranda Bryant:

»

Snapchat has been accused by a Danish research organisation of leaving an “overwhelming number” of drug dealers to openly operate on Snapchat, making it easy for children to buy substances including cocaine, opioids and MDMA.

The social media platform has said it proactively uses technology to filter out profiles selling drugs. However, research by Digitalt Ansvar (Digital Accountability), a Danish research organisation that promotes responsible digital development, has found evidence of a failure to moderate drug-related language in usernames. It also accused Snapchat of failing to respond adequately to reports of profiles openly selling drugs.

Researchers used profiles of 13-year-olds and found a multitude of people selling drugs on Snapchat under usernames featuring keywords such as “coke”, “weed” and “molly”. When researchers reported 40 of these profiles to Snapchat, the company removed only 10 of them. The other 30 reports were rejected, they said.

Snapchat said it had “proactively disabled” 75% of the accounts reported and had now disabled all of them.

The investigation also found that despite previous criticism, Snapchat’s recommendation systems were spreading and promoting profiles of those selling illegal drugs to users – including to children who had not previously shown an interest in or interacted with drug-dealing profiles.

Within a few hours, the researchers’ 13-year-old test profiles had recommendations to add up to 70 suspected drug-dealing profiles because one friend was connected to a drug-dealing profile.

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OpenAI backs AI-made animated feature film • WSJ

Jessica Toonkel:

»

OpenAI wants to prove that generative artificial intelligence can make movies faster and cheaper than Hollywood does today.

The startup is lending its tools and computing resources to the creation of a feature-length animated movie made largely with AI that is expected to be released in theaters globally next year.

“Critterz,” about forest creatures who go on an adventure after their village is disrupted by a stranger, is the brainchild of Chad Nelson, a creative specialist at OpenAI. Nelson started sketching out the characters three years ago while trying to make a short film with what was then OpenAI’s new DALL-E image-generation tool.

Now, he has teamed up with production companies in London and Los Angeles, aiming to debut a feature-length version of the film at the Cannes Film Festival in May. 

The team is attempting to make the movie in about nine months instead of the three years it would typically take, said James Richardson, co-founder of London-based Vertigo Films. Vertigo is producing the film along with Native Foreign, a studio that specializes in using AI along with traditional video-production tools.

“Critterz” has a budget of less than $30m, far less than what animated films typically cost. The production team plans to cast human actors for character voices and hire artists to draw sketches that are fed into OpenAI’s tools, including GPT-5 and image-generating models.

“OpenAI can say what its tools do all day long, but it’s much more impactful if someone does it,” Nelson said. “That’s a much better case study than me building a demo.”

«

Toy Story, in 1995, cost about $30m – which is about $64m in today’s money. I’ll bet that this film is not even half as good (not that there’s really a way to measure that). It grossed just short of $400m. Don’t think that will happen for this one.
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Anonymity is dead and we’re all content now • The Verge

Elizabeth Lopatto:

»

Look, it’s easy to see why that Coldplay couple went viral. The exaggerated response to being on camera — and trying to duck an arena’s kiss cam — is funny. The couple is possibly cheating (immoral, loathed by TikTok) and Chris Martin (the man who knowingly married Gwyneth Paltrow and then consciously uncoupled!) gets a good dunk in. All someone had to do was identify them, and they had one of the world’s most powerful accelerants: the bad behavior of a CEO with one of his employees. It was perfect internet content.

The fact that it’s perfect internet content is also what encourages us to surveil each other. And the consequences of the funny internet video were very real. The CEO resigned. His former subordinate is getting a divorce, which I know because People and E! News reported on the filing as news. The humiliation didn’t end with the viral video — it’s still ongoing, and by writing about it, I am in some sense participating.

This is all possible because our society built a panopticon that any of us can use against any other at will. And while virality isn’t new, TikTok’s algorithm makes it easier than ever for videos to take off unexpectedly, because users don’t even have to share the video to make it go wide. You don’t even have to get caught on a kiss cam at a concert.

…Living in the panopticon means every person you meet is also someone who can ruin your life. Take “West Elm Caleb,” a guy who went viral for… dating. Apparently, he met women on dating apps, was briefly enthusiastic, and then ghosted them. (Not great behavior, but hardly uncommon.) Of course he was immediately doxxed. As the internet has increasingly traded on dating app screenshots for content, people have begun writing responses to each other with the assumption that the conversation won’t remain private. That does seem counter to, you know, dating, since a successful relationship requires vulnerability, the exact thing online daters now avoid.

«

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Flush door handles are the car industry’s latest safety problem • Ars Technica

Jonathan Gitlin:

»

Earlier this week, Ars spent some time driving the new Nissan Leaf. We have to wait until Friday to tell you how that car drives, but among the changes from the previous generation are door handles that retract flush with the bodywork, for the front doors at least. Car designers love them for not ruining the lines of the door with the necessities of real life, but is the benefit from drag reduction worth the safety risk?

That question is in even sharper relief this morning. Bloomberg’s Dana Hull has a deeply reported article that looks at the problem of Tesla’s door handles, which fail when the cars lose power.

The electric vehicle manufacturer chose not to use conventional door locks in its cars, preferring to use IP-based electronic controls. While the front seat occupants have always had a physical latch that can open the door, it took some years for the automaker to add emergency releases for the rear doors, and even now that it has, many rear-seat Tesla passengers will be unaware of where to find or how to operate the emergency release.

A power failure also affects first responders’ ability to rescue occupants, and Hull’s article details a number of tragic fatal crashes where the occupants of a crashed Tesla were unable to escape the smoke and flames of their burning cars.

In fact, the styling feature might be on borrowed time. It seems that Chinese authorities have been concerned about retractable door handles for some time now and are reportedly close to banning them from 2027. Flush-fit door handles fail far more often during side impacts than regular handles, delaying egress or rescue time after a crash. During heavy rain, flush-fit door handles have short-circuited, trapping people in their cars. Chinese consumers have even reported an increase in finger injuries as they get trapped or pinched.

«

Flush handles are just a puzzle to people who haven’t encountered that particular car before. They’re terrible UX.
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Roundtable – Multiple AI Models Brainstorm Together

Roundtable:

»

Can AIs audit each other for bias and truth?

«

This asks a series of chatbots (Google Gemini, Claude 4, etc) to answer this. They reply. The replies are all hedged around – “well yes but also no, and to sum up, maybe!” – in that annoying fashion that chatbots have when you ask them anything more complicated than how many Rs there are in raspberry.

Just feed them some questions and let them fight over it like piranhas. Cage fighting chatbots: that’s what I want.
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The Kong Edition • Why Is This Interesting?

Ryan McManus:

»

It’s 1970. A guy named Joe Markham is operating a garage in downtown Denver, which at the time was plagued by burglaries. The local police were unable to provide much in the way of protection except for a bit of advice: Every good junkyard has a dog.

Turns out Joe knew of a dog in need of a home who might fit the bill—a German shepherd named Fritz, who was originally destined to become a K9 officer with the Denver Police Department, except for one problem—Fritz could not stop chewing.

Fritz would chew anything—dog bones, radiator hoses, even rocks. The last one got Joe worried, as Fritz’s obsessive rock chewing was wearing down his teeth. Then one day, as the legend goes, Joe was tearing down the suspension of a customer’s late 60’s VW Type 2 Bus (the hippie kind) when he heard Fritz going crazy: The dog was chewing on a bulbous rubber axle stop that had been laid aside during the repair.

Axle stops are a high-density rubber component of certain types of suspensions, designed to keep the axle from contacting the leaf springs under heavy load. By design, they need to be durable, offset deflection, and retain their shape under duress. This also turns out to be the ideal qualities of a chew toy.

The Kong represents a perfect case study in accidental innovation: The VW Bus bump stop had a distinctive conical shape: wider at the bottom to distribute impact force over a larger area, then tapering to a narrower top to fit snugly into the suspension housing. This automotive engineering requirement created an inherently unstable shape that would bounce erratically in any direction when dropped.

What’s wild is how perfectly this automotive function translated to canine psychology, despite serving a completely different purpose. Dogs are natural problem-solvers and foragers, with hunting instincts that crave unpredictable movement patterns.

«

Very Post-It Note glue/WD-40 invention.
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A million weight-loss jab users at risk of invalid travel or health insurance • The Times

George Nixon:

»

More than a million users of weight-loss jabs could be at risk of invalidating their travel and health insurance amid confusion over whether they should be listed as medical treatments.

Some 26% of 1,000 UK adults polled by the market researcher Consumer Intelligence said that they did not know how they would classify the use of drugs such as Mounjaro, Ozempic or Wegovy when buying cover.

Only 24% said that they would classify them as medical treatments for health conditions; 11% said that they would call them cosmetic treatments like botox; while 10% that they were lifestyle tools.

Insurers normally require consumers to disclose any pre-existing medical conditions when they buy insurance and their cover can be invalidated if they don’t, even if they make a claim that has nothing to do with that condition.

Ian Hughes, the chief executive of Consumer Intelligence, said that the confusion over how weight-loss jabs should be described could leave claimants out of pocket.

He said: “This confusion isn’t academic — it has real consequences for millions buying travel and health insurance. When a quarter of the population doesn’t know whether their medication counts as being for a pre-existing condition, we’re seeing a perfect storm for claim disputes and coverage gaps.”

«

Still fascinated by the way these GLP-1 drugs are worming their way into our consciousness.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The introduction of translation to Apple’s Airpods 3 might be useful or.. might not at all. CC-licensed photo by download.net.pl – mobile 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.

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

California limits on “addictive” social media feeds for children largely upheld • Reuters

Jonathan Stempel and Nate Raymond:

»

A federal appeals court largely upheld a California law on Tuesday making it illegal, absent parental permission, for social media companies to provide children with “addictive feeds” that the state fears could damage their mental health.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected most claims by the technology trade group NetChoice, which said California’s Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act was overbroad and vague and violated the First Amendment.

Addictive feeds are algorithms that select personalized media for users based on those users’ online behavior.
NetChoice, whose 41 members, opens new tab include Google, Facebook and Instagram parent Meta Platforms, Netflix and Elon Musk’s X, said the law signed by Governor Gavin Newsom last September unconstitutionally limited members’ ability to speak to children through the algorithms.

Writing for a three-judge panel, Circuit Judge Ryan Nelson said the issue of which algorithm-based feeds were “expressive” for First Amendment purposes was fact-intensive, and NetChoice did not show the California law’s alleged unconstitutional applications predominated.

Nelson also found NetChoice premature in challenging a requirement that platforms take steps to verify users’ ages, rather than simply limit feeds to users it knows are children, because the requirement doesn’t take effect until 2027.
The court blocked a requirement that accounts’ default settings prevent children from seeking how many likes and other comments their posts receive. It said that requirement was not the least restrictive way to protect children’s mental health.

Paul Taske, co-director of the NetChoice Litigation Center, said the group is “largely disappointed” with the decision.
“California’s law usurps the role of parents and gives the government more power over how legal speech is shared online,” Taske said. NetChoice has filed many lawsuits challenging state-level internet restrictions.

«

This is surely headed for the Supreme Court, which will maybe rule in the tech firms’ favour, though it probably depends on which way the political winds are blowing at the time.
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Record-breaker: Leonard Barden’s chess column celebrates 70 years and a place in history • The Guardian

Sean Ingle:

»

September 1955. The dying embers of one era, the dawning of another. It’s been five months since Sir Winston Churchill retired as prime minister. In another four Elvis Presley will release Heartbreak Hotel, his first worldwide hit. Food rationing is over. Frozen fish fingers, courtesy of Clarence Birdseye, have just arrived.

Change is also in the air at the Manchester Guardian. On 8 September a young chess master from Croydon, Leonard Barden, writes his first column. His subject is a Russian teenager, Boris Spassky, whose games, Barden notes, “all show the controlled aggression characteristic of a great master”.

The writing is lively and accessible. The judgment impeccable. Spassky will go on to become world champion. Meanwhile, Barden is on the foothills of a journey that, 70 years, 15 prime ministers, and nearly 4,000 articles later, is still going strong.

In all that time he has never missed a week – rain or shine, in sickness and in health. And now, officially, he is a record-breaker. Barden recently eclipsed Jim Walsh of the Irish Times, who started his column in July 1955 and finally retired in May this year, to set a Guinness World Record for the longest-running continuous chess column.

Barden, who recently turned 96, is also the longest-serving daily newspaper columnist for his 63-year stint with the Evening Standard, which ended in 2020. Both records will surely never be broken. Yet they are only a small part of an astonishing career.

He was British chess champion in 1954. He played for England in four chess Olympiads. And he was a key figure in the British chess explosion of the 70s and 80s that turned players such as Nigel Short into world title contenders. As the grandmaster Raymond Keene put it a couple of years ago: “Everywhere you looked in British chess, the giant handprint of Len Barden was to be found.”

«

As with so many stories like this, he nearly came a cropper early on when he was given duff advice and the solution was wrong. The chief sub gave him an official final warning.

Anyway, he’s still writing articles. Each one has a chess puzzle – typically just a “move to win” – from real play which is always entertaining.
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Narrative podcasts are disappearing. What happened? • Rolling Stone

Eric Benson:

»

For years, narrative podcasts were the buzziest segment of the industry. They were what many listeners thought of when they heard the word “podcast.” Many of these shows, following the lead of Serial, were true crime, while others, like Slow Burn, took a similar investigative approach to politics and history. But regardless of genre, most narrative shows shared a style — they were told through the perspective of a single reporter-host, who not only guided a listener through a story but invited them along on the reporting journey.

Now, these shows seem increasingly like an artifact of history. Layoffs have hit nearly every organization that makes this kind of audio, from corporate behemoths like Spotify to successful start-ups like Pushkin Industries to the public-radio godfather of it all, This American Life. In early August, Amazon announced it was dismantling Wondery, one of the biggest and most commercially successful studios in the business, which had made its name on shows like Dr. Death and The Shrink Next Door. Amazon had acquired Wondery less than five years ago for $300m. Now, the company was being broken up into parts and a reported 110 staffers were laid off.

“It feels like podcasts speed-ran the development of an industry to the decline of an industry,” the journalist and podcast host Evan Ratliff told me. “It went from people were making absolutely no money, to people were making fortunes big enough where they’d never have to work again, to ‘There’s not a budget for that’ in less than 10 years.” Now, even those reduced budgets have vanished.

The fall of the industry has been so vertiginous that it’s been hard to fully comprehend its decline. But in many ways, this collapse was baked into its spectacular rise, when a flood of dumb money, pollyannaish entrepreneurs, and hungry journalists rushed to build an industry that would soon turn into a house of cards.

…The tech and media giants that had funded the podcast boom had learned that narrative journalism was hard to scale. In 2019, it might have been enough for them to make shows that “we can brag about,” but a few years later, as recession fears grew, losing money on prestige programming no longer seemed like a good idea.

«

Early entrants tend not to be long-term survivors, lesson 945. Much easier to get a few people in a room to talk about any old thing than make a radio documentary. Or actually.. who needs people?
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AI podcast start up plans 5,000 shows, 3,000 episode a week • Hollywood Reporter

Caitlin Huston:

»

Why pay a celebrity podcast host millions when you can create your own using AI? 

Inception Point AI is attempting to do just that, as the company builds a stable of AI talent to host podcasts, and eventually become broader influencers across social media, literature and more. Amid the high costs for producing narrative podcasts and pricy, short-term contracts for popular hosts, the idea here is being able to own, scale and control the talent (unlike those off-the-cuff humans) and produce shows at a minimal cost. 

“We believe that in the near future half the people on the planet will be AI, and we are the company that’s bringing those people to life,” said CEO Jeanine Wright, who was previously chief operating officer of podcasting company Wondery, which has recently had to reorganize under the changing podcast landscape. 

The company is able to produce each episode for $1 or less, depending on length and complexity, and attach programmatic advertising to it. This generally means that if about 20 people listen to that episode, the company made a profit on that episode, without factoring in overhead. 

Inception Point AI already has more than 5,000 shows across its Quiet Please Podcast Network and produces more than 3,000 episodes a week. Collectively, the network has seen 10 million downloads since September 2023. It takes about an hour to create an episode, from coming up with the idea to getting it out in the world. 

The company produces different levels of podcasts. The lowest level involves weather reports for various geographic areas or simple biographies and higher levels involving subject-area podcasts hosted by one of about 50 AI personalities they’ve created, including food expert Claire Delish, gardener and nature expert Nigel Thistledown and Oly Bennet, who covers off-beat sports.

As for how it stacks up against human podcasts? “I think that people who are still referring to all AI-generated content as AI slop are probably lazy luddites. Because there’s a lot of really good stuff out there,” Wright said. 

«

I think by “in the near future half the people on the planet will be AI” he means we humans will be interacting with AI as often as we do humans. Sure, but we will get a lot more value from the human interaction. And while I’m sure there are people who want to listen to AI-generated and -read podcasts, I’m not one of them.
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Judge: Anthropic’s $1.5bn settlement is being shoved “down the throat of authors” • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

At a hearing Monday, US District Judge William Alsup blasted a proposed $1.5bn settlement over Anthropic’s rampant piracy of books to train AI.

The proposal comes in a case where Anthropic could have owed more than $1 trillion in damages after Alsup certified a class that included up to 7 million claimants whose works were illegally downloaded by the AI company.

Instead, critics fear Anthropic will get off cheaply, striking a deal with authors suing that covers less than 500,000 works and paying a small fraction of its total valuation (currently $183bn) to get away with the massive theft. Defector noted that the settlement doesn’t even require Anthropic to admit wrongdoing, while the company continues raising billions based on models trained on authors’ works. Most recently, Anthropic raised $13bn in a funding round, making back about 10 times the proposed settlement amount after announcing the deal.

Alsup expressed grave concerns that lawyers rushed the deal, which he said now risks being shoved “down the throat of authors,” Bloomberg Law reported.

In an order, Alsup clarified why he thought the proposed settlement was a chaotic mess. The judge said he was “disappointed that counsel have left important questions to be answered in the future,” seeking approval for the settlement despite the Works List, the Class List, the Claim Form, and the process for notification, allocation, and dispute resolution all remaining unresolved.

Denying preliminary approval of the settlement, Alsup suggested that the agreement is “nowhere close to complete,” forcing Anthropic and authors’ lawyers to “recalibrate” the largest publicly reported copyright class-action settlement ever inked, Bloomberg reported.

Of particular concern, the settlement failed to outline how disbursements would be managed for works with multiple claimants, Alsup noted. Until all these details are ironed out, Alsup intends to withhold approval, the order said.

One big change the judge wants to see is the addition of instructions requiring “anyone with copyright ownership” to opt in, with the consequence that the work won’t be covered if even one rights holder opts out, Bloomberg reported.

«

Making it opt-in will significantly reduce the number of people who claim – so a bigger payout for those who do. More background from the initial story about the $1.5bn offer last week.
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Apple announces AirPods Pro 3 with “world’s best ANC” and heart rate sensing • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

Apple just announced the AirPods Pro 3, the first major update to the product in three years. Apple is introducing a new heart rate sensor in the AirPods Pro 3, as well as improved active noise cancellation (ANC) and a live translation feature. You’ll be able to preorder the AirPods Pro 3 today for $249, and they’ll start shipping on September 19th.

Apple is upgrading the audio quality in the AirPods Pro 3 with a widened sound stage and improved noise cancellation. Apple says the AirPods Pro 3 will deliver the “world’s best ANC,” thanks to foam-infused ear tips for greater noise isolation. Apple claims this will enable twice the ANC than the previous generation of AirPods Pro, and “deliver the world’s best ANC of any in-ear wireless headphones.”

Perhaps the biggest upgrade on the AirPods Pro 3 will be the new heart rate sensor. Apple is using its smallest heart rate sensor on the AirPods Pro 3, which is a custom photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor that “shines invisible infrared light pulsed at 256 times per second to measure light absorption in blood flow.”

«

Ah, so it finally came true.

I’m more interested by this:

»

Apple is also bringing a new live translation feature to the AirPods Pro 3. ANC will lower the volume of the speaker and play audio back to you in your preferred language. “When enabled, Live Translation helps users understand another language and communicate with others by speaking naturally with AirPods,” explains Apple. “To interact with someone who doesn’t have this hands-free capability, there’s an option to use iPhone as a horizontal display, showing the live transcription of what the user is saying in the other person’s preferred language.”

«

I can’t honestly imagine being in a situation where I’d want to do this, and you have to upgrade the phone to iOS 26 (🤢), but it’s honestly the most attractive thing Apple announced in the entire infomercial. (Though Google announced it for its Pixel Buds back in November 2023. Do people use that?)
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Zuckerberg’s AI hires disrupt Meta with swift exits and threats to leave • Financial Times

Hannah Murphy, Cristina Criddle and George Hammond:

»

“There’s a lot of big men on campus,” said one investor who is close with some of Meta’s new AI leaders. 

Adding to the tumult, a handful of new AI staff have already decided to leave after brief tenures, according to people familiar with the matter.

This includes Ethan Knight, a machine-learning scientist who joined the company weeks ago. Another, Avi Verma, a former OpenAI researcher, went through Meta’s onboarding process but never showed up for his first day, according to a person familiar with the matter.

In a tweet on X on Wednesday, Rishabh Agarwal, a research scientist who started at Meta in April, announced his departure. He said that while Zuckerberg and Wang’s pitch was “incredibly compelling”, he “felt the pull to take on a different kind of risk”, without giving more detail.

Meanwhile, Chaya Nayak and Loredana Crisan, generative AI staffers who had worked at Meta for nine and 10 years respectively, are among the more than half a dozen veteran employees to announce they are leaving in recent days. Wired first reported some details of recent exits, including Zhao’s threatened departure. 

Meta said: “We appreciate that there’s outsized interest in seemingly every minute detail of our AI efforts, no matter how inconsequential or mundane, but we’re just focused on doing the work to deliver personal superintelligence.”

«

Late to this (it was reported at the end of August). That’s a lot of money not quite taken up. (Via Benedict Evans, like quite a few of the links below.)
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China’s social media platforms rush to abide by AI-generated content labelling law • South China Morning Post

Coco Feng:

»

Major Chinese social media platforms, including Tencent Holdings’ WeChat and ByteDance-owned Douyin, have launched new features to abide by Monday’s roll-out of a new law that mandates labelling of all artificial intelligence-generated content online.

The law, which was issued in March, requires explicit and implicit labels for AI-generated text, images, audio, video and other virtual content. Explicit markings must be clearly visible to users, while implicit identifiers – such as digital watermarks – should be embedded in the metadata.

The country’s top internet watchdog, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) – along with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security and the National Radio and Television Administration – drafted the law.

The new regulation reflects Beijing’s increased scrutiny of AI, as concerns grow over misinformation, copyright infringement and online fraud.

«

Have to feel that it’s a strange state of affairs when the Chinese Communist Party is more concerned about copyright and fraud than the US Republican Party. The “misinformation” stuff, well, you can understand that bit.
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Some French publishers are giving AI revenue directly to journalists. Could that ever happen in the US? • Nieman Journalism Lab

Andrew Deck:

»

In the US, when a publisher signs a licensing deal with an AI company, newsroom staffers don’t get a cut.

Many newsrooms have licensed their content to OpenAI in bulk, for example. A staff reporter’s stories can be used as training data for the latest GPT model, or may surface in ChatGPT’s response to a user question.

Does that reporter deserve to be compensated directly for how their work is being used by OpenAI? In France, the answer is, increasingly, yes.

At least, that’s the logic underlying a host of agreements between French news publishers and trade unions, which are redistributing revenue from AI licensing deals directly to journalists. These agreements guarantee that if a reporter’s stories are being used by AI companies, they will share directly in the publisher’s earnings.

In some cases, the agreements put a fixed sum of several hundred euros into the pockets of newsroom staffers each year. At other outlets, journalists are splitting a percentage share. Le Monde, one of France’s largest newspapers, signed a deal with several unions in June 2024 ensuring a quarter of its AI licensing revenue is redistributed, without a ceiling.

To an American journalist, these arrangements can feel foreign or out of reach.

«

I’ll go with “about as out of reach as the Moon”, actually. Any US publisher large enough to warrant some sort of payout is not going to pass it on. However as the article explains the French have a slightly different system for assigning rights.
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Warner Bros. sues Midjourney to stop AI knockoffs of Batman, Scooby-Doo • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Warner Bros. hit Midjourney with a lawsuit last Thursday, crafting a complaint that strives to shoot down defenses that the AI company has already raised in a similar lawsuit filed by Disney and Universal Studios earlier this year.

The big film studios have alleged that Midjourney profits off image generation models trained to produce outputs of popular characters. For Disney and Universal, intellectual property rights to pop icons like Darth Vader and the Simpsons were allegedly infringed. And now, the WB complaint defends rights over comic characters like Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman, as well as characters considered “pillars of pop culture with a lasting impact on generations,” like Scooby-Doo and Bugs Bunny, and modern cartoon characters like Rick and Morty.

“Midjourney brazenly dispenses Warner Bros. Discovery’s intellectual property as if it were its own,” the WB complaint said, accusing Midjourney of allowing subscribers to “pick iconic” copyrighted characters and generate them in “every imaginable scene.”

Planning to seize Midjourney’s profits from allegedly using beloved characters to promote its service, Warner Bros. described Midjourney as “defiant and undeterred” by the Disney/Universal lawsuit.

«

I suspect Midjourney is more like tired and weary of the lawsuits. The new process for an AI startup is: 1) create AI project 2) hire lawyers 3) ??? 4) perhaps profit, who knows?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A £200m relief road around Lincoln has been held up by the presence of.. possibly one bat. CC-licensed photo by Florida Fish and Wildlife 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. Can you hear it? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Online safety laws to strengthen to protect people of all ages from devastating self-harm content • GOV.UK

»

The government has today (8 September) announced urgent action to toughen the Online Safety Act by putting stricter legal requirements on tech companies to hunt down and remove material that encourages or assists serious self-harm, before it can destroy lives and tear families apart.

While platforms already have to take specific steps to protect children from this dangerous self-harm content, the government recognises that adults battling mental health challenges are equally at risk from exposure to material that could trigger a mental health crisis or worse.

The new regulations mean that content encouraging or assisting serious self-harm will be treated as a priority offence for all users.

The change will trigger the strongest possible legal protections, compelling platforms to use cutting-edge technology to actively seek out and eliminate this content before it can reach users and cause irreparable harm, rather than simply reacting after someone has already been exposed to it.

Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said: “This government is determined to keep people safe online. Vile content that promotes self-harm continues to be pushed on social media and can mean potentially heart-wrenching consequences for families across the country.

“Our enhanced protections will make clear to social media companies that taking immediate steps to keep users safe from toxic material that could be the difference between life and death is not an option, but the law.”

«

The UK is already in a ferment about what can and can’t be said online, and what the role of the police is; in addition to the introduction of the OSA requiring age verification all over the place (with uneven effect). This is not going to improve things. The impact, when something dramatic blows up into a huge problem, is probably about six months away.
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Strictly Come Dancing shake-up! BBC confirms major change to show’s voting system • Digital Spy via MSN

Stefania Sarrubba:

»

The BBC has announced a big change to Strictly Come Dancing and other shows’ voting system.

Weeks before Strictly returns for its new season, the BBC has shared that all voting will now take place online, as premium-rate phone voting has come to an end.

Strictly, as well as other shows like the Eurovision Song Contest, will continue welcoming online votes from viewers.

The BBC has noted that online voting was “the go-to choice” for most viewers, with the majority of votes for the last season of Strictly being cast online.

The broadcaster explained the decision to stop offering premium-rate phone voting, saying the system, run by phone company BT, is “outdated” and “expensive to run”.

Online-only voting can be done via your BBC account. The BBC encourages viewers to create an account, as having one offers a more personalised iPlayer experience and weather updates tailored to your location.

If you don’t have an account, you can sign up for one for free on the BBC website.

«

The premium-rate voting system did at least have the disadvantage that it was expensive to scam. This feels like it’s going to be relatively easy to scam.
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In court filing, Google says the open web is in “rapid decline” • Ars Technica

Ryan Whitwam:

»

Is the web thriving or faltering? Google has an unexpected take in a new legal filing. Google is heading back to court soon in hopes of convincing a judge that it should not have to split up its ad business. The company lost its adtech antitrust case earlier this year, and now it’s up to the court to decide on remedies for the illegal conduct. In its response to the Department of Justice’s requested remedies, Google made a startling claim: “The fact is that today, the open web is already in rapid decline.”

Google says that forcing it to divest its AdX marketplace would hasten the demise of wide swaths of the web that are dependent on advertising revenue. This is one of several reasons Google asks the court to deny the government’s request. The DOJ also tried to force a divestment of Chrome in the search antitrust trial, but the judge in that case declined to order that in the remedies.

Google’s advertising business has turned it into an unrivaled Internet juggernaut. Google increasingly is the Internet—websites have no choice but to adhere to Google’s standards for search and ads because there’s no substantial competition. The court in this case ruled that in tying its display ad services with the AdX marketplace, Google suppressed the adoption of rival technologies, and this gave it an opportunity to preference its own services in ad auctions.

As users become increasingly frustrated with AI search products, Google often claims people actually love AI search and are sending as many clicks to the web as ever. Now that its golden goose is on the line, the open web is suddenly “in rapid decline.” It’s right there on page five of the company’s September 5 filing, as spotted by Search Engine Roundtable.

…Google’s position is that the entire passage is referring to open-web advertising rather than the open web itself. “Investments in non-open web display advertising like connected TV and retail media are growing at the expense of those in open web display advertising,” says Google.

«

Yeah, no. Is Google seriously saying that total advertising spend has peaked? That would be a hell of thing to tell people. The reality seems to be that advertising on the open web is falling, but that also means Google controls more of the places where advertising does happen. So its monopoly is stronger. The filing works against it.
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EU fines Google nearly €3bn for “abusing” dominant position in ad tech • Associated Press via The Guardian

»

European Union regulators on Friday hit Google with a €2.95bn ($3.5bn) fine for breaching the bloc’s competition rules by favoring its own digital advertising services, marking the fourth such antitrust penalty for the company as well as a retreat from previous threats to break up the tech giant.

The European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s executive branch and top antitrust enforcer, also ordered the US company to end its “self-preferencing practices” and take steps to stop “conflicts of interest” along the advertising technology supply chain.

The commission’s investigation found that Google had “abused” its dominant positions in the ad-technology ecosystem.

Google said the decision was “wrong” and that it would appeal. “It imposes an unjustified fine and requires changes that will hurt thousands of European businesses by making it harder for them to make money,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, the company’s global head of regulatory affairs, said in a statement.

The decision arrived more than two years after the European Commission announced antitrust charges against Google. The commission had said at the time that the only way to satisfy antitrust concerns about Google’s lucrative digital ad business was to sell off parts of its business. However, this decision marks a retreat from that earlier position and comes amid renewed tensions between Brussels and the Trump administration over trade, tariffs and technology regulation.

Top EU officials had said earlier that the commission was seeking a forced sale because past cases that ended with fines and requirements for Google to stop anti-competitive practices have not worked, allowing the company to continue its behavior in a different form.

«

The same case in the US came to the same conclusion about abuse of dominant position, which Google likewise said it would appeal.
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The iPhone 17’s potential makeover might be just enough • The Verge

Allison Johnson:

»

I think five or seven years ago, the choice to buy an iPhone was more of an active one. People really liked what the iPhone offered — a robust app ecosystem, a streamlined operating system, and an excellent camera. But over the past decade, the list of things you “need” an iPhone for has gotten shorter as Android has caught up. You can even get a Pixel phone with what is essentially MagSafe these days.

To be sure, that’s partially the reality of a mature product category. The appearance of must-have upgrades has slowed down, and people are buying phones less frequently than they used to as a result. But even if the pace of innovation has declined and people are holding on to their phones longer, shouldn’t a phone that’s four or five years newer than the one you’re trading in feel like a real upgrade?

It looks like there’s good news on that front. Rumors point to some significant upgrades for the base model 17, like the long-awaited addition of a ProMotion screen. The features Apple has slowly trickled out over the last few years — Dynamic Island and Camera Control — haven’t exactly set the world on fire, but the compounding effect might make them feel like more substantial upgrades in the hands of, say, an iPhone 13 owner.

Beyond the base model, it seems that Apple is taking some bigger swings. Rumors point to a significant redesign for the Pro phones: the camera bump will stretch out, we’ll get a vibrant orange color option, and the Plus model will slim down into a strikingly thin iPhone Air.

«

Well, the event is happening today (6pm BST, 1pm EST, 10am PST) if you’re at all interested. But as this article admits, there’s basically no reason to upgrade your phone any more. The improvements are asymptotic; if you can tell the difference between phone from two random years within a five-year span, you’re doing well.

There will also be new AirPods and new Apple Watches. The thrill! I’ll go to the foot of our stairs!
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Humans are being hired to make AI slop look less sloppy • NBC News

Angela Yang:

»

The same technology that was supposed to put graphic designer Lisa Carstens out of business is now keeping her busier than ever.

Carstens, a longtime freelancer based in Spain, spends a good portion of her day working with startups and individual clients looking to fix their botched attempts at artificial intelligence-generated logos.

The illustrations clients bring to her are commonly littered with unclean lines and nonsensical text, and they look like a mess of pixels when blown up beyond a certain size.

“There’s people that are aware AI isn’t perfect, and then there’s people that come to you angry because they didn’t manage to get it done themselves with AI,” Carstens said. “And you kind of have to be empathetic. You don’t want them to feel like idiots. Then you have to fix it.”

Such gigs are part of a new category of work spawned by the generative AI boom that threatened to displace creative jobs across the board: Anyone can now write blog posts, produce a graphic or code an app with a few text prompts, but AI-generated content rarely makes for a satisfactory final product on its own.

The issue has transformed the job market for many gig workers. Despite widespread concern that AI is replacing workers across industries, some are saying they’ve found new work as a result of AI’s incompetencies: Writers are asked to spruce up ChatGPT’s writing. Artists are being hired to patch up wonky AI images. Even software developers are tasked with fixing buggy apps coded by AI assistants.

«

The before-and-after of an AI-generated image really is something. The spelling alone is worth it.

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Son of bat tunnel • The Value of Nothing

Martin Robbins on the bizarre stalling of a £200m relief road around Lincoln cause by.. bats. But: bats whose presence is uncertain:

»

Either way, £4.3m of public spending has been allocated to protect an unknown number of Barbastelles on the say-so of a piece of software, backed up by a single human report. That’s a lot of cash, so you would hope that the measures are proven and reliable, but that’s not actually the case.

Back in Norfolk again, which seems to be ground zero for England’s accidental war against the Barbastelle, similar bat protection measures were installed on the Norwich Northern Distributor Road at a cost of over £1m. A couple of years later, data on their effectiveness reached the BBC. It was not good: “none of the bridges was effective, with ecologists suggesting disturbance from the road may have driven the bats away.” A report issued by Norfolk County Council found that “just 13 bats crossed a £1.2m ‘green bridge’ during surveys.” Local populations of Barbastelles tagged with radio monitors had apparently just moved away.

That’s not surprising as Barbastelles are famously elusive, prefer woodland areas and avoid loud, bright, built-up environments. They are not fans of gentrification or major infrastructure projects. The most likely outcome of the North Hykeham Relief Road – a 70mph dual carriageway built across large open fields miles from any woodland – is that they simply feed elsewhere. If the goal was to help grow their population, the millions of pounds spent on bat bridges and culverts would have been better invested in new woodland habitats for them, away from major roads.

«

James O’Malley (a co-host of a podcast about how for God’s sake we should get more done in this country) has a post about a similar blocking of Getting Building Done near Cambridge.

For me, this adds up to a sclerosis in Britain’s ability to do anything, and it will have serious political ramifications. Robbins points this out too: Natural England, the government organisation which insisted on kid gloves for the bats, is part of the gigantic blockage which is frustrating people. Unless, of course, it’s stopping something they don’t like getting built. But then they wonder why living standards aren’t rising.
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What if the AI stock market blows up? • The Economist

This might be Alex Hern, the AI correspondent at The Economist, wondering what happens if the AI boom is a bubble and bursts:

»

For now, the splurge looks fairly modest by historical standards. According to our most generous estimate, American AI firms have invested 3-4% of current American GDP over the past four years. British railway investment during the 1840s was around 15-20% of GDP. But if forecasts for data-centre construction are correct, that will change. What is more, an unusually large share of capital investment is being devoted to assets that depreciate quickly. Nvidia’s cutting-edge chips will look clunky in a few years’ time. We estimate that the average American tech firm’s assets have a shelf-life of just nine years, compared with 15 for telecoms assets in the 1990s.

Last is the question of who would bear the losses from a crash. Almost half the forthcoming $2.9trn in data-centre capex, Morgan Stanley reckons, will come from giant tech firms’ cashflows. These companies can borrow a lot more to fund their investments if they wish, since they have little existing debt. They make up about a fifth of the S&P 500 index’s market value, but as borrowers, they account for only 2% of the investment-grade bond market. Their balance-sheets look rock-solid.

The other big investors are likely to be insurance companies, pension schemes, sovereign-wealth funds and rich families. In August PIMCO, a big bond investor, and Blue Owl, a private-credit firm, funded Meta’s $29bn data-centre expansion in Louisiana. If the value of all AI investments went to zero such investors would suffer, but would be unlikely to bring down the financial system. Since American banks are not financing much of the AI boom themselves, their exposure to it is mostly indirect, through such non-bank lenders.

In another respect, though, America’s economy is in a historically unique position: individuals’ exposure to the stockmarket has never been so high. Ownership of stocks accounts for about 30% of the net worth of American households, compared with 26% in early 2000, at the peak of the dotcom bubble. Such ownership is concentrated among the rich, whose spending has powered economic growth of late.

«

So basically not too worried: it’ll be venture capitalists (and those who fund them) who will bear the brunt, on this reading.
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Red Sea cable cuts disrupt internet across Asia and the Middle East • Reuters via The Japan Times

»

Internet connectivity in multiple countries, including India and Pakistan, has been affected due to subsea cable outages in the Red Sea, internet monitoring group Netblocks said.

Similar internet disruptions were also observed on Etilasat and Du networks in the United Arab Emirates, Netblocks said.

It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the damage, but Netblocks identified failures affecting cable systems near Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Microsoft on Saturday said its Microsoft Azure users may experience increased latency due to multiple undersea fiber cuts in the Red Sea.

The company said its users may experience service disruptions on traffic routes through the Middle East. Azure, the world’s second largest cloud provider after Amazon’s AWS, has rerouted traffic through alternative network paths, and network traffic is not interrupted.

“We do expect higher latency on some traffic that previously traversed through the Middle East. Network traffic that does not traverse through the Middle East is not impacted,” Microsoft said.

«

Coincidentally with all the failures affecting India and Pakistan, a number of the most annoying accounts on Twitter/X fell strangely silent.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Being able to run quickly is not necessarily a benefit for lizards, research shows. CC-licensed photo by B 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.

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

Fake pitches flood newsrooms as AI tools proliferate • Media Copilot

Christopher Allbritton:

»

“Margaux Blanchard” never existed. Yet this fictional freelance journalist successfully placed articles in Wired, Business Insider, and four other publications before Press Gazette exposed the elaborate hoax in August.

Press Gazette’s investigation found that “Blanchard’s” profile photos appeared AI-generated, showing different women across various platforms. When confronted, a newly created X account claiming to represent Blanchard sent messages that AI detection tool Pangram identified as 99% artificially generated. Wired and Business Insider have both pulled multiple “Blanchard” pieces from their sites.

Blanchard is allegedly Tim Boucher, a Quebec-based web policy expert using the pseudonym Andrew Frelon. In a post on Medium, he claimed he committed the Blanchard fraud to give a “major media client” “actionable data” on whether a “fully autonomous AI system” could create credible news stories for top-tier outlets. He said he set up an AI system to identify or create trends and draft and send pitches with minimal intervention.

Boucher previously made headlines for creating a fake X account representing AI-generated band Velvet Sundown, successfully deceiving Rolling Stone into publishing an interview.

“I want to be able to show people a bit of what that’s like — this feeling of having to determine what’s real,” Boucher told CBC News at the time.

The ability of Boucher, if he is behind the hoax, to fool editors at top-tier publications reveals troubling vulnerabilities in editorial verification processes as AI tools make it easier to create convincing fake identities and content. City AM Magazine editor Steve Dinneen recently uncovered another AI fraud involving a US-based writer called Joseph Wales, who turned out to be Wilson Kaharua operating from Nairobi.

Kaharua told Dinneen he used AI tool Deepseek to generate pitches and paid for services alerting him to editorial callouts. He created fake identification documents and used cryptocurrency payments to maintain his false identity.

«

There’s been a lot of speculation about the Velvet Sundown creator. This would tie up a loose ends if it is Boucher.
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The doctors are real, but the sales pitches are frauds • The New York Times

Steven Lee Myers, Alice Callahan and Teddy Rosenbluth:

»

Dr. Robert H. Lustig is an endocrinologist, a professor emeritus of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, and an author of best-selling books on obesity.

He is absolutely not — despite what you might see and hear on Facebook — hawking “liquid pearls” with dubious claims about weight loss. “No injections, no surgery, just results,” he appears to say in one post.

Instead, someone has used artificial intelligence to make a video that imitates him and his voice — all without his knowledge, let alone consent.

The posts are part of a global surge of frauds hijacking the online personas of prominent medical professionals to sell unproven health products or simply to swindle gullible customers, according to the doctors, government officials and researchers who have tracked the problem.

While health care has long attracted quackery, A.I. tools developed by Big Tech are enabling the people behind these impersonations to reach millions online — and to profit from them. The result is seeding disinformation, undermining trust in the profession and potentially endangering patients.

Even if the products are not dangerous, selling useless supplements can raise false hopes among people who should be getting the medical treatment they need.

“There are so many things wrong with this,” Dr. Lustig — the real one — said in an interview when contacted about the impersonations. The interview was the first time he had learned about them.

The Food and Drug Administration and other government agencies, as well as advocacy groups and private watchdogs, have stepped up warnings about counterfeit or fraudulent health products online, but they appear to have done little to stem the tide.

«

In the health and wellness – and especially vaccine – space, it becomes more important for information to be reliable. And that’s being taken away. Would criminal sanctions for scams like this make a difference?
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Using AI to perceive the universe in greater depth • Google DeepMind

»

Our novel Deep Loop Shaping method improves control of gravitational wave observatories, helping astronomers better understand the dynamics and formation of the universe.

To help astronomers study the universe’s most powerful processes, our teams have been using AI to stabilize one of the most sensitive observation instruments ever built.

In a paper published today in Science, we introduce Deep Loop Shaping, a novel AI method that will unlock next-generation gravitational-wave science. Deep Loop Shaping reduces noise and improves control in an observatory’s feedback system, helping stabilize components used for measuring gravitational waves — the tiny ripples in the fabric of space and time.

These waves are generated by events like neutron star collisions and black hole mergers. Our method will help astronomers gather data critical to understanding the dynamics and formation of the universe, and better test fundamental theories of physics and cosmology.

We developed Deep Loop Shaping in collaboration with LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) operated by Caltech, and GSSI (Gran Sasso Science Institute), and proved our method at the observatory in Livingston, Louisiana.

«

They say “AI” but the actual paper talks about “a reinforcement learning method”, which a few years ago they would happily have called “machine learning”. That’s a much more reliable form of AI; this is where machine learning has the potential to make a huge difference.
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National Grid connects UK’s largest battery storage facility at Tilbury substation • National Grid

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National Grid has connected the UK’s largest battery energy storage system (BESS) to its transmission network at Tilbury substation in Essex.

The 300MW Thurrock Storage project, developed by Statera Energy, is now energised and delivering electricity flexibly to the network across London and the south east.

With a total capacity of 600MWh, Thurrock Storage is capable of powering up to 680,000 homes, and can help to balance supply and demand by soaking up surplus clean electricity and discharging it instantaneously when the grid needs it.

Our Tilbury substation once served a coal plant, and with battery connections like this, it’s today helping to power a more sustainable future for the region and the country.

National Grid reinforced its Tilbury substation to ensure the network in the region could safely carry the battery’s significant additional load, with new protection and control systems installed to ensure a robust connection.

The substation previously served the coal-fired Tilbury A and B power stations on adjacent land prior to their demolition, so the connection of the Thurrock Storage facility marks a symbolic transition from coal to clean electricity at the site.

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I’m a high schooler. AI is demolishing my education • The Atlantic

Ashanty Rosario:

»

AI has transformed my experience of education. I am a senior at a public high school in New York, and these tools are everywhere. I do not want to use them in the way I see other kids my age using them—I generally choose not to—but they are inescapable.

During a lesson on the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, I watched a classmate discreetly shift in their seat, prop their laptop up on a crossed leg, and highlight the entirety of the chapter under discussion. In seconds, they had pulled up ChatGPT and dropped the text into the prompt box, which spat out an AI-generated annotation of the chapter. These annotations are used for discussions; we turn them in to our teacher at the end of class, and many of them are graded as part of our class participation. What was meant to be a reflective, thought-provoking discussion on slavery and human resilience was flattened into copy-paste commentary. In Algebra II, after homework worksheets were passed around, I witnessed a peer use their phone to take a quick snapshot, which they then uploaded to ChatGPT. The AI quickly painted my classmate’s screen with what it asserted to be a step-by-step solution and relevant graphs.

These incidents were jarring—not just because of the cheating, but because they made me realize how normalized these shortcuts have become.

«

This is going to become commonplace in the next few years (perhaps the next 12 months) and I think teachers are completely unprepared for what it will do to education – and recruiters are going to be surprise by what it does to their intake.
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Faster isn’t always better: the unexpected cost of speed for lizards • Animal Ecology in Focus

Kristoffer Wild:

»

Ectotherms – or cold-blooded animals such as lizards – rely on external heat sources to regulate their body temperature. Maintaining optimal temperatures is crucial because it influences their ability to digest food, grow, avoid predators, and reproduce effectively. To achieve this, lizards will move strategically between sunny spots and shady retreats – a delicate balancing act known as behavioural thermoregulation.

Our research confirmed that these dragons were masters at adjusting their behaviour according to seasonal shifts. In spring and summer, when environmental conditions made it easier to maintain optimal temperatures, lizards achieved greater thermoregulatory precision, keeping their bodies within a narrow, ideal temperature range. In winter, when it was more costly (both energetically and in terms of predation risk) to achieve optimal body temperatures, their thermoregulation became less precise.

The surprising twist came when we linked these thermoregulatory behaviours and thermal performance curves to their survival. Thermal performance curves are a way to visualise how an ectotherm’s ability to perform tasks, such as sprint speed or digestion, changes with changes in body temperature. A lizard will usually regulate its body temperature within a preferred range to optimise these tasks.

Contrary to expectations, higher locomotor performance in the field was associated with greater mortality risk. In other words, being the fastest lizard on the block wasn’t always beneficial. This effect was particularly pronounced in females, suggesting sex-specific trade-offs between performance and survival.

Why would being faster increase their chances of death? It’s possible that speedy individuals might engage in riskier behaviours – moving around more openly and frequently and thereby becoming more visible and vulnerable to predators like raptors and mammals. Interestingly, this increased risk was especially pronounced during spring, the reproductive season, when predator activity was high, and movement behaviours were more conspicuous.

«

Evolution leads us up strange paths.
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Orsted sues to save offshore wind farm from Trump administration axe • CNBC

Spencer Kimball:

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The Danish renewable energy company Orsted sued the Trump administration on Thursday in a bid to restart construction on an offshore wind farm in New England that the government has blocked.

The Interior Department abruptly ordered Orsted on Aug. 22 to halt construction on Revolution Wind off the coast of Rhode Island and Connecticut. The fully permitted project is 80% complete and would provide enough power for more than 350,000 homes across both states.

Orsted asked the United States District Court for the District of Columbia to set aside the stop-work order, dismissing it as arbitrary, capricious, unlawful and “issued in bad faith.” Orsted and its partner Skyborn Renewables have already invested $5bn in Revolution Wind, they said.

The Trump administration’s action puts at risk billions of dollars in future revenue from the project, the companies said. Orsted and Skyborn would also face $1bn in breakaway costs if the project is cancelled, they said.

Orsted shares hit a record low on Aug. 25 in the wake of the stop-work order.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has justified the order on national security grounds and concerns that Revolution Wind will interfere with other uses of U.S. territorial waters.

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“The wind turbines will interfere with our uses, though none to know what they shall be”
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Why more and more people are tuning the news out: “now I don’t have that anxiety” • The Guardian

Josie Harvey:

»

News has never been more accessible – but for some, that’s exactly the problem. Flooded with information and relentless updates, more and more people around the world are tuning out.

The reasons vary: for some it’s the sheer volume of news, for others the emotional toll of negative headlines or a distrust of the media itself. In online forums devoted to mindfulness and mental health, people discuss how to step back, from setting limits to cutting the news out entirely.

“Now that I don’t watch the news, I just don’t have that anxiety. I don’t have dread,” said Mardette Burr, an Arizona retiree who says she stopped watching the news about eight years ago. “There were times that I’d be up at two or three o’clock in the morning upset about something that was going on in the world that I just didn’t have a lot of control over.”

She’s not alone. Globally, news avoidance is at a record high, according to an annual survey by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism published in June. This year, 40% of respondents, surveyed across nearly 50 countries, said they sometimes or often avoid the news, up from 29% in 2017 and the joint highest figure recorded.

The number was even higher in the US, at 42%, and in the UK, at 46%. Across markets, the top reason people gave for actively trying to avoid the news was that it negatively impacted their mood. Respondents also said they were worn out by the amount of news, that there is too much coverage of war and conflict, and that there’s nothing they can do with the information.

«

This is a totally sensible response. What can you do, seriously, about it all? If the news does make you unhappy, or anxious, or despondent, then for most people the solution is to ignore the news. (For a few, it’s to become an activist.)
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What is Blueskyism? • Silver Bulletin

Nate Silver:

»

Bluesky was initially popular with Twitter refugees who disliked Musk’s takeover of the platform, some of whom proclaimed that Elon had unleashed the “gates of hell” by restoring banned accounts or predicted that the platform would implode due to a shortage of engineering talent. I suppose I have no problem with this; ironically, the first post in Silver Bulletin history is entitled “In case Twitter goes to zero”. (I wanted a hedge in case it did, although if we’re being honest, I also had one eye out the door as ABC News was beginning to dismantle FiveThirtyEight.) However, this also self-selected for a certain type of user, adherents of an attitude that I call “Blueskyism”.

Blueskyism should not be mistaken for general left-of-center political views. Google search traffic for Bluesky over the past year is highly correlated with Kamala Harris’s vote share, but has some other skews: controlling for the Harris vote, it’s (statistically) significantly higher in states with a large white population and where the percentage of people with advanced degrees is higher. Bluesky is disproportionately popular in D.C., but also in crunchy white states like Vermont and Oregon. Search traffic for Twitter/X over the same period shows the same bias toward highly educated states, but less toward Harris voters and actually an inverse correlation with the white population share. (X gets more search traffic in more diverse states.)

Demographics alone only go so far in explaining Blueskyism, however. It’s not a political movement so much as a tribal affiliation, a niche set of attitudes and style of discursive norms that almost seem designed in a lab to be as unappealing as possible to anyone outside the clique.

«

As you can imagine, this Substack post has made Silver enormously popular on Bluesky. People always love having a mirror held up to their flaws.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In the US, Chicago has more lead pipes carrying water than anywhere else. But don’t worry – they’ll be replaced by 2076. CC-licensed photo by Michael 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.

A selection of 9 links for you. Not thirsty, no. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Starmer considering new digital ID scheme to tackle illegal migration • BBC News

Paul Seddon:

»

Sir Keir Starmer has confirmed for the first time the government is looking at digital ID as a way to tackle illegal immigration.

The prime minister said a new identity programme could play an “important part” in reducing the incentive to enter the UK without permission. He added things had “moved on” since the fraught debate over ID cards under the last Labour government in the mid-2000s.

But Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said: “I think as a way of helping to control immigration, it is not really going to solve the problem.”

Speaking to political editor Chris Mason, Sir Keir said: “We all carry a lot more digital ID now than we did 20 years ago, and I think that psychologically, it plays a different part.” Asked whether a new scheme could play a role in reducing the attractiveness of the UK as a destination for illegal migrants, he added: “My instinct is it can play an important part. Obviously we need to look through some of the detail.”

He added that, two decades on from the row over New Labour’s physical ID card scheme, the public was likely to “look differently” at a digital-based scheme. He did not confirm whether any new digital ID scheme would be mandatory.

By law, employers have to check that prospective candidates have the right to work in the UK. Since 2022, they have been able to carry out checks on passport-holding British and Irish citizens by using digital verification services that have been certified by the government. A Home Office online scheme also exists to verify the status of some non-British or Irish citizens, whose immigration status is held electronically.

It is understood officials are looking at whether requiring a digital ID could provide a more consistent approach to verifying identity. They are also thought to be exploring whether the scheme could reduce the use of fake documents, and make it easier to target enforcement activity.

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What sort of non-scheme is this? Either grasp the nettle and introduce ID cards, or stop wibbling about “instincts”. You could, actually, have a (whisper it) blockchain scheme for ID: might there finally be a use? Also: the web headline here said “tackle illegal working”, and the page headline says “tackle illegal migration”. Which is it, BBC? Working and migration are very different things. Yes, it is time to “have a conversation” about digital ID. That’s been true for a decade.
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Google deletes net-zero pledge from sustainability website • Canada’s National Observer

Darius Snieckus and Rory White:

»

Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai stood smiling in a leafy-green California garden in September 2020 and declared that the IT behemoth was entering the “most ambitious decade yet” in its climate action.

“Today, I’m proud to announce that we intend to be the first major company to operate carbon free — 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year,” he said, in a video announcement.

Pichai added that he knew the “road ahead would not be easy,” but Google “aimed to prove that a carbon-free future is both possible and achievable fast enough to prevent the most dangerous impacts of climate change.”

Five years on, just how hard Google’s “energy journey” would become is clear. In June, Google’s Sustainability website proudly boasted a headline pledge to achieve net-zero emissions by 2030. By July, that had all changed. 

An investigation by Canada’s National Observer has found that Google’s net-zero pledge has quietly been scrubbed, demoted from having its own section on the site to an entry in the appendices of the company’s sustainability report.

Genna Schnurbach, an external spokesperson for Google, referring to the report, told us: “As you can see from the document, Google is still committed to their ambition of net zero by 2030.” 

By tracing back through the history of Google’s Sustainability website, we found that the company edited it in late June, removing almost all mention of its lauded net-zero goals. (A separate website referring to data centres specifically has maintained its existing language around net-zero commitments.)

…“Running the global infrastructure behind our products and services, including AI, takes considerable energy,” said Google in its Environment 2025 report, which explained that it will be almost impossible to meet its erstwhile net-zero ambitions, partly due to its expansion in AI. 

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That pesky climate can just wait – we need to churn out a few school essays first.
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Making cash off ‘AI slop’: the surreal business of AI video • The Washington Post

Drew Harwell:

»

Luis Talavera, a 31-year-old loan officer in eastern Idaho, first went viral in June with an AI-generated video on TikTok in which a fake but lifelike old man talked about soiling himself. Within two weeks, he had used AI to pump out 91 more, mostly showing fake street interviews and jokes about fat people to an audience that has surged past 180,000 followers, some of whom comment to ask if the scenes are real.

The low-effort, high-volume nature of AI videos has earned them the nickname “AI slop,” and Talavera knows his videos aren’t high art. But they earn him about $5,000 a month through TikTok’s creator program, he said, so every night and weekend he spends hours churning them out. “I’ve been on my couch holding my 3-month-old daughter, saying, ‘Hey, ChatGPT, we’re gonna create this script,’” he said.

Nothing has transformed or polluted the creative landscape in the past few years quite like AI video, whose tools turn text commands into full-color footage that can look uncannily real. In the three years since ChatGPT’s launch, AI videos have come to dominate the social web, copying and sometimes supplanting the human artists and videographers whose work helped train the systems in the first place.

Their power has spawned a wild cottage industry of AI-video makers, enticed by the possibility of infinite creation for minimal work. Adele, a 20-year-old student in Florida who spoke on the condition that only her first name be used because she fears harassment, told The Washington Post she is taking a break from college to focus on making money from her AI-video accounts. Another creator in Arizona who went viral with an AI airport kangaroo said he made $15,000 in commissions in three months, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of concern over online harassment.

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Um. I feel like I predicted this in August 2022:

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I suspect in the future there will be a premium on good, human-generated content and response, but that huge and growing amounts of the content that people watch and look at and read on content networks (“social networks” will become outdated) will be generated automatically, and the humans will be more and more happy about it.

In its way, it sounds like the society in Fahrenheit 451 (that’s 233ºC for Europeans) though without the book burning. There’s no need: why read a book when there’s something fascinating you can watch instead?

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On the one hand, nice to get a prediction right. On the other, is this good?
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Crypto scandal sinks Russian elite’s $8.5mn polar party cruise • FT

Polina Ivanova and Adrienne Klasa:

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More than 150 elite Russian-speaking guests were due to embark last month on a luxury cruise to the North Pole on board an icebreaker belonging to a company owned by France’s billionaire Pinault family, complete with Michelin-starred meals, saunas and Swarovski telescopes.

But the glamorous cruise from the Norwegian island of Svalbard never took place — and the Pinault-owned company, Ponant, now finds itself in court.

Ponant, which is headquartered in Marseille, has been sued in France by TRVL, the Russian-owned Dubai travel company that chartered the vessel.

The legal action followed Ponant’s cancellation of the trip after the US arrest of a Russian crypto entrepreneur whose Delaware-registered company acted as payments broker between the two, according to documents seen by the Financial Times. 

TRVL alleges that Ponant failed to refund it $5.8m of the total $8.5m chartering cost after the collapse of the high-end trip, which had attracted Russian-speaking corporate and tech executives and TV personalities. It is seeking more than €7m in damages and compensation.

The crypto entrepreneur, Iurii Gugnin — aka George Goognin, and founder of the broker Evita Investments, which handled the transaction for the North Pole cruise, according to TRVL’s court filing — was arrested by the FBI in New York in June and charged by US prosecutors with sanctions violations and money laundering.

They allege Gugnin laundered more than $500m and helped Russia acquire sensitive US technology.

Ponant and its owner, the Pinaults’ holding company Artémis, declined to comment on an ongoing legal proceeding. The court filing was shared with the FT by TRVL.

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I’m thinking five-part miniseries on a streaming service, do we know an actor who’s prepared to go bald and wear socks with sandals to play the lead role?
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ChatGPT and the Marjaʿ • Islamic Law Blog

Zahra Takhshid:

»

whether an LLM-based application can eventually replace the role of marājiʿ [high-ranking Islamic cleric/scholar] is far from straightforward. For instance, can the reasoning of an LLM such as ChatGPT be regarded as a valid source of ijtihād in the same way that human reasoning (ʿaql) is? Are there meaningful parallels between following a mujtahid posthumously and relying on a non-human LLM model?

Does the fact that different LLMs may produce divergent answers pose a fundamental challenge, or is this merely analogous to the variance in legal opinions among marājiʿ? Even if an LLM replicates each step of ijtihād, does its response to a religious inquiry carry the necessary hujjiyyah—the authoritative force required for adherence? Beyond doctrinal concerns, the issue also demands a sociological perspective: why might a Muslim turn to ChatGPT for religious guidance in the first place? Is it the efficiency, accessibility, or the avoidance of human interaction—particularly when posing intimate or sensitive questions? These considerations merely scratch the surface of a broader, evolving discourse.

Many marājiʿ and research institutes are actively examining these questions.[20] At the Qom Seminary (Ḥawzah-ye ‘Ilmīyah-ye Qom), younger scholars are now offering advanced courses on the intersection of AI and Islam.[21] What is commonly referred to as “dars al-khārij”—the highest level of seminary study, undertaken by those who have completed their foundational coursework—includes discussions on AI and its implications for Islamic scholarship.

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Yes indeed: Iranian Islamic scholars are beginning to consult LLMs on questions of Islamic law, bypassing humans. Not sure this is necessarily a good thing.
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Chicago has the most lead pipes in the nation. We mapped them all • Grist

Keerti Gopal, Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco, Peter Aldhous, Clayton Aldern and Amy Qin:

»

Chicago has the highest number of lead water service lines in the nation, with an estimated 412,000 of about 491,000 lines at least partly made of lead or contaminated with the dangerous metal. For the first time, Grist, Inside Climate News, and WBEZ have analyzed city data obtained through a public records request that allows Chicago’s residents to see where the problem is most acute — and how it intersects with poverty and race.

The analysis — which includes an interactive map that allows residents to search their address for information on their water lines — found that the toxic pipes plague residents throughout the city, across lines of race and class.
But majority Black and Latino neighborhoods — including Ramirez’s own — bear the biggest burden.

In majority-Latino census tracts, areas that in Chicago average around 1,500 households each,  92% of service lines require replacement. In majority-Black tracts, the figure is 89%. That compares to 74% of service lines in majority-white census tracts and 65% in the city’s nine majority-Asian tracts in and around Chinatown.

Among the worst affected are neighborhoods on the South and West sides, where residents grapple with other environmental health concerns due to the concentration of nearby industrial facilities, expressways, and freight trucks spewing air pollution. Communities there suffer from high rates of chronic disease and low life expectancy. 

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Don’t worry though! There’s a federal deadline to replace leap pipes by 2035. (Seriously?? 2035??) But Chicago is going to miss that – won’t be done, on current schedule, until 2076.
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UK Electricity Generation Map • Energy Dashboard

Energy Dashboard:

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The interactive map shows the location of the UK’s operational electricity generating stations and sites as of April 2025. Hover on a site to see more information.

The legend (top-right) alows you to toggle and filter by technology and shows total number of sites. You can switch to other data layers e.g. ‘Under Construction’, and also change the map layer (light / dark / satellite).

Operational data includes all technology types. For the other layers e.g. ‘In Planning’, only renewable energy sites are shown.

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Solar comprises almost half the generating capacity, on this. Unclear if that includes microgeneration. (Probably not?)
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Boycott the banquet, send a tweet. But ending the horror in Gaza still relies on the worst people in the world • The Guardian

Marina Hyde:

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Some of the worst people in the world – at least, some of the worst people without access to state armies – run the social media companies, and the idea that spending comfortable hours policing their platforms, working for them for free, is taking a stand or showing you care in any useful way tips beyond bizarre into cultural sickness.

Social media claimed to connect and empower people – a populist promise if ever you heard one – and yet what many of us hear our friends and family say all the time in conversations about the news is that they feel powerless. People have been atomised and narcotised by this supposedly unifying and uplifting technology, and when the great perspective of history is afforded to our descendants and perhaps even our future selves, we might well find that most of our present crises were catalysed by it rather than cured by it. This morning I saw a much-shared cut-out of Travis Kelce kissing Taylor Swift in their engagement photo, superimposed on top of a war-demolished building, above a bell hooks quote: “All our silences in the face of racist assault are acts of complicity.” Dear me. Stick it in a time capsule, along with an apology note for the cultural rubble it’ll have to be dug out of.

At operational level, however, things don’t change. The path to peace still goes through politicians with power. Many of them are still terrible people. They will still have to have unpleasant and even “toxic” conversations in which horse-trading and moral compromise are inevitable. And yet these things are still desirable, because this is the way it has always ended.

«

Ostensibly about the intractable wars – Ukraine, Gaza – this observation struck me as too brutally true not to excerpt.
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America against China against America • Jasmi News

Jasmine Sun went back to China to visit her family and then travel with friends. One of her stopoffs was Shenzhen:

»

Our first day in Shenzhen, we met a Chinese AI researcher at Gaga, a Western-style chain cafe that serves avocado kale smoothies and wagyu sliders (plastic gloves provided). He wore a black designer t-shirt and drove a NIO electric car that cost $70k USD. After finishing his master’s degree at a California university, he got married, moved to Shenzhen, and started work in a lab.

“What does a day in your life look like?” we asked. “I wake up and I check Twitter.”

“Do you have to work 996?” “No,” he laughed. “It’s 007 now.” (Midnight to midnight, seven days a week.)

“Do you guys worry about AI safety?” “We don’t think about risks at all.”

“Based,” said Aadil.

This was the first of several conversations that gave us a distinct impression of the Chinese tech community. Spirits are high, and decoupling policies like export controls only fuel their patriotic drive. “China feels bullied—that 100 year scar doesn’t come off. David Sacks is right about chips, but it’s too late now. You can’t slow us down.” After news of the US tariffs hit Chinese social media, netizens adopted the satirical nickname “川建国”: “Trump builds the nation,” or more elegantly, “Comrade Trump.”

Chinese engineers also seem more practical than their American counterparts. They’re here to build tech and make money; risk management is for bureaucrats; policy is only relevant insofar as it helps or hurts your work. This is something I think Westerners often get wrong. If you live in a single-party state, you are, on average, less ideological yourself. The politics have already been decided—no point wasting extra cycles coming up with something new.

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Very interesting perspective. (Via John Naughton.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Folk singer Emily Portman was puzzled recently when fans welcomed her new album. She didn’t write it. CC-licensed photo by Paul Hudson 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.

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

Putin tells Xi organ transplants could offer immortality • Financial Times

Anastasia Stognei:

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Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping discussed the potential for science to extend the lifespans of men of their age, with the Russian president even suggesting organ transports might allow them to live forever.

Russia’s president told a press conference in China on Wednesday that the leaders had talked about longevity in a conversation first inadvertently broadcast on a television audio feed.

“Modern means and methods of improving health, even various surgical [operations] involving organ replacement, allow humanity to hope that . . . life expectancy will increase significantly,” Putin said during a televised press briefing.

His comments came after small talk between Putin and Xi was caught by a mic and broadcast as they headed to the military parade in Beijing.

On the recording the voice of a Chinese-Russian interpreter is heard translating Xi as saying: “In the past, people rarely reached the age of 70; today, they say that at 70 you are still a child.”

A translator for Putin then says in Chinese that advances in biotechnology means that human organs could be continuously transplanted so that a person could “become younger” and “could even become immortal”.

Xi then replies that there are predictions that “in the current century, humans might live to 150”.

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Glad to say that nobody has figured out how to slow down nor reverse the degradation of collagen, which basically holds our bodies together, no matter what the beauty adverts tell you. Your body will eventually fall apart, whether or not you’re still alive in it. So future generations shouldn’t have to worry about Immortal Xi or Everlasting Putin.
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Emily Portman and musicians on the mystery of fraudsters releasing songs in their name • BBC News

Ian youngs and Paul Glynn:

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In July, award-winning singer Emily Portman got a message from a fan praising her new album and saying “English folk music is in good hands”.

That would normally be a compliment, but the Sheffield-based artist was puzzled.

So she followed a link the fan had posted and was taken to what appeared to be her latest release. “But I didn’t recognise it because I hadn’t released a new album,” Portman says.

“I clicked through and discovered an album online everywhere – on Spotify and iTunes and all the online platforms.
“It was called Orca, and it was music that was evidently AI-generated, but it had been cleverly trained, I think, on me.”

The 10 tracks had names such as Sprig of Thyme and Silent Hearth – which were “uncannily close” to titles she might choose. It was something that Portman, who won a BBC Folk Award in 2013, found “really creepy”.

When she clicked to listen, the voice – supposedly hers – was a bit off but sang in “a folk style probably closest to mine that AI could produce”, she says. The instrumentation was also eerily similar.

…There’s now a growing trend, though, for established (but not superstar) artists to be targeted by fake albums or songs that suddenly appear on their pages on Spotify and other streaming services. Even dead musicians have had AI-generated “new” material added to their catalogues.

Portman doesn’t know who put the album up under her name or why. She was falsely credited as performer, writer and copyright holder. The producer listed in the credits was Freddie Howells – but she says that name doesn’t mean anything to her, and there’s no trace online of a producer or musician of that name.

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Very odd if she’s listed as the copyright holder (might want to check the fine print on that one) since she’d then get paid for the AI-generated stuff.
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Wi-Fi signals can measure heart rate—no wearables needed • University of California Santa Cruz

Emily Cerf:

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A team of researchers at UC Santa Cruz’s Baskin School of Engineering that included Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Katia Obraczka, Ph.D. student Nayan Bhatia, and high school student and visiting researcher Pranay Kocheta designed a system for accurately measuring heart rate that combines low-cost WiFi devices with a machine learning algorithm.

Wi-Fi devices push out radio frequency waves into physical space around them and toward a receiving device, typically a computer or phone. As the waves pass through objects in space, some of the wave is absorbed into those objects, causing mathematically detectable changes in the wave.

Pulse-Fi uses a Wi-Fi transmitter and receiver, which runs Pulse-Fi’s signal processing and machine learning algorithm. They trained the algorithm to distinguish even the faintest variations in signal caused by a human heart beat by filtering out all other changes to the signal in the environment or caused by activity like movement.

“The signal is very sensitive to the environment, so we have to select the right filters to remove all the unnecessary noise,” Bhatia said.

The team ran experiments with 118 participants and found that after only five seconds of signal processing, they could measure heart rate with clinical-level accuracy. At five seconds of monitoring, they saw only half a beat-per-minute of error, with longer periods of monitoring time increasing the accuracy.

The team found that the Pulse-Fi system worked regardless of the position of the equipment in the room or the person whose heart rate was being measured—no matter if they were sitting, standing, lying down, or walking, the system still performed. For each of the 118 participants, they tested 17 different body positions with accurate results

«

OK, but what if you’ve got a dog? If you’ve got two people? Looking forward to this being a throwaway line in a spy thriller in a year or two. “Hack into the home Wi-Fi, see how many people are in there.” *frantic typing* “OK there are three people, two adults and a child.. no, a dog.”
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How microdosing GLP-1 drugs became a wellness “craze” • The Washington Post

Daniel Gilbert:

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As a 62-year-old grandmother in Maine, Christine Babb doesn’t identify with the biohacker bros who try experimental medications to optimize their health. But after side effects from her first dose of a weight-loss drug hit her “like a Mack truck,” she, too, decided to experiment.

She drew up a syringe of the GLP-1 drug tirzepatide in June that was just 40% of the standard starting dose. The side effects she’d felt — constipation and extreme fatigue — went away with the smaller shot, she said, while her blood pressure, joint pain and inflammation improved. That experience, coupled with reading studies about the potential of GLP-1 drugs to protect brain health, has persuaded Babb to take a small dose indefinitely in a bid to fend off diseases that come with age.

There is virtually no published scientific evidence that proves taking smaller-than-standard doses of tirzepatide or semaglutide — the active ingredients in Zepbound and Ozempic, respectively — is safe or effective. But that hasn’t stopped patients like Babb from trying nonstandard doses for a broad array of reasons, including expectations of improved wellness and longevity.

…There is also evidence that stimulating the GLP-1 hormone can guard against inflammation in the brain itself, which is linked to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

In interviews, patients and medical providers say they’ve seen real benefits in microdosing. Taking less medicine, they reason, should also reduce the gastrointestinal side effects that are common with GLP-1 drugs. It’s also undeniably cheaper to use less of the brand-name medications, which have list prices upward of $1,000 a month.

But anecdotal patient experiences, outside of controlled clinical trials, don’t prove that microdosing works, scientists say.

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AI startup Flock thinks it can eliminate all crime in America • Forbes

Thomas Brewster:

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38-year-old CEO and cofoun der Garrett Langley presides over the $300m (estimated 2024 sales) company responsible for it all. Since its founding in 2017, Flock, which was valued at $7.5bn in its most recent funding round, has quietly built a network of more than 80,000 cameras pointed at highways, thoroughfares and parking lots across the U.S.

They record not just the license plate numbers of the cars that pass them, but their make and distinctive features—broken windows, dings, bumper stickers. Langley estimates its cameras help solve 1 million crimes a year. Soon they’ll help solve even more. In August, Flock’s cameras will take to the skies mounted on its own “made in Amer ica” drones. Produced at a factory the company opened earlier this year near its Atlanta offices, they’ll add a new dimension to Flock’s business and aim to challenge Chinese drone giant DJI’s dominance.

Langley offers a prediction: In less than 10 years, Flock’s cameras, airborne and fixed, will eradicate almost all crime in the U.S. (He acknowledges that programs to boost youth employment and cut recidivism will help.) It sounds like a pipe dream from another AI-can-solve- everything tech bro, but Langley, in the face of a wave of opposition from privacy advocates and Flock’s archrival, the $2.1 billion (2024 revenue) police tech giant Axon Enterprise, is a true believer. He’s convinced that America can and should be a place where everyone feels safe. And once it’s draped in a vast net of U.S.-made Flock surveillance tech, it will be.

“I’ve talked to plenty of activists who think crime is just the cost of modern society. I disagree,” Langley says. “I think we can have a crime-free city and civil liberties. . . . We can have it all.” In municipalities in which Flock is deployed, he adds, the average criminal—those between 16 and 24 committing nonviolent crime—“will most likely get caught.”

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This is, surely, the setup of one of the strands of the TV series Elementary. Or possibly The Dark Knight. Something Gotham-y, anyway.
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The dirty truth behind the e-waste recycling industry • Rest of World

Yashraj Sharma:

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India is the world’s third-largest producer of e-waste, having generated approximately 1.75 million metric tons in the fiscal year ending 2024, an increase of nearly 75% over the last five years. Close to 60% of e-waste in the country remains unrecycled — which represents both an environmental concern and a financial opportunity. In addition to domestic e-waste, the country is also a magnet for e-waste from countries such as Yemen, the United States, and the Dominican Republic, making India the third-largest importer of it in the world, from both legal and illegal sources. 

Used electronics contain a treasure trove of recoverable raw materials including gold, silver, copper, and rare earth elements. These can be reused in new electronic devices or repurposed entirely. Thanks to government regulation, there’s also money to be made in just processing the recycled materials. Altogether, that adds up to a $1.56bn industry, according to one 2023 measure by an Indian market analytics firm.

A small fraction of those who work in e-waste recycling in India are employed within the country’s regulated industry. In shiny facilities owned by companies like Attero, Ecoreco, and Recyclekaro, workers often have the benefit of well-managed operations that implement protective measures. 

But nearly 95% of those working in the e-waste industry — at least a million people, by some estimates — are in the informal sector. These include big traders, dismantlers, smelters, and small-time refurbishers. The lawless conditions of India’s e-waste recycling industry have given rise to a complex economy, which includes shadowy organizations that call the shots, recycling dons who control swaths of the network, and workers like Khan and Iqrar.  

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The Instagram iPad app is finally here • WIRED

Julian Chokkattu:

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Even before Apple began splitting its mobile operating system from iOS into iOS and iPadOS, countless apps adopted a fresh user interface that embraced the larger screen size of the tablet. This was the iPad’s calling card at the time, and those native apps optimized for its precise screen size are what made Apple’s device stand out from a sea of Android tablets that largely ran phone apps inelegantly blown up to fit the bigger screen.

Except Instagram never went iPad-native. Open the existing app right now, and you’ll see the same phone app stretched to the iPad’s screen size, with awkward gaps on the sides. And you’ll run into the occasional problems when you post photos from the iPad, like low-resolution images. Weirdly, Instagram did introduce layout improvements for folding phones a few years ago, which means the experience is better optimized on Android tablets today than it is on iPad.

Instagram’s chief, Adam Mosseri, has long offered excuses, often citing a lack of resources despite being a part of Meta, a multibillion-dollar company. Instagram wasn’t the only offender—Meta promised a WhatsApp iPad app in 2023 and only delivered it earlier this year. (WhatsApp made its debut on phones in 2009.)

The fresh iPad app (which runs on iPadOS 15.1 or later) offers more than just a facelift. Yes, the Instagram app now takes up the entire screen, but the company says users will drop straight into Reels, the short-form video platform it introduced five years ago to compete with TikTok. The Stories module remains at the top, and you’ll be able to hop into different tabs via the menu icons on the left. There’s a new Following tab (the people icon right below the home icon), and this is a dedicated section to see the latest posts from people you actually follow.

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At very, very long last. But this is also a puzzle: why (a) has it taken SO long to get WhatsApp and Instagram on the iPad (b) have the iPad versions of both apps appeared within a few months of each other?
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The AI breakthrough that uses almost no power to create images • Techxplore

Paul Arnold:

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In a paper published in the journal Nature, Aydogan Ozcan, from the University of California Los Angeles, and his colleagues describe the development of an AI image generator that consumes almost no power.

AI image generators use a process called diffusion to generate images from text. First, they are trained on a large dataset of images and repeatedly add a statistical noise, a kind of digital static, until the image has disappeared.

Then, when you give AI a prompt such as “create an image of a house,” it starts with a screen full of static and then reverses the process, gradually removing the noise until the image appears. If you want to perform large-scale tasks, such as creating hundreds of millions of images, this process is slow and energy intensive.

The new diffusion-based image generator works by first using a digital encoder (that has been trained on publicly available datasets) to create the static that will ultimately make the picture. This requires a small amount of energy. Then, a liquid crystal screen known as a spatial light modulator (SLM) imprints this pattern onto a laser beam. The beam is then passed through a second decoding SLM, which turns the pattern in the laser into the final image.

Unlike conventional AI, which relies on millions of computer calculations, this process uses light to do all the heavy lifting. Consequently, the system uses almost no power.

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It would be lovely if this were to become widespread, but one has to have slight doubts.
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Apple revokes EU distribution rights for torrent client, leaving developer left in the dark • TorrentFreak

Ernesto Van der Sar:

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While alternative app stores operate independently and are required by EU law, Apple is still in a position to exert some control. This became apparent a few weeks ago, when iTorrent users suddenly ran into trouble when installing the app.

In July, several users complained that they were unable to download iTorrent from AltStore PAL. Initially the cause of the problem was unclear but the app’s developer, XITRIX, later confirmed that Apple itself had stepped in.

Apparently, Apple had revoked the developer’s “alternative distribution” right, which is required to publish apps in alternative stores, including AltStore PAL.

Given Apple’s long history of banning torrent apps from its own store, it’s tempting to conclude that the company stepped in for the same reason here. For now, however, there’s no confirmation that’s indeed the case.

Speaking directly with TorrentFreak, iTorrent developer Daniil Vinogradov (XITRIX) says that Apple did not reach out to him regarding the revocation of his alternative EU distribution rights.

Soon after the issues appeared, Vinogradov sent a support request to Apple seeking clarification, but that wasn’t helpful either. Instead, Apple responded with a generic message related to App Store issues.

After another follow-up last week, Apple informed the developer that their escalation team is looking into it, but nothing further. “I still have no idea if it was my fault or Apple’s, and their responses make no sense,” Vinogradov says.

…A day after publication, Apple informed us that the distribution rights (notarization) were revoked due to sanctions-related rules.

“Notarization for this app was removed in order to comply with government sanctions-related rules in various jurisdictions. We have communicated this to the developer,” Apple told us.

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“Sanctions-related rules” to me sounds like Russia, or possibly Iran.
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Fantasy football nerds are using AI to get an edge in their leagues this year • Fast Company

Marty Swant:

»

This fantasy football season, Aaron VanSledright is letting his bot call the shots.

Ahead of the NFL season, the Chicago-based cloud engineer built a custom AI draft agent that pulls real-time data from ESPN and FantasyPros, factoring in last-minute intel like injuries and roster cuts.

Using his background in coding and cloud computing, VanSledright spun up the agent in just a week with Anthropic’s Claude large language models. He also tapped Amazon Web Services tools, including the new Strands SDK, which helps developers launch agents with just a few lines of code.

“Let’s see how well the AI performs against other humans, because nobody else in my league is doing this,” he tells Fast Company.

«

That’s all one can read of the story if you’re not a premium subscriber, but even so, that’s enough for one to say: isn’t the point of doing these leagues to do it personally? For sort-of fun? Is there nothing AI can’t ruin?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Grapes benefit significantly from having solar panels positioned above them, a French study has found. CC-licensed photo by judy dean 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.

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

Judge: Google keeps Chrome but is barred from exclusive search deals • CNBC

Jennifer Elias:

»

A federal judge ruled Tuesday that the company can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts and must share search data.

Alphabet shares popped 8% in extended trading as investors celebrated what they viewed as minimal consequences from a historic defeat last year in the landmark antitrust case that found it held an illegal monopoly in its core market of internet search.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled against the most severe consequences that were proposed by the U.S. Department of Justice, including selling off its Chrome browser, which provides data that helps its advertising business deliver targeted ads. 

“Google will not be required to divest Chrome; nor will the court include a contingent divestiture of the Android operating system in the final judgment,” the decision stated. “Plaintiffs overreached in seeking forced divesture of these key assets, which Google did not use to effect any illegal restraints.”

The company can make payments to preload products, but it cannot have exclusive contracts, the decision stated.

The DOJ asked Google to stop the practice of “compelled syndication,” which refers to the practice of making certain deals with companies to ensure its search engine remains the default choice in browsers and smartphones. 

Google pays Apple billions of dollars per year to be the default search engine on iPhones. It’s lucrative for Apple and a valuable way for Google to get more search volume and users.

Apple shares rose 4% on Tuesday after hours.

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This is a complete cop-out by the judge. (Here’s the decision.) The trial decision was that Google has a monopoly and has abused it. And all it has to do is “share search data”? The data-sharing remedies are described from p128 of the decision. Google gets to charge a “marginal cost” on some search data – so expect big fights over what “marginal” means.

The reason given for not blocking payments? It might hurt Apple, Mozilla and Android OEMs. So an illegal monopoly must be propped up because of its dependents; hurting them “would hurt consumer welfare”, Judge Mehta says.
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Is it possible to allow sideloading *and* keep users safe? • Terence Eden’s Blog

Terence Eden:

»

Do we want to live in a future where our computers refuse to obey our commands? No! Neither law nor technology should conspire to reduce our freedom to compute.

There are, I think, two small cracks in that argument. The first is that a user has no right to run anyone else’s code, if the code owner doesn’t want to make it available to them. Consider a bank which has an app. When customers are scammed, the bank is often liable. The bank wants to reduce its liability so it says “you can’t run our app on a rooted phone”.

Is that fair? Probably not. Rooting allows a user to fully control and customise their device. But rooting also allows malware to intercept communications, send commands, and perform unwanted actions. I think the bank has the right to say “your machine is too risky – we don’t want our code to run on it.”

The same is true of video games with strong “anti-cheat” protection. It is disruptive to other players – and to the business model – if untrustworthy clients can disrupt the game. Again, it probably isn’t fair to ban users who run on permissive software, but it is a rational choice by the manufacturer. And, yet again, I think software authors probably should be able to restrict things which cause them harm.

So, from their point of view it is pragmatic to insist that their software can only be loaded from a trustworthy location.
But that’s not the only thing Google is proposing. Let’s look at their announcement:

»

We’ve seen how malicious actors hide behind anonymity to harm users by impersonating developers and using their brand image to create convincing fake apps. The scale of this threat is significant: our recent analysis found over 50 times more malware from internet-sideloaded sources than on apps available through Google Play.

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Back in the early days of Android, you could just install any app and it would run, no questions asked. That was a touchingly naïve approach to security – extremely easy to use but left users vulnerable. A few years later, Android changed to show user the permissions an app was requesting.

No rational user would install a purported battery app with that scary list of permissions, right? Wrong! We know that users don’t read and they especially don’t read security warnings. There is no UI tweak you can do to prevent users bypassing these scary warnings. There is no amount of education you can provide to reliably make people stop and think.

…I’ve tried to be pragmatic, but there’s something of a dilemma here:
• Users should be free to run whatever code they like
• Vulnerable members of society should be protected from scams.

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There’s a fair bit more to his argument. The sideloading debate goes on.
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AI is ummasking ICE officers. Can Washington do anything about it? • POLITICO

Alfred Ng:

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An activist has started using artificial intelligence to identify Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents beneath their masks — a use of the technology sparking new political concerns over AI-powered surveillance.

Dominick Skinner, a Netherlands-based immigration activist, estimates he and a group of volunteers have publicly identified at least 20 ICE officials recorded wearing masks during arrests. He told POLITICO his experts are “able to reveal a face using AI, if they have 35% or more of the face visible.”

The AI-powered project adds a new twist to the debates over both ICE masking and government surveillance tools, as immigration enforcement becomes more widespread and aggressive.

ICE says its agents need to wear masks to prevent being unfairly harassed for doing their jobs. To their critics, agents in masks have become a potent symbol of unaccountable government force. The masking, and the counter-campaign to identify agents, has prompted a crossfire of bills on Capitol Hill.

ICE agents “don’t deserve to be hunted online by activists using AI,” said Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who chairs the Senate Homeland Security subcommittee on border management and the federal workforce.

Some Democrats concerned about the masking are pushing for regulations to make it easier to identify law enforcement officials — but they still say they’re uneasy that vigilante campaigns have begun using technology to do it.

Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), who co-sponsored a bill called the VISIBLE Act to require ICE officials to clearly identify themselves, has “serious concerns about the reliability, safety and privacy implications of facial recognition tools, whether used by law enforcement … or used by outside groups to identify agents,” an aide told POLITICO.

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We can be sure that Peters’s bill will never get passed, and that the activists are going to continue going at this: you can’t hide the technology, and cameras are everywhere. But there wouldn’t be this incentive to identify ICE agents if people didn’t feel they were behaving like authoritarian goons.
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Amid rising geopolitical strains, oil markets face new uncertainties as the drivers of supply and demand growth shift • IEA

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Oil 2025 provides in-depth analysis of the latest data and forecasts for evolving oil supply, demand, refining and trade dynamics through to 2030, going beyond the near-term analysis provided in the IEA’s monthly Oil Market Report.

It highlights several important trends that could considerably reshape global oil markets over the medium term. According to the report, China – which has driven the growth in global oil demand for well over a decade – is set to see its consumption peak in 2027, following a surge in electric vehicle sales and the continued deployment of high-speed rail and trucks running on natural gas. At the same time, US oil supply is now expected to grow at a slower pace as companies scale back spending and focus on capital discipline – although the United States remains the single largest contributor to non-OPEC supply growth in the coming years.

In this context, global oil demand is forecast to increase by 2.5 million barrels per day (mb/d) between 2024 and 2030, reaching a plateau of around 105.5 mb/d by the end of the decade. At the same time, global oil production capacity is forecast to rise by more than 5 mb/d to 114.7 mb/d by 2030. This growth is set to be dominated by robust gains in natural gas liquids (NGLs) and other non-crude liquids.

…According to the report, accelerating sales of electric cars – which reached a record 17m in 2024 and are on course to surpass 20m in 2025 – have kept a peak in global oil demand on the horizon. Based on the current outlook, electric vehicles are set to displace a total of 5.4 mb/d of global oil demand by the end of the decade.

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The idea of China’s oil demand peaking is quite something. That’s momentous.
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Agrivoltaics can increase grape yield by up to 60% • PV Magazine International

Gwénaëlle Deboutte:

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Sun’Agri, a French agrivoltaics specialist, has shared the results of its 2024 harvests at two pilot agrivoltaic sites in southern France. The sites in Domaine de Nidolères in the Pyrénées Orientales tested three grape varieties.

The results showed that grape yields under solar panels were 20% to 60% higher than in areas without PV. The highest increase, 60%, was seen in Chardonnay grapes, followed by Marselan (30%) and Grenache blanc (20%).

In a second trial in Vaucluse, southeastern France, the yield increase remained over 30%, with or without irrigation.

Sun’Agri attributed the gains to the agrivoltaic system’s ability to optimize the microclimate, moderating temperatures, increasing humidity, and reducing irrigation needs by 20% to 70%.

It said it also helps protect against frost, preventing temperature drops of up to 2ºC. As a result, plants’ survival rates improve, with mortality reduced by 25% to 50%.

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This is not at all what the opponents of solar panels would like to hear. The picture shows the panels mounted about 1.5m above the ground, which is higher than usual. But if you get better grapes…
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Adblue: the law and its implementation • LawShun

Kara Sears:

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AdBlue is a diesel exhaust fluid that helps vehicles meet strict Euro 6 emission regulations. It is commonly found in Euro 6 diesel vehicles registered from September 2015 onwards. The Euro 6 regulation was first introduced in September 2014 and later imposed for all new cars in September 2015.

AdBlue is a non-toxic, non-flammable, odourless, and biodegradable fluid. It is made from a urea and water solution, which is stored in a separate tank within the vehicle. The urea contains ammonia, which reacts with nitrogen oxide (NOx) gas and prevents it from being released into the atmosphere. NOx is linked to a range of respiratory diseases and is subject to strict limits when it comes to modern vehicle emissions and clean air zones.

AdBlue is injected into a modified section of the vehicle’s exhaust system, where it creates a chemical reaction, removing the harmful nitrogen-oxide emissions and converting them into harmless water and nitrogen. This process is known as Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR). SCR technology is one of the most effective systems for reducing nitrogen oxide levels in the exhaust fumes outputted by diesel engines. SCR was first applied to automobiles by the Nissan Diesel Corporation in 2004.

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I wondered yesterday how the bigger vehicles making deliveries in Paris could have reduced their emissions so drastically since 2007; this seems to be the answer. (Thanks sean for the link.)
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DOGE put critical social security data at risk, whistleblower says • The New York Times

Nicholas Nehamas:

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Members of the Department of Government Efficiency uploaded a copy of a crucial Social Security database in June to a vulnerable cloud server, putting the personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans at risk of being leaked or hacked, according to a whistleblower complaint filed by the Social Security Administration’s chief data officer.

The database contains records of all Social Security numbers issued by the federal government. It includes individuals’ full names, addresses and birth dates, among other details that could be used to steal their identities, making it one of the nation’s most sensitive repositories of personal information.

The account by the whistleblower, Charles Borges, underscores concerns that have led to lawsuits seeking to block young software engineers at the agency built by Elon Musk from having access to confidential government data. In his complaint, Mr. Borges said DOGE members copied the data to an internal agency server that only DOGE could access, forgoing the type of “independent security monitoring” normally required under agency policy for such sensitive data and creating “enormous vulnerabilities.”

Mr. Borges did not indicate that the database had been breached or used inappropriately.

But his disclosure stated that as of late June, “no verified audit or oversight mechanisms” existed to monitor what DOGE was using the data for or whether it was being shared outside the agency.

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I’m sure there are absolutely no problems with taking absolutely everything and putting it in one place that could be accessed by pretty much anyone if just one flag wasn’t set right on the server command.
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India bans real-money gaming, threatening a $23bn industry • TechCrunch

Jagmeet Singh:

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India’s lower house of parliament on Wednesday passed a sweeping online gaming bill that, while promoting esports and casual gaming without monetary stakes, imposes a blanket ban on real-money games — threatening to disrupt billions of dollars in investment and significantly impact the real-money gaming industry, which could see widespread shutdowns.

Titled the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Bill, 2025, the legislation aims to prohibit real-money games nationwide — whether based on skill or chance — and ban both their advertisement and associated financial transactions, as TechCrunch reported earlier based on its draft version.

“In this bill, priority has been given to the welfare of society and to avoid a big evil that is creeping into society,” India’s IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said in Parliament while introducing the bill.

The proposed legislation restricts banks and other financial institutions from allowing transactions for real-money games in the country. Anyone offering these games could face imprisonment for up to three years, a fine of up to ₹10m (approximately $115,000), or both. Additionally, celebrities promoting such games on any media platform could be liable for up to two years of imprisonment or a fine of ₹5m (roughly $57,000), the bill states.

Vaishnaw said the decision to bring the legislation was to address several incidents of harm, including cases where individuals reportedly died by suicide after losing money in games. However, industry stakeholders largely attribute these incidents to offshore betting and gambling apps, which many believe will not be addressed by this legislation.

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Fingers crossed this actually works, though of course the offshore element means it’s going to be whack-a-mole.
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F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with engineers before fighter jet crashed in Alaska • CNN

Brad Lendon:

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A US Air Force F-35 pilot spent 50 minutes on an airborne conference call with Lockheed Martin engineers trying to solve a problem with his fighter jet before he ejected and the plane plunged to the ground in Alaska earlier this year, an accident report released this week says.

The January 28 crash at Eielson Air Force Base in Fairbanks was recorded in a video that showed the aircraft dropping straight down and exploding in a fireball. The pilot ejected safely, suffering only minor injuries, but the $200 million fighter jet was destroyed.

An Air Force investigation blamed the crash on ice in the hydraulic lines in the nose and main landing gears of the F-35, which prevented them from deploying properly.

According to the report, after takeoff the pilot tried to retract the landing gear, but it would not do so completely. When lowering it again, it would not center, locking on an angle to the left. Attempts to fix the landing gear caused the fighter jet to think it was on the ground, ultimately leading to the crash.

After going through system checklists in an attempt to remedy the problem, the pilot got on a conference call with engineers from the plane’s manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, as the plane flew near the air base. Five engineers participated in the call, including a senior software engineer, a flight safety engineer and three specialists in landing gear systems, the report said.

…An inspection of the aircraft’s wreckage found that about one-third of the fluid in the hydraulic systems in both the nose and right main landing gears was water, when there should have been none.

The investigation found a similar hydraulic icing problem in another F-35 at the same base during a flight nine days after the crash, but that aircraft was able to land without incident.

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Probably not the sort of thing you can sort out on a support call, to be honest. “Try turning it off and on.. no?”
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified