A story about a Swedish startup training crows to clean up cigarette butts is true – except the startup closed last month. CC-licensed photo by shankar s. on Flickr.

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

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GPU prices are coming to earth just as RAM costs shoot into the stratosphere • Ars Technica

Andrew Cunningham:

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It’s not a bad time to upgrade your gaming PC. Graphics card prices in the 2020s have undulated continuously as the industry has dealt with pandemic and AI-related shortages, but it’s actually possible to get respectable mainstream- to high-end GPUs like AMD’s Radeon RX 9060 XT and 9070 series or Nvidia’s RTX 5060, 5070, and 5080 series for at or slightly under their suggested retail prices right now. This was close to impossible through the spring and summer.

But it’s not a good time to build a new PC or swap your older motherboard out for a new one that needs DDR5 RAM. And the culprit is a shortage of RAM and flash memory chips that has suddenly sent SSD and (especially) memory prices into the stratosphere, caused primarily by the ongoing AI boom and exacerbated by panic-fuelled buying by end users and device manufacturers.

… there’s no escaping these price increases, which affect SSDs and both DDR4 and DDR5 RAM kits of all capacities (though higher-capacity RAM kits do seem to be hit a little harder). If you’re thinking about an SSD upgrade, those increases haven’t become too ludicrous just yet, but if you were thinking about a RAM upgrade, your best bet is to hold on tight to whatever you already have and hope that nothing breaks any time soon.

Memory and storage shortages can be particularly difficult to get through. As with all chips, it can take years to ramp up capacity and/or build new manufacturing facilities. Not only do we need to meet today’s demand with supply levels that were decided years ago, but manufacturers also must try to decide tomorrow’s supply levels based on today’s demand. This was part of the problem during the pandemic-fueled chip shortages of 2021 and 2022—most companies weren’t prepared for the pandemic-fueled spike in demand for consumer tech, or for the lull in normal buying and upgrade patterns that followed (just look at PC sales, which went way up in 2020 and 2021, then crashed for a while, and then eventually returned to something resembling a normal pattern).

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The table compiled by Ars Technica shows memory and storage prices rocketing – some quadrupling – just since August.
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Can crows be trained to clean the streets? The idea refuses to die • Ubergizmo

Aiva Keller:

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For a brief moment in early 2022, it felt as if humanity had finally learned to collaborate with one of the planet’s sharpest non-human minds.

A tiny Swedish startup called Corvid Cleaning AB suggested a scheme so irresistibly clever that it launched a thousand headlines: teach wild crows to pick up cigarette butts, reward them with food, and watch as nature’s most mischievous problem-solvers outsmart our waste problem. It sounded like the kind of idea a sci-fi writer would pitch as a metaphor for harmonious coexistence, except here it was, being quietly tested in a suburb southwest of Stockholm.

The underlying concept was pure operant conditioning, the same psychological mechanism behind vending machines for pigeons or the way your dog learns that “sit” equals treats. A crow drops a cigarette butt into a metal bin; a camera verifies the object; a food pellet drops.

In theory, the crow spreads the word, the flock imitates the behavior, and suddenly the city has an ultra-low-cost cleanup crew powered by curiosity and peanuts. It was whimsical, scientifically plausible, and deeply appealing in a future-tech sort of way. You could almost picture a crow dashing across a sidewalk like a tiny sanitation worker with wings.

But from the start, Swedish ethologists tapped the brakes. Cigarette butts are chemical cocktails of tar, nicotine, and microplastics. Asking wild birds to pick them up raises uncomfortable questions about animal welfare.

…And then.. quiet. No flashy municipal dashboard tracking crow productivity. No triumphant urban-innovation reports boasting a 75% reduction in cleanup costs. Instead, the story simply resurfaced every year or so, drifting through global media like an urban myth with a Scandinavian accent.

…The only concrete update arrived not from the environmental world but from Sweden’s company registry: in October 2025, Corvid Cleaning AB entered bankruptcy. According to filings, it had zero employees, around SEK 7,000 ($750 USD) in turnover, and no sign of becoming the global crow-powered sanitation empire that headlines imagined.

What remains is an idea, an undeniably enchanting one, that has not yet transformed into a viable solution.

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Definitely a zombie idea: there are posts from only a few days ago showing this working successfully. But it’s only when you try to go to the Corvid Cleaning website that you discover it’s as dead as the proverbial parrot.

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Why college students prefer TikTok over newspapers • The Verge

Victoria Le:

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rather than read traditional journalistic outlets that do the work of reporting, [computer science major Ankit] Khanal still gets most of his news from aggregators like News Daddy. Social media is simply a more appealing news source for Khanal, who says he’s turned off by the biases and political leanings of traditional news outlets. News influencers, on the other hand, are “actually connected to the people they’re getting their news for.” Khanal’s behavior is not unusual. Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab polled 1,026 students at 181 two- and four-year institutions from December 19th to 23rd, 2024, on their media literacy practices.

In January of this year, the survey results were published, showing that social media is a “top news source” for nearly three in four students. Of those surveyed, “half at least somewhat trust platforms such as Instagram and TikTok to deliver that news and other critical information accurately.” And word of mouth ranked second among students’ most popular news sources, an avenue for half of those surveyed. Legacy media, primarily newspapers, on the other hand, are regular news sources for just two in 10 students, even though they indicate that newspapers are more likely to convey accurate information.

Professor Karen North, founder of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg digital media program, agrees with the study’s findings. At the beginning of each of her classes, North discusses with her students the day’s most relevant headlines. She asks them where they caught wind of those events. The three most common answers among her students each semester: “They get their news from Instagram and TikTok. And from their professors.” But North says classroom newsgetting is a distant third, far behind social media’s grip on student news sourcing culture.

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Wonderful how they don’t like the biases and leanings of “traditional news” but can’t see that there must be a bias in other people’s output. Quite often one has to worry about American students.
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New research on the real reason states first emerged thousands of years ago • The Conversation

Christopher Opie and Quentin Atkinson:

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One theory suggests it was the intensification of agriculture that spurred the creation of states. Once fertilisation and irrigation were used, it produced a surplus that elites could extract to build and maintain states.

However, an alternative view, first put forward by anthropologist James Scott, is gaining ground. This proposes that states didn’t emerge from agriculture in general – rather, they almost invariably formed in societies that grew cereal grains.

Grasses such as wheat, barley, rice and maize grow above ground, ripen at a predictable time, and the grains they produce are readily stored. This makes them perfect for the systems of taxation that Scott argues fuelled state formation.

By Scott’s account, Mafia-style protection rackets forced people to produce grain, from which tax could be extracted and used to fund further exploitation. Scott proposed that these protection rackets were effectively the original states.

In the meantime, writing was invented and adopted as the information system to record those taxes. Once states had formed, writing had a huge influence on the structure and institutions of those societies. States, controlled by very small elites, used writing to build institutions and laws to maintain extreme hierarchies.

We tested these ideas, combining data from hundreds of societies worldwide with a global language family tree representing the ancestral relationships between those societies. We then used a mathematical model to evaluate claims about how statehood and its possible drivers evolved along the branches of this tree.

Our results suggest that intensive agriculture, with fertilisation and irrigation, was just as likely to be the result of state formation as it was to be its cause. On the other hand, grain agriculture consistently predicted subsequent state formation and the adoption of taxes.

We also found a strong correlation between non-grain agriculture and the formation of states. However, crops such as vegetables, fruit, roots and tubers – which were hard to tax – were more likely to be lost, not gained, as states were formed. This is consistent with the idea that grains were favoured over other forms of agriculture by emerging states for their taxation potential.

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Congratulations to Opie and Atkinson on this research, which is published in Nature – and which Opie tells me was inspired (in part) by a link here on The Overspill back in September 2017, since when they’ve been working on this.

Next on their agenda: “This helps us understand current concerns about the destabilisation of modern nation states. Digital technologies and AI are disrupting how we generate, store and broadcast information; globalisation and cryptocurrencies are disrupting our taxation systems; and our agricultural production is under pressure because of climate change.”

For the avoidance of doubt: always happy to link to research projects inspired by Overspill links.
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AI teddy bear back on the market after getting caught telling kids how to find pills and start fires • Futurism

Frank Landymore:

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After pulling its AI-powered teddy bear “Kumma” from the market, the children’s toymaker FoloToy says it’s now restoring sales of the controversial product, which a safety group found would give inappropriate and potentially dangerous responses, including explaining how to find and light matches, locate pills, and discussing myriad sexual fetishes.

“After a full week of rigorous review, testing, and reinforcement of our safety modules, we have begun gradually restoring product sales,” the company said in a statement posted to social media Monday. “As global attention on AI toy safety continues to rise, we believe that transparency, responsibility, and continuous improvement are essential. FoloToy remains firmly committed to building safe, age-appropriate AI companions for children and families worldwide.”

…In its latest announcement, the company says it “strengthened and upgraded our content-moderation and child-safety safeguards,” and “deployed enhanced safety rules and protections through our cloud-based system.”

Neither FoloToy nor OpenAI responded to a request for comment. It’s unclear what AI model the company has chosen to be the default model for its toys going forward, or if the company had its access restored to OpenAI’s models.

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This one could run and run.
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Klarna launches stablecoin to cut cost of cross-border payments • Financial Times

Akila Quinio:

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Klarna is launching a payment stablecoin, becoming the latest fintech to bet that the digital tokens will reshape cross-border payments.

The Swedish “buy now, pay later” lender said on Tuesday it had launched KlarnaUSD on a blockchain created by payment company Stripe and would use the digital token for international payments.

Klarna said the stablecoin would allow it to “dramatically reduce costs for both consumers and merchants”. One person familiar with the plans said it would reduce the costs for Klarna when moving large amounts of money globally by cutting out parties such as the Swift network.

While the launch was likely to help with Klarna’s internal payment infrastructure initially, it was expected to be rolled out for merchants and consumer payments eventually, the person added.

Stablecoins are a form of privately issued digital cash typically backed by short-term securities or cash-like assets, overwhelmingly linked to US dollars. There were $280bn worth of stablecoins in issuance in September, up from $200bn at the start of the year, according to Citigroup.

Klarna’s push into stablecoins follows a wave of similar announcements by payment companies including PayPal and Stripe.

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This sounds sophisticated: cryptocoins! Blockchains! Yet in reality it’s just a sophisticated version of hawala – a system that has been used for effortless currency transfer for more than a thousand years.
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Kagi News

Since we’re doing AI news aggregators, here’s Kagi’s effort, which pulls together multiple news sources and synthesizes them into written-through stories with references and “highlights” of the key points.

It is, indeed, impressive, as reader Karsten L suggested. Going to be a while before it’s picking out links and making snarky yet incisive comments yet though.
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Obesity drug semaglutide fails to slow Alzheimer’s • BBC News

Michelle Roberts:

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Drug maker Novo Nordisk, external says semaglutide, the active ingredient for the weight loss jab Wegovy, does not slow Alzheimer’s – despite initial hopes that it might help against dementia.

Researchers began two large trials involving more than 3,800 people after reports the medicine was having an impact in the real world.

But the studies showed the GLP-1 drug, which is already used to manage type 2 diabetes and obesity, made no difference compared to a dummy drug. The disappointing results are due to be presented at an Alzheimer’s disease conference next month and are yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Dr Susan Kohlhaas from Alzheimer’s Research UK said the results would come as a blow for people affected by Alzheimer’s. Martin Holst Lange, chief scientific officer and executive vice president of research and development at Novo Nordisk, said: “Based on the significant unmet need in Alzheimer’s disease as well as a number of indicative data points, we felt we had a responsibility to explore semaglutide’s potential, despite a low likelihood of success.

“While semaglutide did not demonstrate efficacy in slowing the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, the extensive body of evidence supporting semaglutide continues to provide benefits for individuals with type 2 diabetes, obesity, and related comorbidities,” he said.

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Not quite a panacea. Still does some remarkable things.
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An AI podcasting machine is churning out 3,000 episodes a week • The Wrap

Tess Patton:

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There are already at least 175,000 AI-generated podcast episodes on platforms like Spotify and Apple. That’s thanks to Inception Point AI, a startup with just eight employees cranking out 3,000 episodes a week covering everything from localized weather reports and pollen trackers to a detailed account of Charlie Kirk’s assassination and its cultural impact, to a biography series on Anna Wintour. 

Its podcasting network Quiet Please has generated 12 million lifetime episode downloads and amassed 400,000 subscribers — so, yes, people are really listening to AI podcasts.

Inception Point’s ability to flood the market with audio episodes faster than any human team could match starkly illustrates both the promise of AI and the nightmare scenario that it can truly come after every job. Even as companies have shed more than a million jobs this year, with many citing AI as a reason, there was a belief that certain creative roles would be safe. The biggest allure of a podcast, after all, is the personality of its host. But Inception Point CEO Jeanine Wright believes the tool is proof that automation can make podcasting scalable, profitable and accessible without human writers, editors or hosts.

…At a cost of $1 an episode, Wright takes a quantity-over-quality approach …With each episode only needing 20 listeners to turn a profit, it’s no wonder Inception Point prioritizes quantity. The company noted on its website that it monetizes with iHeartRadio as a partner, but representatives for the audio platform were unfamiliar with it. The company generates its revenue from programmatic ads that run during its episodes.

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Sturgeon’s Law (“90% of everything is crap”) applies. Though I think in this, more like 100%. Also, there’s no evidence provided that there are any human listeners. Though the continuing existence of the company might argue that there are. Then again, the Corvid Cleaning story above shows that the number of stories is no measure of success.
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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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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified