Charging stations in the UK will be hit by new business rates in April that could make their prices for electricity rocket. CC-licensed photo by JCT 600 on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Discharged. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Here’s how the AI crash happens • The Atlantic
Matteo Wong and Charlie :
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The amount of energy and money being poured into AI is breathtaking. Global spending on the technology is projected to hit $375bn by the end of the year, and half a trillion dollars in 2026. Three-quarters of gains in the S&P 500 since the launch of ChatGPT came from AI-related stocks; the value of every publicly traded company has, in a sense, been buoyed by an AI-driven bull market. To cement the point, Nvidia, a maker of the advanced computer chips underlying the AI boom, last week became the first company in history to be worth $5 trillion.
Here’s another way of thinking about the transformation under way: multiplying Ford’s current market cap 94 times over wouldn’t quite get you to Nvidia’s. Yet 20 years ago, Ford was worth nearly triple what Nvidia was. Much like how Saudi Arabia is a petrostate, the US is a burgeoning AI state—and, in particular, an Nvidia-state. The number keeps going up, which has a buoying effect on markets that is, in the short term, good. But every good earnings report further entrenches Nvidia as a precariously placed, load-bearing piece of the global economy.
America appears to be, at the moment, in a sort of benevolent hostage situation. AI-related spending now contributes more to the nation’s GDP growth than all consumer spending combined, and by another calculation, those AI expenditures accounted for 92% of GDP growth during the first half of 2025. Since the launch of ChatGPT, in late 2022, the tech industry has gone from making up 22% of the value in the S&P 500 to roughly one-third.
…The economic nightmare scenario is that the unprecedented spending on AI doesn’t yield a profit anytime soon, if ever, and data centers sit at the center of those fears. Such a collapse has come for infrastructure booms past: Rapid construction of canals, railroads, and the fiber-optic cables laid during the dot-com bubble all created frenzies of hype, investment, and financial speculation that crashed markets. Of course, all of these build-outs did transform the world; generative AI, bubble or not, may do the same.
This is why OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta are willing to spend as much as possible, as rapidly as possible, to eke out the tiniest advantage. Even if a bubble pops, there will be winners—each company would like to be the first to build a superintelligent machine.
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UK charging industry could face £100m bill under business rate changes • The Guardian
Jasper Jolly:
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The UK charging industry has said it could face a £100m bill as the government considers making public charger operators pay business rates for the first time, at a time when slower-than-expected electric car sales have put pressure on the sector.
ChargeUK, an industry body, said that its estimates suggest that operators will have to pay business rates on as many as 64,000 parking bays beside chargers which have not, up to now, been liable for the taxes. The lobby group said the change could add as much as £300 to the annual charging bill for some people if the cost is passed on to the customer.
The number of public chargers has soared during recent years to cater for more than 1m battery electric cars on British roads. There were 86,000 public chargers at the end of September, an 18% increase on the 73,000 at the end of 2024, according to data company Zap Map.
Business rates are taxes paid on most commercial properties in the UK to fund local services, but charging bays have not yet been added to lists of rateable properties. The Valuation Office Agency (VOA) has told the charging industry this will change next April – meaning charging companies will have to pay the taxes for the first time.
Ian Johnston, the chief executive of Osprey Charging, said that his business would consider closing some sites and slowing down investment because of the extra costs – particularly away from London, which has the highest number of electric cars.
“Large, high-power hubs in certain regions of the Midlands and north [of England] are more likely to be loss-making because we have built ahead of EV uptake,” he added.
ChargeUK said it believed that the VOA’s own assumptions of a £25m cost for the sector were too small, because it had underestimated how many bays would be rateable, and the average rents paid.
To make matters worse for the charger companies, the bill may be backdated as far as 1 April 2023 as the VOA works out the final details of its review. That might mean that the first bill for the current financial year could be more than double the £100m.
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Totally insane. If you were trying to devise a plan to dissuade people from buying EVs, then raising the price at chargers would be right up there in your Evil Scheme. The amount raised is tiny compared to what could be achieved by raising fuel duty, which hasn’t been raised since 2010.
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How many AI artists have debuted on Billboard’s charts? • Billboard
Xander Zellner:
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AI music is no longer a fantasy or niche curiosity among internet sleuths — it’s here, and it’s already beginning to have an impact on Billboard’s charts.
In just the past few months, at least six AI or AI-assisted artists have debuted on various Billboard rankings. That figure could be higher, as it’s become increasingly difficult to tell who or what is powered by AI — and to what extent. Many of these charting projects, whose music spans every genre from gospel to rock to country, also arrive with anonymous or mysterious origins.
How do we know these charting titles are AI or AI-assisted? For some, their artist pages on DSPs claim their music was made with the help of AI. For others, Billboard cross-checked the songs using Deezer’s AI detection tool, which adds a flag to all AI-generated content on the platform.
One of the most prominent examples is Xania Monet, an artist with an animated avatar created by Mississippi-based songwriter Telisha “Nikki” Jones. Jones writes the lyrics and has used Suno — along with help from some other humans — to create the songs. Monet made headlines in September when she debuted on multiple Billboard charts: Hot Gospel Songs with “Let Go, Let Go” (which climbed to No. 3 on the chart dated Oct. 25) and Hot R&B Songs with “How Was I Supposed to Know?” (No. 20 peak).
There was a bidding war to sign Xania Monet with offers reaching $3m. Hallwood Media, led by former Interscope executive Neil Jacobson, ultimately signed Monet to a multimillion-dollar deal.
Monet has since become the first known AI artist to earn enough radio airplay to debut on a Billboard radio chart, debuting at No. 30 on this week’s Adult R&B Airplay chart (dated Nov. 11). She’s also topped R&B Digital Song Sales (with “How Was I Supposed to Know?” on Sept. 20) and debuted on Emerging Artists (reaching No. 18).
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There tend to be generational differences in detecting AI music: kids, oddly, are better at it than older people. If you listen to the Monet song (I don’t recommend it) you can detect the fake vocal wobble. It’s a terrible song – completely lacking in variation and with no middle 8. Welcome to your AI future.
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Manufacturer issues remote kill command to disable smart vacuum after engineer blocks it from collecting data • Tom’s Hardware
Jowi Morales:
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An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device. That’s when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn’t consented to. The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers’ IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after. After a lengthy investigation, he discovered that a remote kill command had been issued to his device.
He sent it to the service center multiple times, wherein the technicians would turn it on and see nothing wrong with the vacuum. When they returned it to him, it would work for a few days and then fail to boot again. After several rounds of back-and-forth, the service center probably got tired and just stopped accepting it, saying it was out of warranty. Because of this, he decided to disassemble the thing to determine what killed it and to see if he could get it working again.
…He then discovered that it used Google Cartographer to build a live 3D map of his home.
This isn’t unusual, by far. After all, it’s a smart vacuum, and it needs that data to navigate around his home. However, the concerning thing is that it was sending off all this data to the manufacturer’s server. It makes sense for the device to send this data to the manufacturer, as its onboard SoC is nowhere near powerful enough to process all that data. However, it seems that iLife did not clear this with its customers. Furthermore, the engineer made one disturbing discovery — deep in the logs of his non-functioning smart vacuum, he found a command with a timestamp that matched exactly the time the gadget stopped working. This was clearly a kill command, and after he reversed it and rebooted the appliance, it roared back to life.
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But… was it really back to life?
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Why doesn’t anyone trust the media? • Harpers Magazine
A transcript of a series of interviews about why trust in the media has fallen so badly:
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Christopher Carroll: Why don’t we begin with the biggest question. A Gallup poll from last year showed that the media was the least trusted civic or political institution in the United States—among other things, Americans trust Congress more than they trust the media. What accounts for this? Why don’t we trust the media?
Taylor Lorenz: Well, I think there’s a lot of culpability on the media side. Corporate media in particular has spent years selling people out and getting things wrong. Look at mainstream coverage of the Iraq War, the COVID-19 pandemic, or the genocide in Palestine. And that’s the tip of the iceberg. These media outlets do not center the lives of poor people, disabled people, immigrants, or the working class. The civil-rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis has done an excellent job reporting on how legacy news outlets push pro-police messaging. He looks at coverage of issues like crime surges or shoplifting epidemics—for instance, the widely reported but unsubstantiated claim that shoplifting forced Walgreens to close stores.
I do think that the corporate media—having worked in it myself—has done things to erode trust, whether it’s kowtowing to power or simply failing to represent the truth.
jelani cobb: I agree that the media has made a lot of mistakes. As you suggest, Taylor, there are some obvious ones, such as the credulous coverage that facilitated the Iraq War or, I would add, the self-interested coverage of the 2016 election.
But I’m not sure that there’s a correlation between the mistakes the media has made and the distrust the public feels toward it. Here’s what I mean: every one of us has been in a conversation in which someone says, “What the media won’t tell you . . . ” There are certain sentences that, when you hear the first half, you should immediately ignore the second half—and that’s one of them.
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Not short, but very interesting.
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Artificial intelligence is helping Indian farmers adapt to climate change • Human Centred Weather Forecasts
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Thirty-eight million farmers across India received forecasts this summer accurately predicting the start of the rainy season. This forecast, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), was tailored to farmers’ needs, providing them with advance prediction of the rainy season earlier than ever before—up to four weeks ahead of the rain. This represents a paradigm shift for smallholder farmers who had to make important farming decisions like what, how much, and when to plant without this information.
With this initiative, the Indian Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare set a model for what the future of weather services for farming could look like for hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers across the tropics who depend on information about when the rainy season, known as the monsoon, will come each year. Nearly two-thirds of the global population live in areas with monsoon climates.
“This program harnesses the revolution in AI-based weather forecasting to predict the arrival of continuous rains, empowering farmers to plan agricultural activities with greater confidence and manage risks. We look forward to continuing to improve this effort in future years,” says Dr. Meherda, Additional Secretary at the Indian Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare.
The Indian Ministry partnered with an international team of researchers to select its forecast. The Human-Centered Weather Forecasts Initiative at the University of Chicago Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth led the effort to evaluate forecasting models, recruiting researchers from IIT Bombay, IISc Bangalore, and the University of California, Berkeley.
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Rather as with the mobile phone, we’re discovering non-trivial applications for AI.
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London’s phones thieves are burying stolen devices in flowerbeds • London Centric
Riya Sharma and Polly Smythe:
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At 8.45pm on 3rd October, a phone thief bumped up against a woman walking down Shaftesbury Avenue. It was a rainy Friday evening and the streets were busy with tourists and Londoners buzzing about Soho. Discreetly swiping the phone inside the victim’s jacket pocket, the thief made off with both her device and the thousands of irreplaceable photos and messages it held. It’s an experience familiar to many who live in the capital or have spent a holiday here.
What happened next will be far less familiar. The thief took the phone around the corner to the Phoenix Garden, a small community-run patch of green behind Shaftesbury Avenue in the middle of central London. It’s a special space where volunteers maintain an urban oasis on a former bomb site for locals and tourists to take a breather. To the despair of the volunteers, Phoenix Garden is doubling up as a storage facility for central London’s stolen phones – and they can’t get the Metropolitan police to take it seriously.
Once at the park, the thief buried the device an inch down in the dirt, alongside many others. Other criminals are less fastidious, with some phone thieves on e-bikes pulling up by the railings and chucking the phones over the fence into the shrubbery.
The following day, the thieves — or their accomplices — return to pick up their bounty. They are often found scrabbling in the dirt to recover stolen devices that can be shipped abroad to markets in Algeria or China.
Sometimes the thieves are beaten to their buried treasure by their victims. Last year, the garden’s staff said, a Canadian tourist whose phone had been stolen followed his Find My iPhone app to Phoenix Garden and spent a day of his holiday digging through its flowerbeds. By the end, he had unearthed his phone – and three others.
On other occasions the thieves simply fail to return, meaning the volunteers find abandoned devices as they tend to the plants. Some of them are wrapped in tinfoil to block GPS trackers such as Apple’s Find My.
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Guess what happened when they told the police? That’s right – absolutely nothing.
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77-year-old cyclist survives three days in ravine after fall • Entrevue
Emma Ray:
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A 77-year-old man was found alive after spending three days in a ravine in southern Lozère, following a cycling accident. The man, considered a true miracle survivor, owes his life to his shopping bag and an incredible survival instinct.
While out shopping in La Grand-Combe, in the Gard department, the 77-year-old was returning home to Saint-Julien-des-Points when he missed a turn on the RN 106, the road that marks the border between the two departments. His bicycle plunged down a steep slope before crashing forty meters below into the Gardon riverbed. Trapped in the ravine, he couldn’t get out on his own. For three days, he tried to attract the attention of motorists by shouting at every sound from the road. All to no avail. Exposed to the cold and damp, he relied on his supplies to survive: a shopping bag containing food and a few bottles, including some wine, which miraculously remained undamaged after the fall.
It was finally on Tuesday afternoon that road workers from the Interdepartmental Directorate of Roads heard his cries. Below, they spotted a twisted bicycle, then the silhouette of the elderly man, visibly exhausted but conscious.
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“Miraculously remained undamaged” in what is surely the most French survival story ever; could only have been bettered if he’d been wearing a striped shirt (still might be), a beret and had a baguette in the back.
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Vertical floating PV plant comes online in Germany • PV Magazine International
Jochen Siemer:
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German developer Sinn Power has announced the completion of what it claims to be the world’s largest floating photovoltaic plant featuring vertically oriented solar panels.
The company said its SKipp-Float system offers notable advantages in terms of storm resistance. The mounting structure is designed so the modules can deflect under wind load via a cable system, minimizing wind resistance while also providing significant stability against wave motion.
The system became operational on August 21 at a gravel pit lake in Gilching, Bavaria, in southern Germany, and was officially inaugurated last Friday. Bavaria’s Minister-President Markus Söder was among the keynote speakers. The groundbreaking ceremony in November, when around 50 modules had already been installed, had already drawn high-profile visitors, including Minister of Economic Affairs Hubert Aiwanger. Sinn Power first announced the project in April of last year.
Despite the relatively long implementation phase, unplanned delays were reportedly minimal. Gottfried Jais, Managing Director of Kies- und Quetschwerk Jais GmbH & Co. KG, the project partner that owns the quarry lake and uses the generated electricity for its operations, expressed gratitude for the speedy approval process during the inauguration.
According to yield forecasts, the gravel pit can cut its grid electricity purchases by up to 70%, with any surplus electricity fed into the public grid.
The solar modules are arranged vertically in an east-west orientation with a four-metre row spacing. Each SKipp-Float unit requires only a narrow, keel-like base extending approximately 1.6 metres underwater, which the company says ensures a small footprint.
Exact figures were not provided in Sinn Power’s press release, and the Federal Network Agency’s market data register contains no entry for the site. According to Sinn Power, the floating array occupies just 4.65% of the lake’s surface, well below the 15% maximum allowed under Germany’s Water Resources Act. Plans are already underway for a second expansion phase, which would add another 1.7 MW to the site.
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Clever idea, and the vertical orientation really is surprising.
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Age and gender distortion in online media and large language models • Nature
Douglas Guilbeault, Solène Delecourt and Bhargav Srinivasa Desikan:
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Despite there being no systematic age differences between women and men in the workforce according to the US Census, we found that women are represented as younger than men across occupations and social roles in nearly 1.4 million images and videos from Google, Wikipedia, IMDb, Flickr and YouTube, as well as in nine language models trained on billions of words from the internet.
This age gap is the starkest for content depicting occupations with higher status and earnings. We demonstrate how mainstream algorithms amplify this bias. A nationally representative pre-registered experiment (n = 459) found that Googling images of occupations amplifies age-related gender bias in participants’ beliefs and hiring preferences.
Furthermore, when generating and evaluating resumes, ChatGPT assumes that women are younger and less experienced, rating older male applicants as of higher quality. Our study shows how gender and age are jointly distorted throughout the internet and its mediating algorithms, thereby revealing critical challenges and opportunities in the fight against inequality.
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Model based on contents of internet has same biases as contents of internet. AI-generated film at 11.
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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 