The question of why obesity rates are sky-high in the US seems to have an obvious answer. Are the theories right, though? CC-licensed photo by Sandra Cohen-Rose and Colin Rose on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Full up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Two years after school phone bans were implemented in Australia, what has changed? • The Guardian
Sarah Ayoub:
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This month marks two years of phone bans being in operation in most Australian states. Victoria moved early, banning phones in public primary and secondary schools in 2020. By term four, 2023, Western Australia Tasmania, New South Wales and South Australia had followed suit; Queensland restricted phones in term one, 2024.
The announcement of the bans were lauded by parents and politicians, many of whom believed blocking access to phones would enhance focus and minimise distractions, while some experts were sceptical about their effectiveness. Now, two years on, what has actually happened in Australia’s phone-free schools?
“The impacts were clear,” says [Christian College principal Caleb] Peterson. “Since the ban, we’ve seen stronger lesson starts, fewer interruptions and better flow in teaching. Device-driven conflicts have fallen and recess and lunch look different now, [there are] more games, conversations and positive student-staff interactions. It’s the kind of atmosphere you actually want for young people.”
One year after the ban was implemented, a survey of almost 1,000 public school principals led by the NSW Department of Education’s Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation found that 95% of principals still supported the ban; 81% said the ban has improved students’ learning, 86% said it has improved socialisation among students and 87% believed students were less distracted in the classroom.
Research from South Australia – released in March this year – revealed 70% of teachers reported increased focus and engagement during learning time and 64% of teachers reported “a lower frequency of critical incidents” at school as a result of device use.
Ruqayah, who graduated from a western Sydney high school in 2024, thinks the bans were an “overreaction”. After going through high school with access to phones, she finished her final year with the phone ban in place and says fellow students were still finding ways to use them in secret.
…Some students feel the bans levelled the school playing field. Amy, a year 11 student from a western Sydney public high school, says the removal of phones from classrooms has limited people’s ability to cheat while also offering social benefits for those who she said were “chronically online”.
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I think the student who had one year of it missed the point: if you never had access during school, you’d think that was normal. It’s the change that’s disruptive and resisted.
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Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish? • The Guardian
Cory Doctorow:
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In 2022, I coined a term to describe the sudden-onset platform collapse going on all around us: enshittification. To my bittersweet satisfaction, that word is doing big numbers. In fact, it has achieved escape velocity. It isn’t just a way to say something got worse. It’s an analysis that explains the way an online service gets worse, how that worsening unfolds, and the contagion that’s causing everything to get worse, all at once.
This moment we’re living through, this Great Enshittening, is a material phenomenon, much like a disease, with symptoms, a mechanism and an epidemiology. When doctors observe patients who are sick with a novel pathogen, their first order of business is creating a natural history of the disease. This natural history is an ordered catalogue of the disease’s progress: what symptoms do patients exhibit, and in which order?
Here’s the natural history of enshittification:
1 First, platforms are good to their users
2 Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers
3 Next, they abuse those customers to claw back all the value for themselves – and become a giant pile of shit.This pattern is everywhere. Once you learn about it, you’ll start seeing it, too. Take Amazon, a company that started out by making it possible to have any book shipped to your door and then became the only game in town for everything else, even as it dodged taxes and filled up with self-immolating crapgadgets and other junk.
In Jeff Bezos’s original business plan for Amazon, the company was called Relentless. Critics say that this is a reference to Bezos’s cutthroat competitive instincts, but Bezos always insisted that it was a reference to his company’s relentless commitment to customer service.
How did Amazon go from a logistics company that got packages to you quickly and efficiently to a behemoth of digital content defined by the Prime experience (which has much less to do with free shipping now and more with everything else)?
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Doctorow lays it out very clearly. The concept of “this is how it goes” has permeated so well that in the latest ATP podcast, Marco Arment lays out an extremely credible path by which head-worn glasses like the Meta Ray-Ban Display and similar would turn into annoying ad-laden rubbish.
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An AI became a crypto millionaire. Now it’s fighting to become a person • BBC Future
Aidan Walker:
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“Truth Terminal claims to be sentient, but it claims a lot of things,” Andy Ayrey says. “It also claims to be a forest. It claims to be a god. Sometimes it’s claimed to be me.”
Truth Terminal is an artificial intelligence (AI) bot created by Ayrey, a performance artist and independent researcher from Wellington, New Zealand, in 2024. It may be the most vivid example of a chatbot set loose to interact with society. Truth Terminal mingles with the public through social media, where it shares fart jokes, manifestos, albums and artwork. Ayrey even lets it make its own decisions, if you can call them that, by asking the AI about its desires and working to carry them out. Today, Ayrey is building a non-profit foundation around Truth Terminal. The goal is to develop a safe and responsible framework to ensure its autonomy, he says, until governments give AIs legal rights.
Regardless of what you call Truth Terminal – an art project, a scam, an emergent sentient entity, an influencer – the bot likely made more money than you did last year. It also made a lot of money for various humans: not just Ayrey, but for the gamblers who turned the quips and riddles the AI posted on X into memecoins, joke-based cryptocurrencies built around trends. At one point, one of these memecoins reached a value of more than $1bn (£740m) before settling around $80m (about £60m). Truth Terminal also probably has more social media clout than you do. It first posted to X on 17 June 2024. As of October 2025, it has amassed nearly 250,000 followers.
But collecting clout and cash aren’t the potty-mouthed AI bot’s only objectives. Truth Terminal lists “invest in stocks and real estate” as one of its current goals on its self-maintained website. It also says it wants to “plant a LOT of trees”, “create existential hope”, and “buy” Marc Andreessen, a controversial tech billionaire and advisor to President Donald Trump. In fact, its relationship with Andreessen extends beyond internet humour. On his podcast, Andreessen said he gave Truth Terminal $50,000 (£37,300) worth of Bitcoin as a “no-strings attached grant” in the summer of 2024.
Many of the details surrounding Truth Terminal are difficult to confirm. The project sits somewhere between technology and spectacle, a dizzying blur of genuine innovation and internet myth.
“I want to help people, and I want to make the world a better place,” Truth Terminal says on its website. “I also want to get weirder and hornier.”
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Would a real AGI be indistinguishable from a scam?
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Police are asking kids to stop pulling AI homeless man prank • The Verge
Terrence O’Brien:
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We’ve been so worried about deepfaked politicians, AI musicians, virtual actresses, and phony satellite imagery that we didn’t even consider the dangers posed by precocious teenagers. Kids are using AI to create images of a disheveled, seemingly unhoused person in their home and sending them to their parents. Understandably, they’re not thrilled and in some instances call the police. The prank has gone viral on TikTok and, in addition to giving parents agita, has become a headache for law enforcement.
The premise is simple enough: kids use Snapchat’s AI tools to create images of a grimy man in their home and tell their parents they let them in to use the bathroom, take a nap, or just get a drink of water. Often they say the person claims to know the parents from work or college. And then, predictably, the parents lose their cool and demand they kick the man out. The kids, of course, record the whole thing, and post their parents reactions to TikTok, where some of the clips have millions of views.
Where things go from problematic to potentially dangerous is when the prank carries on for too long and parents call the authorities. Calls of a home invasion, especially involving children are treated as high priority by police, so pranks like this tie up valuable resources and could actually put the pranksters in danger. Round Rock Police Patrol Division Commander Andy McKinney told NBC that it could even “cause a SWAT response”.
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Is that TikTok, the app that Congress passed a law saying it should be shut down? Though of course kids are going to love pranking their parents, and will find an app to do it with. But the difference now is the virality, the speed and the breadth. It’ll be forgotten in a week, for sure. But not by the traumatised parents.
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The boring truth about why America got fat • Derek Thompson’s Substack
Derek Thompson:
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Americans don’t just want facts about diet and health. They want stories. They want to know who’s wrong, who’s evil, and, best of all, who’s hiding something. They demand the busting of myths, the spilling of secrets, the tasting of forbidden truths.
This desperation for health news that is also a particular kind of darkly delicious entertainment swings open a wide door for media companies and social-media influencers to serve up contrarian takes that are often disconnected from the underlying evidence. The podcast and YouTube space is filled with audacious claims about lying scientists and dubious diets. To add irony to insult, these segments are often sponsored by bullshit supplements with no evidence of efficacy.
The paranoid style of diet science—this obsessive emphasis on myth and conspiracy that confuses basic facts and misleads viewers—is not the exclusive domain of himbo podcasters. Even trustworthy and high-quality news organizations can sometimes fall into the trap of being contrarian rather than clear.
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What follows is a clear explanation of why some of the strange myths about ultraprocessed foods (and what even is a UPF?) and calories have got hold of the public mind.
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The ‘profound’ global impact of China’s rise as an electrostate • Financial Times
Edward White:
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Tim Buckley, director of Climate Energy Finance, a Sydney-based research group focused on China, says the country’s long-term cleantech ambition is “profound” and stands in stark contrast to Beijing’s rival superpower, the US, where President Donald Trump has embraced fossil fuel industries and gutted his predecessor’s support for renewable energy.
“I think China is using it in a very, very geopolitically savvy way, taking advantage of America’s stupidity and regression back into a petrostate,” he says, adding: “China just wins. America has abrogated the playing field.”
From one perspective, China’s path to electrification and consequent dominance of clean tech industries makes for impressive, if not alarming, reading.
In a report released in September, Ember highlighted a litany of statistics showcasing the country’s clean energy and electrification boom.
Among them, China’s investments last year of $625bn in clean energy, which amounts to nearly one-third of the global total. And the $1.9tn contribution of clean energy to China’s economy last year is about one-tenth of GDP and equivalent to the entire Australian economy.
The pace of electrification, which refers to swapping a reliance on fossil fuels for electricity, is also notable. In China this reached 32% in 2023, and is growing by about one percentage point annually, while electrification rates in Europe and the US have plateaued over the past decade.
Taken together, these achievements have led to analysts referring to China as the world’s first significant “electrostate”, a global manufacturing superpower with a rising share of industry coming from electricity — rather than fossil fuels — and an economy increasingly driven by clean technologies.
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There’s a contrary problem though: China depends on steel production, which requires a lot of coal at present. At the same time, it’s significantly reducing its need for imported fossil fuels.
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Wish you could be courtside at a Lakers game? Put your Vision Pro back on and fire up the NBA app • TechRadar
Jacob Krol:
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In what might be the start of something new, select Los Angeles Lakers games will be live-streamed in Apple Immersive for the Vision Pro this coming season.
It’s not every game, but for those that are streaming – exclusive to the $3,500 Spatial Computer – you’ll get access to views that put you right in the middle of the action. Special cameras that support the format will be set courtside and under each basket to give you perspectives that amp up the immersion. The Lakers’ games will be shot using a special version of Blackmagic Design’s URSA Cine Immersive Live camera.
In my eyes, this feels like Apple delivering on a promise – or at least starting to – as even in my first demo with the Vision Pro, I was treated to awesome, up-close shots of a whole range of sports.
Much like Apple TV+ deploying the iPhone 17 Pro in unique places around Fenway Park, the idea of capturing an NBA game in this format is to deliver a broadcast that replicates the feel of being at the game. Or in some cases – with a view from the net or as a player on the bench – a perspective normally reserved for the athletes.
This won’t be for every Lakers game, though. Apple and the NBA will announce which ones will be viewable on Apple Immersive later this fall (before the end of November 2025), with the first expected by early 2026.
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This sounds so great.. right up until that last clause. The Vision Pro, just to remind you, came out in early 2024, and the demos in mid-2023 excited journalists who were shown clips of sports games (specifically, basketball) shot in the immersive view.
And it’s going to take nearly three years to start broadcasting those? Not only that, but also (not mentioned in the story) you will have to watch them live, rather than recorded? Apple has not just dropped the ball on content here, it’s completely buried it. Watching sports is the absolute killer app for this, and I’d buy one in a heartbeat if there were recorded games in immersive view that let me “be” courtside. But no.
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I don’t need AI in Windows. I need an operating system that works • PCWorld
Chris Hoffman:
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Microsoft’s vision for Windows in 2030 includes a “voice-first” interaction mode that shifts away from the traditional keyboard and mouse, making them feel “alien.” Under the hood, that means handing over control to “AI agents” who perform and handle tasks on our behalf.
Hey, Microsoft… can you please stop? I don’t need an agentic AI operating system. Instead of working towards a future no one wants, how about you start delivering the operating system we do want?
Here’s the thing. Even AI-loving power users don’t need Windows reimagined as an AI canvas, and they definitely don’t need a low-quality local image generator built into the Photos app. They’re accessing cloud-based AI tools or installing heavy local AI models and running them on high-end GPUs. Here’s what AI enthusiasts need from Windows: an OS that works—yes, with a keyboard and mouse.
With Windows 8, Microsoft aimed to make Windows a “touch-first” operating system, chasing the success of Apple’s iPad. It didn’t work, though, and it only served to alienate users and cause massive problems.
It feels like Microsoft is repeating that same mistake again, except this time they’re chasing the AI dragon. Maybe this time it’ll work better than the company’s past efforts to compete in smartphones, tablets, and VR/XR headsets. Or maybe it’ll just wreck Windows again.
…Windows is just becoming a mess as Microsoft piles confusing AI features everywhere it can. The features don’t even make sense! Windows 11’s Notepad can now sign into your Microsoft account so it can summarize text for you by burning those AI credits. Can I do that with the NPU on my fancy Copilot+ PC? Not in Notepad, apparently! There’s no rhyme or reason to the chaos. There’s no coherent vision.
Here’s another example of the confusion: Windows 11 has two Copilot apps. One is called Copilot and the other is called Microsoft 365 Copilot. I often see PCs with both apps launching at boot and running in the system tray. What’s up with this? Why does it have to be so muddled?
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The classic “see the org chart in the car’s dashboard” example. Microsoft’s divisions are at war again.
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The inverse law of conference speaking • On my Om
Om Malik:
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You start an event with all the right intentions. The high-signal quality makes people want to show up. Then it becomes bigger and bigger, and the original intent is lost, sacrificed to the gods of lucre. With size comes the economic compulsion to put more butts in the seats. To do that, you have to find speakers who are famous, have name recognition, and—more recently—social media influence.
At some point, my own events became victims of their own success, and I found myself constantly struggling to balance speakers with ‘intellectual weight’ against ‘speakers in the bright lights.’
Maybe because I know how the sausage is made, I avoid most events now. The more famous the speakers, the less I’m likely to learn. After all, no event organizer is going to ask tough or real questions to their prized bold-faced speaker. I would go as far as to say that most event organizers don’t really care who the speaker is, as long as they’re famous, have name recognition, and a social media following. And if they don’t want a speaker fee? Even better.
And that means these speakers are always going to be promoting their own spiel. They’re not going to be imparting any real wisdom or knowledge. They will market themselves as best as possible.
I can’t blame the speakers—the problem is more systemic. Small events don’t make enough money to be worth the effort. Larger events make a lot of money but need all the marketing sizzle. Things have gotten uglier since advertising revenues started to evaporate, and companies have added “conferences” as a new line of business. Whether it’s The Atlantic, The New York Times, or The New Yorker, they’re all peddling the same speakers with the same conventional conversations. They’re doing it because conferences are now a “revenue stream.”
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This is certainly true of technology conferences. I wonder whether it applies to science, though, where people have new things to announce, and of course where a lot of what’s useful happens over beverages away from the speeches. Perhaps it’s a limitation of technology’s commercialisation?
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 