The British Transport Police say they won’t check CCTV over two hours for bicycle theft. But one person has created a tool that could review that in around 20 seconds. CC-licensed photo by Dan4th Nicholas on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Reviewed. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Apple pays $750m for US Formula 1 streaming coverage • Ars Technica
Jonathan Gitlin:
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The United States Grand Prix takes place this weekend at the Circuit of the Americas in Texas, and this morning, Formula 1 used the occasion to announce a new broadcast deal for the sport in the US. Starting next year, F1 will no longer be broadcast on ESPN—it’s moving to Apple TV in a five-year, $750m deal.
Apple boss Tim Cook has been seen at F1 races in the past, and earlier this year, Apple released F1: The Movie, starring Brad Pitt as a 50-something racing driver who improbably gets a second bite at the cherry 30 years after a brutal crash seemingly ended his F1 career.
But securing the rights to the sport itself means Apple has snagged a very fast-growing series, with races almost every other week—currently, the sport has expanded to 24 races a year.
“We are no strangers to each other, having spent the past three years working together to create F1: The Movie, which has already proven to be a huge hit around the world. We have a shared vision to bring this amazing sport to our fans in the US and entice new fans through live broadcasts, engaging content, and a year-round approach to keep them hooked,” said Stefano Domenicali, F1 president and CEO.
Apple says Apple TV subscribers will be able to watch every practice and qualifying session, as well as all the sprint races and grands prix. And “select races and all practice sessions will also be available for free in the Apple TV app throughout the course of the season,” the company said.
Apple also plans to “amplify the sport” through its other channels—Apple News, Apple Maps, Apple Music, and Apple Fitness+. There will even be a designated widget for iPhone home screens.
That obviously means no more coverage on ESPN, a channel that many cable subscribers get as part of their packages.
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That works out (if it continues at 24 races per year) to just $6.25m per race, which is pretty cheap for hours of programming. Wonder what the Fitness+ amplification will be: sit like an F1 driver for hours? Or does that mean “advertise”? Also, no word on whether there will be Vision Pro content. But that, too, seems like a no-brainer. Surely – surely – they won’t miss this chance?
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Everything is television • Derek Thompson
Derek Thompson:
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A spooky convergence is happening in media. Everything that is not already television is turning into television.
…When podcasts got started, they were radio for the Internet. This really appealed to me when I started my show. I never watch the news on television, and I love listening to podcasts while I make coffee and go on walks, and I’d prefer to make the sort of media that I consume. Plus, as a host, I thought I wanted to have conversations focused on the substance of the words rather than on ancillary concerns about production value and lighting.
But the most successful podcasts these days are all becoming YouTube shows. Industry analysts say consumption of video podcasts is growing twenty times faster than audio-only ones, and more than half of the world’s top shows now release video versions. YouTube has quietly become the most popular platform for podcasts, and it’s not even close. On Spotify, the number of video podcasts has nearly tripled since 2023, and video podcasts are significantly outgrowing non-video podcasts. Does it really make sense to insist on an audio-only podcast in 2025? I do not think so. Reality is screaming loudly in my ear, and its message is clear: Podcasts are turning into television.
…… and why does this matter? Fine question. And, perhaps, this is a good place for a confession. I like television. I follow some spectacular YouTube channels. I am not on Instagram or TikTok, but most of the people I know and love are on one or both. My beef is not with the entire medium of moving images. My concern is what happens when the grammar of television rather suddenly conquers the entire media landscape.
In the last few weeks, I have been writing a lot about two big trends in American life that do not necessarily overlap. My work on the “Antisocial Century” traces the rise of solitude in American life and its effects on economics, politics, and society. My work on “the end of thinking” follows the decline of literacy and numeracy scores in the U.S. and the handoff from a culture of literacy to a culture of orality. Neither of these trends is exclusively caused by the logic of television colonizing all media. But both trends are significantly exacerbated by it.
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His piece is not just about podcasts (they’re oral!) but how “TV” – aka video – has become the powerful attractor for everything.
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Famous cognitive psychology experiments that failed to replicate • Aether Mug
Marco Giancotti:
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The field of psychology had a big crisis in the 2010s, when many widely accepted results turned out to be much less solid than previously thought. It’s called the replication crisis, because labs around the world tried and failed to replicate, in new experiments, previous results published by their original “discoverers”. In other words, many reported psychological effects were either non-existent—artifacts of the experimenter’s flawed setup—or so much weaker than originally claimed that they lost most of their intellectual sparkle.
(The crisis spanned other fields as well, but I mostly care about psychology here, especially the cognitive kind.)
This is very old news, and I’ve been vaguely aware of several of the biggest disgraced results for years, but I keep on forgetting which are (still probably) real and which aren’t. This is not good. Most results in the field do actually replicate and are robust [maybe], so it would be a pity to lose confidence in the whole field just because of a few bad apples.
This post is a compact reference list of the most (in)famous cognitive science results that failed to replicate and should, for the time being, be considered false. The only goal is to offset the trust-undermining effects of my poor memory—and perhaps yours, too?—with a bookmarkable page.
This can’t be a comprehensive list: if a study is not on this page, it’s not guaranteed to be fully replicated. Still, this should cover most of the high-profile debunked theories that laypeople like me may have heard of.
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You’ve surely heard of the marshmallow experiment (children who didn’t immediately eat the marshmallow did better in the future), sugar “recharges” your willpower, hearing words related to elderly stereotypes makes people walk more slowly, and plenty more.
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Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft’s move towards a surveillance state • Scott Larson
Scott Larson:
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Whether you’re a business or a home user, I’m here to tell you that in many cases, Linux is a real alternative to Windows. So instead of pushing the goal post back from the brink of an Orwellian nightmare. I’m suggesting all of us consider switching Linux now.
Microsoft’s design of Windows 11 is a concern because:
1: Computer manufacturers, due to pressure from Microsoft, are designing new computers with artificial limitations like TPM and Secure Boot. These unnecessary add-ins push consumers to unnecessary hardware upgrades
2: In the setup of newly purchased consumer-grade computers, there is obfuscation in the installation language. Many of the default choices are aimed at confusing customers into selecting options that share data with vendors
2a: The process of setting up OneDrive to act as a backup of data. Without consent, the setup of this configuration moves all customers’ data to the cloud service, re-points all the user folders to a cloud-specific OneDrive folder that’s very difficult to revert
2b: The process of selecting a browser is obfuscated by Microsoft’s Edge Browser setup
3: The AI tool Co-pilot is installed and enabled without consent. Removal is difficult or nonexistent
4: The history tracking tool “Recall” that is due to be released, sometime in the future, saves snapshots of your user experience into Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud. It looks great on paper, but in reality, this feature, along with others, will be used to move forward a surveillance state
5: Windows 11 prevents the complete uninstall of many of its built-in features. They can be removed from one user account, but they can be reinstalled during an update, or if you upgrade your computer, without your consent
6: Microsoft Edge is forced on users as a replacement by obfuscating choice in various ways.«
I remember people complaining about TPM at least ten years ago, so no novelty there. All the other stuff is, well, people need to consider what they’re sharing, and Chrome remains the most popular browser, which suggests people can figure this stuff out. Larson meanwhile is recommending that customers for whom he builds new computers should get Linux installed. Everything old is new again.
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I made a binary search tool for videos to embarrass British Transport Police into doing their job • Tony Onodi
Tony Onodi:
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Last week London Centric reported that British Transport Police (BTP) would no longer review CCTV footage in bike theft cases if the footage was longer than two hours
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If it is available we will review around two hours of CCTV footage to try to identify the incident, but it is not proportionate to review longer periods as it keeps officers from being available to respond to emergencies, visibly patrolling railway stations and trains, investigating crimes with identified lines of enquiry or which cause the most harm to victims – such as violent or sexual offences.
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London Centric, quoting a Cambridge mathematics professor, then go on to suggest that the police could use binary search to cut the time taken to search any plausible amount of footage down to something very trivial.
…I think part of the problem with selling the police on binary search is that it’s called “binary search”, which sounds very technical, and it’s being flogged to them by computer scientists and mathematics professors. I think a more palatable name for binary search would be something like “scrubbing through a video using common sense” and a better messenger would be just some guy. Luckily I’m not a computer scientist or a mathematics professor, I am just some guy. So I used AI (Claude Code if you must know) to build a tool that makes binary search even more foolproof than it already is. To make a point.
The way it works is a user uploads a video that they suspect contains footage of a theft, and gets shown a frame from the middle of the video. They then click either the “Item still there” or “Item stolen” button to narrow down which half of the video the theft happens in. Then they’re shown a frame from the middle of that half and the process repeats until the user has narrowed the range down to whatever granularity they want, at which point they can play the video and watch the theft take place.
…By my count, it takes about 10 seconds to narrow 64 minutes of footage down to a 30 second window, and—because of the way binary search scales (
O(log n)for the nerds)—searching an eight-hour video would take more like 20 seconds than 80.«
The police’s problem is that they’re used to watching CCTV to notice *everything* about an incident, not just “oh look they took the bike there”. There’s a demo video: impressive.
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Apple said to cut iPhone Air production amid underwhelming sales • MacRumors
Hartley Charlton:
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Apple plans to cut production of the iPhone Air amid underwhelming sales performance, Japan’s Mizuho Securities believes (via The Elec).
The Japanese investment banking and securities firm claims that the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max are seeing higher sales than their predecessors during the same period last year, while the standard iPhone 17 is a major success, performing significantly better than the iPhone 16.
The iPhone Air is apparently the outlier; Apple plans to reduce production by one million units this year. Meanwhile, Apple plans to increase production of all other models by two million units. The overall production forecast of the iPhone 17 series this year has also been increased from 88 million units to 94 million units for the start of 2026.
A separate report earlier today claimed that Samsung has canceled plans to release a successor to its own iPhone Air rival, the Galaxy S25 Edge, due to low sales. Nevertheless, the iPhone Air reportedly sold out within hours in China, despite lower than expected sales in western countries last month.
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It wouldn’t be surprising if the Air isn’t setting the world on fire; people see the “Pro” name and think it’s for them, because nobody thinks of themselves as “amateur”. The Air is for people who are making a particular choice – rather like those who bought the original Macbook Air. It took a few generations for that to become the low-end Mac for everyone.
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Liquid Glass is cracked, and usability suffers in iOS 26 • Nielsen/Norman Group (NN/G)
Raluca Budiu:
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iOS 26 brings Liquid Glass controls laid over noisy backgrounds, jittery animated buttons, shrunken and crowded tab bars, collapsing navigation, and ubiquitous search bars. On top of that, it breaks long‑established iOS conventions, getting closer to Android design.
Overall, Apple is prioritizing spectacle over usability, lending credibility to the theory that Liquid Glass is an attempt to distract customers from iOS 26’s lack of long-promised AI features.
The interface is restless, needy, less predictable, less legible, and constantly pulling focus rather than supporting seamless access to content. Instead of smoothing the path for everyday tasks, iOS 26 makes users relearn basics while enduring a constant parade of visual stunts.
Apple may call it Liquid Glass. To many users, it feels more like a fogged‑up window: pretty from a distance, but frustrating when you try to see beyond it.
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This is the summary of a much longer piece, but it’s why I’m personally not updating my iPad or iPhone to it. Even iOS 7 didn’t have simple legibility problems; this does. Other critiques: What happened to Apple’s legendary attention to detail; Apple’s Liquid Glass design prioritises content over tools.
How long for this to get sorted out – is six months about right, or too optimistic?
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Shakespeare family home damaged by reversing driver • Sky News
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A 17th-century building that housed William Shakespeare’s family has been left damaged after a driver reversed into it.
A picture of the Grade I listed building following the crash showed significant damage to the outside walls, with the timber overhang appearing to be supported by scaffolding.
“Yesterday morning, a vehicle was accidentally driven into Halls Croft, located in the Old Town area of Stratford-upon-Avon,” a spokesperson for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust told Sky News.
“First and foremost, we are relieved to confirm that no one was injured in the incident and the building has been made secure to prevent any further damage,” they said.
“This is a stark reminder of how fragile our heritage is,” the Trust added in a post on X.
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To quote Philip Purser-Hallard on Bluesky: “But soft! What light through yonder window.. BRAAAKES!!”
Are hard drives getting better? Let’s revisit the Bathtub Curve • Backblaze
Drive Stats Team:
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If you’ve hung around Backblaze for a while (and especially if you’re a Drive Stats fan), you may have heard us talking about the bathtub curve. In Drive Failure Over Time: The Bathtub Curve Is Leaking, we challenged one of reliability engineering’s oldest ideas—the notion that drive failures trace a predictable U-shaped curve over time.
But, the data didn’t agree. Our fleet showed dips, spikes, and plateaus that refused to behave. Now, after 13 years of continuous data, the picture is clearer—and stranger.
The bathtub curve isn’t just leaking, and the shape of reliability might look more like an ankle-high wall at the entrance to a walk-in shower. The neat story of early failures, calm middle age, and gentle decline no longer fits the world our drives inhabit. Drives are getting better—or, more precisely, the Drive Stats dataset says that our drives are performing better in data center environments.
So, let’s talk about what our current “bathtub curve” looks like, and how it compares to earlier generations of the analysis.
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Backblaze is the “we back it all up for you” company and you probably don’t need to read this in detail; just scroll past the graphs. It seems drives are getting a lot more reliable: failure rates are down by an order of magnitude.
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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. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 
Just turn on Reduce transparency in Accessibility settings.
No need whatsoever to stay on older OSes.