An incredibly hubristic building project in Saudi Arabia has had to face reality. CC-licensed photo by Prachatai on Flickr.
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Apologies for the lack of emailed Overspill on Thursday. Today’s is a double helping as a result.
A selection of 10 links for you. Under construction. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
End of The Line: how Saudi Arabia’s Neom dream unravelled • Financial Times
Alison Killing:
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The centrepiece of The Line, a vast, glass-clad linear city in Saudi Arabia, was to be the “hidden marina”. The world’s largest cruise ships would glide through a gate as tall as London’s Shard over a deepwater harbour carved from the desert. Suspended above it, like a chandelier, a 30-storey glass-and-steel building would hang from the arch, a sci-fi vision dreamed up by a Hollywood art director. Even its designers warned that physics might not cooperate.
Beneath the marina, engineers planned a high-speed rail station. Above the chandelier, another flourish: a 45,000-seat football stadium perched 350 metres above sea level, ready for Saudi Arabia’s 2034 World Cup. “This stadium will be like nothing you have ever seen,” Denis Hickey, The Line’s chief development officer, told an audience in Davos earlier this year. “Everyone says: ‘Can you build it?’”
His own team was unsure of the answer. As architects worked through the plans, the chandelier began to seem implausible. One recalled warning Tarek Qaddumi, The Line’s executive director, of the difficulty of suspending a 30-storey building upside down from a bridge hundreds of metres in the air.
…The chandelier was just one part of The Line, a 500 metre-tall mirror-glass structure running 170km across the sand and designed to house 9mn people: a city built into a wall higher than the Empire State Building.
…A planned wind farm north of The Line added to worries. “If the birds aren’t being sliced and diced by going through the wind turbines, they are going to run into a 500 metre-high mirrored finish,” said the planner. “We would sit in hundreds, literally hundreds of meetings about birds,” said the senior architect.
Designers proposed fritting — printing small ceramic dots on the glass — to make it more visible to the birds. But Livio Rey, of the Swiss Ornithological Institute, explained that this would not address the issue. Even if they spotted the obstacle, they would “have to fly 90km along The Line to go around it”.
Former employees explained that it could be possible to create large gaps in the facade, both at ground level and higher up the building, to allow mammals and birds to pass through. But Rey explained that birds migrated at the altitude where there are tailwinds, and the height can vary. “Some holes in the building will not solve the problem at all,” he added.
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Everything about this, up to and including the $1.4 trillion budget, is insane. From the tiny detail to the biggest. And
we’re all thinking of the same thing, aren’t we? Though there’s a detail in the story I’m still wondering about: Trojena, a site which will allegedly be for the 2029 Asian Winter Games. In the middle of Saudi Arabia? (Story requires free registration, and is definitely worth it for the jawdropping requirements for the construction.)
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Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show • Reuters
Jeff Horwitz:
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Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16bn – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.
A cache of previously unreported documents reviewed by Reuters also shows that the social-media giant for at least three years failed to identify and stop an avalanche of ads that exposed Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp’s billions of users to fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos, and the sale of banned medical products.
On average, one December 2024 document notes, the company shows its platforms’ users an estimated 15 billion “higher risk” scam advertisements – those that show clear signs of being fraudulent – every day. Meta earns about $7bn in annualized revenue from this category of scam ads each year, another late 2024 document states.
Much of the fraud came from marketers acting suspiciously enough to be flagged by Meta’s internal warning systems. But the company only bans advertisers if its automated systems predict the marketers are at least 95% certain to be committing fraud, the documents show. If the company is less certain – but still believes the advertiser is a likely scammer – Meta charges higher ad rates as a penalty, according to the documents. The idea is to dissuade suspect advertisers from placing ads.
The documents further note that users who click on scam ads are likely to see more of them because of Meta’s ad-personalization system, which tries to deliver ads based on a user’s interests.
…Meta’s acceptance of revenue from sources it suspects are committing fraud highlights the lack of regulatory oversight of the advertising industry, said Sandeep Abraham, a fraud examiner and former Meta safety investigator who now runs a consultancy called Risky Business Solutions.
“If regulators wouldn’t tolerate banks profiting from fraud, they shouldn’t tolerate it in tech,” he told Reuters.
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Gemini Deep Research comes to Google Finance, backed by prediction market data • Ars Technica
Ryan Whitwam:
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Google has announced new features in the popular Google Finance platform, and it leans heavily on Google’s tried-and-true strategy of more AI in more places. This builds on Google’s last Finance update, which added a Gemini-based chatbot. Now, Google is adding Gemini Deep Research to the site, which will allow users to ask much more complex questions. You can also ask questions about the future, backed by new betting market data sources.
The update, which is rolling out over the next several weeks, will add a Deep Research option to the Finance chatbot. The company claims that with the more powerful AI, users will be able to generate “fully cited” research reports on a given topic in just a few minutes. So you can expect an experience similar to Deep Research in the Gemini app—you give it a prompt, and then you come back later to see the result.
You probably won’t want to bother with Deep Research on simple queries—there are faster, easier ways to get that done. Google suggests using Deep Research on more complex things.
Everyone will be able to run at least a few Deep Research reports in Finance. There is an unclear limit, but users with AI Pro and AI Ultra subscriptions will enjoy higher Deep Research limits. Google has a cap on Deep Research in the Gemini app, which may or may not be the same. There, free users only get five Deep Research jobs per month. AI Pro gets 20 reports per day, and AI Ultra gets a whopping 200 per day. Given the time it takes to generate even one, it may be difficult to use that many.
Financial markets can turn on a dime, and AI can’t predict the future. However, Google seems to think that people make smart predictions in aggregate when there’s money on the line. That’s why, as part of the Finance update, Google has partnered with Kalshi and Polymarket, the current leaders in online prediction markets.
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This is going to mean turbocharged day trading – but there’s no reason to think people using it will be any more successful using this; just more confident. The big traders have access to these resources too, but also much faster systems.
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It’s cool to have no followers now • The New Yorker
Kyle Chayka:
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now that social media has dominated culture for more than a decade, many big accounts belong to figures of an earlier era of notoriety; they are the establishment rather than the vanguard. The music producer Jack Antonoff, who hit his creative peak in the twenty-tens, has more than a half million followers on X, whereas the acclaimed up-and-coming musician Nourished by Time has just over three thousand. Which is a better follow? The large numbers don’t quite mean what they used to as signals of relevance or clout, as social media has become more aged, more manipulable, and more automated by artificial intelligence.
As it’s become harder to trust a high number of followers, the opposite—a conspicuously modest following—has attained a certain cachet. In a recent edition of her buzzy newsletter, Feed Me, the writer Emily Sundberg praised the new head editor of the publication Air Mail, Julia Vitale, for not being a social-media power user: “I respect her sub-500 follower count on her private Instagram,” Sundberg wrote. In an issue of the fashion newsletter Blackbird Spyplane headlined “Now That’s How You Post,” the writer Jonah Weiner similarly complimented the stylist Lotta Volkova for posting haphazardly on Instagram and being unafraid of her images (of a banal river landscape, or a row of storage lockers) getting only a few hundred likes or a dozen comments each. This might once have been considered embarrassing for an account with nearly a half million followers. Volkova’s attitude, Weiner summarizes, is “Who gives a f–k?” There’s a certain status that comes from ignoring the usual signs of success online, and an envy inspired by those who can grow a career without the pressure of performing on social media.
…When did having lots of followers lose its inherent appeal? It’s a post-pandemic phenomenon. During the height of Covid, online followings surged as cooped-up people across the planet spent more time looking at screens. TikTok, newly popular in the United States, had a turbocharged algorithmic feed that made it possible to gain millions of followers literally overnight. Instagram has replicated that strategy with Reels, inspiring hordes of new, successful content creators. But as time has passed the attention of audiences has ebbed in intensity. As users have come to rely more on algorithmic recommendations, they have got used to drifting where the feed brings them rather than intentionally seeking out specific accounts.
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(Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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As Brazil cracks down on forest clearing, emissions fall • Yale E360
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Last year Brazil saw its biggest drop in emissions since 2009, new data show. The decline comes in the wake of a crackdown on deforestation.
Since returning to power in 2022, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has moved to stem illicit clearing of forest by miners, loggers, and farmers, stepping up enforcement that had been weakened under his predecessor, far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon is now at its lowest level in more than a decade.
In Brazil, forests are largely destroyed to create new cropland and pasture, and together, the loss of forest and raising of cattle are its biggest sources of emissions. Lula’s crackdown on illegal deforesters has put those emissions in check.
According to the Climate Observatory, a green group, Brazilian emissions fell by 16.7% last year. “The new data shows the impact of the federal government retaking control over deforestation after a deliberate lack of control between 2019 and 2022,” when Bolsonaro held office, the group said in a statement.
Lula aims to end illegal deforestation entirely by the end of this decade, but as he makes progress on this goal, Brazil is still facing worsening droughts and fires fueled by warming. Last year, fires accounted for two-thirds of the primary tropical forest lost in Brazil, according to the World Resources Institute.
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Corporate profits are soaring even as layoffs mount. Economists call it a “jobless boom” • CBS News
Aimee Picchi:
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As US corporate profits rise and the stock market hits new highs, investors are reaping the rewards. Yet beneath the surge, companies have cut nearly one million jobs this year — the most since 2020, when the pandemic slammed the economy.
The disconnect between soaring company earnings and mounting layoffs amounts to what Chen Zhao, chief global strategist at investment research firm Alpine Macro, calls a “jobless boom.” Typically, layoffs accelerate when companies are struggling with declining profitability and need to pare costs.
“This is something that is completely different from a historical playbook,” Zhao told CBS News. “It’s kind of odd to see Amazon laying off 30,000 people even though the profit is doing really, really well.”
At the heart of the issue, Zhao said, is the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence, which is boosting business productivity across multiple industries and the economy at large, while also suppressing demand for workers. Although that trend has initially taken root in the technology sector, it is spreading to other industries as businesses adopt AI as a way to boost productivity and lower costs, he noted.
“You have a labour demand that basically has come down to probably 0% in terms of growth, maybe even a mild contraction, even though the economy is doing fine — profits are doing great,” he said. “We’ve never seen anything like that.”
…The nation’s unemployment rate has remained relatively low despite the shifting tides of slower hiring and more layoffs, experts have noted. The jobless rate stood at 4.3% in August, according to the most recent data available.
Unemployment has remained in check because the nation’s labour pool is shrinking due to the retiring baby boom generation and lower immigration stemming from the Trump administration’s tighter policies, Zhao said.
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The labour pool is shrinking but the unemployment rate is the same but companies are laying off people. Are we sure the companies are laying off people, rather than that people are just ageing out of or leaving the country of the companies?
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Common Crawl is doing the AI industry’s dirty work • The Atlantic
Alex Reisner:
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he common crawl foundation is little known outside of Silicon Valley. For more than a decade, the nonprofit has been scraping billions of webpages to build a massive archive of the internet. This database—large enough to be measured in petabytes—is made freely available for research. In recent years, however, this archive has been put to a controversial purpose: AI companies including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Nvidia, Meta, and Amazon have used it to train large language models. In the process, my reporting has found, Common Crawl has opened a back door for AI companies to train their models with paywalled articles from major news websites. And the foundation appears to be lying to publishers about this—as well as masking the actual contents of its archives.
Common Crawl has not said much publicly about its support of LLM development. Since the early 2010s, researchers have used Common Crawl’s collections for a variety of purposes: to build machine-translation systems, to track unconventional uses of medicines by analyzing discussions in online forums, and to study book banning in various countries, among other things. In a 2012 interview, Gil Elbaz, the founder of Common Crawl, said of its archive that “we just have to make sure that people use it in the right way. Fair use says you can do certain things with the world’s data, and as long as people honor that and respect the copyright of this data, then everything’s great.”
Common Crawl’s website states that it scrapes the internet for “freely available content” without “going behind any ‘paywalls.’” Yet the organization has taken articles from major news websites that people normally have to pay for—allowing AI companies to train their LLMs on high-quality journalism for free. Meanwhile, Common Crawl’s executive director, Rich Skrenta, has publicly made the case that AI models should be able to access anything on the internet. “The robots are people too,” he told me, and should therefore be allowed to “read the books” for free. Multiple news publishers have requested that Common Crawl remove their articles to prevent exactly this use. Common Crawl says it complies with these requests. But my research shows that it does not.
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(Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Ford considers scrapping electric version of F-150 truck • WSJ via MSN
Sharon Terlep:
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Ford Motor executives are in active discussions about scrapping the electric version of its F-150 pickup, according to people familiar with the matter, which would make the money-losing truck America’s first major EV casualty.
The Lightning, once described by Ford as a modern Model T for its importance to the company, fell far short of expectations as American truck buyers skipped the electric version of the top-selling truck. Ford has racked up $13bn in EV losses since 2023.
“The demand is just not there” for F-150 Lightning and other big electric pickups, said Adam Kraushaar, owner of Lester Glenn Auto Group in New Jersey. He sells Ford, GMC, Chevy and other brands. “We don’t order a lot of them because we don’t sell them.”
No final decision has yet been made, according to people familiar with the discussions, but such a move by Ford could be the beginning of the end for big EV trucks. Ram truck-maker Stellantis earlier this year called off plans to make an electric version of its full-size pickup. General Motors executives have discussed discontinuing some electric trucks, according to people familiar with the matter. Sales of Tesla’s angular, stainless steel Cybertruck pickup tanked this year. And EV truck-maker Rivian has been cutting jobs to conserve cash.
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The F-150, for reference, is the biggest-selling truck/SUV thing in the US, but the electric version was always going to struggle, because Americans get extreme range anxiety, even when it’s not justified.
Ford keeps trying at electric vehicles, and keeps failing. General Motors hasn’t thrived at it either. So Chinese companies will come and eat their lunch, and breakfast, and, eventually, dinner.
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At this SF grocery store, you can’t leave unless you buy something • SF Gate
Madeline Wells:
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At the Safeway on San Francisco’s King Street, you now can’t leave the store unless you buy something. The Mission Bay grocery store recently installed new anti-theft measures at the entrance and exit.
New gates at the entrance automatically swing open when customers walk in, but they’re set to trigger an alarm if someone attempts to back out. And if you walk into Safeway and change your mind about grocery shopping, you might find yourself trapped: Another gate that only opens if you scan your receipt blocks the store’s sole exit.During my Monday visit, I purchased a kombucha and went through the check-out line without incident. (No high-tech gates block the exit if you go through the line like normal.) But for journalism’s sake, I then headed back into the store to try going out the new gate.
While I watched some customers struggle with the new technology, my receipt scanned immediately. The glass doors slid open, and I was free. But if, like this person on the San Francisco subreddit recounted, I hadn’t bought anything, my only means of exit would have been to beg the security guard to let me out.
I couldn’t reach a Safeway spokesperson for comment on the new gates before the time of publication, but this is not the first time we’ve seen these sliding gates in SF Safeway stores. In 2023, KPIX-TV reported that Safeway stores in the Excelsior and the Fillmore neighborhoods (the Fillmore store has since closed) had installed receipt-scanning gates at self-checkout.
“Recent changes were made at select Safeway stores in the Bay Area … given the increasing amount of theft. Those updates include operational changes to the front end of the stores to deter shoplifting,” a Safeway spokesperson told KPIX-TV in a statement at the time.
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On the Strong Message Here podcast on Wednesday, the guest Phil Wang observed that while violent crime has gone down, petty crime – shoplifting, fare-dodging etc – has rocketed. So now stores do stuff like this to try to enforce the social contract.
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The deadliest US nuclear accident is not what you think • Hackaday
Al Williams:
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When you think of a US Nuclear accident, you probably think of Three Mile Island. However, there have been over 50 accidents of varying severity in the US, with few direct casualties. (No one died directly from the Three Mile Island incident, although there are some studies that show increased cancer rates in the area.)
Indeed, where there are fatalities, it hasn’t been really related to the reactor. Take the four people who died at the Surry Nuclear Power Plant accident: they were killed when a steam pipe burst and fatally scalded them. At Arkansas Nuclear One, a 525-ton generator was being moved, the crane failed to hold it, and one person died. That sort of thing could happen in any kind of industrial setting.
But one incident that you have probably never heard of took three lives as a direct result of the reactor. True, it was a misuse of the reactor, and it led to design changes to ensure it can’t happen again. And while the incident was nuclear-related, the radiation didn’t kill them, although it probably would have if they had survived their injuries.
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This turns out to be from January 1961, but many of the events resemble Chernobyl: fuel rods, critical reactor, boom. Definitely not good, definitely terrible.
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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 