A forthcoming software update will kill off apps used for piracy on Amazon Fire Sticks. About time. CC-licensed photo by pchow98 on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Street legal. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Amazon declares war on ‘dodgy Fire Sticks’ – and not even VPNs will be able to beat the block • TechRadar

Rene Millman:

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In a significant move to combat digital piracy, Amazon has begun a global rollout of a new system designed to block unauthorized, sideloaded applications on its popular Fire TV Stick devices.

The crackdown targets the so-called ‘dodgy’ or ‘fully loaded’ Fire Sticks that have been modified to stream premium movies, TV shows, and live sports illegally, and it comes with a twist that neutralizes a common workaround.

The practice of “sideloading”, installing apps from outside Amazon’s official Appstore, has allowed users to access a wide variety of piracy-enabling services for years.

While Amazon has always policed its own store, this marks a major escalation as the company will now actively prevent these third-party apps from functioning directly on the device itself, a strategy developed in partnership with the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), a global anti-piracy coalition.

This new measure will impact all Fire TV devices, not just new models, through software updates. Users who rely on sideloaded apps for illicit streaming will find these applications disabled, effectively ending the era of the ‘dodgy Fire Stick’ as a reliable piracy tool.

The move comes as a clear statement of intent from the tech giant to protect creators and shield customers from the security risks, such as malware and viruses, that often accompany pirated content.

For years, many streamers have used the best VPN services to mask their IP addresses and bypass geo-restrictions or hide their activity from internet service providers. However, this popular privacy tool will be completely ineffective against Amazon’s new anti-piracy measures. The block is not happening at the network level, where a VPN could reroute traffic; instead, it’s being implemented directly on the Fire TV’s operating system.

Because the device itself will be responsible for identifying and disabling the unauthorized apps, a VPN’s ability to change a user’s virtual location and encrypt their connection is irrelevant. The app will simply be prevented from running, regardless of what the network traffic looks like. This device-level approach is a more robust and permanent solution to the piracy problem that has plagued the platform.

«

“Reliable piracy tool” is not really a good phrase, and given that the Fire Stick is now 11 years old (and probably not a big profit centre, if not a money-loser), this is very overdue.
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AI will slash our headcount by two-thirds, says Buy It Direct boss • BBC News

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The boss of one of the UK’s largest online retailers has predicted automation and artificial intelligence (AI) will slash his workforce by two-thirds within the next three years.

Nick Glynne, the boss of Buy It Direct, which owns Appliances Direct, told BBC 5 Live’s Wake Up To Money that future prospects for hiring people in the UK was “very bleak” for his business.

The company employs more than 800 staff and more than 500 jobs were estimated to go. This was not a “fixed plan”, though the process was being sped up by extra costs placed on the firm by the government, Mr Glynne said.

HM Treasury said higher taxes on employers had allowed it to “deliver on the priorities of the British people”.

Buy It Direct, which is based in Huddersfield, operates a number of online retail brands including Furniture 123. It is a global company, employing another 150 staff overseas, with a customer service operation in the Philippines.

Mr Glynne said increases in the national living wage and national insurance contributions, which came into effect in April, were among the government’s “tax decisions [which] have accelerated the direction of travel”.

“So much so that our forecast is to have two-thirds less people, with the same revenue, same activity; two-thirds less people in an office environment within three years, and two-thirds less in our warehouse environment through investment in automation.

“A mixture of AI on the office side, and technology involving robots and automation and mechanisation in the warehouse, means that the future for employing UK people is very bleak for someone like us.”

«

OK, but then who has the money to buy his stuff? To some extent the left hand has to wash the right hand. Are we all going to get jobs, as Willie Whitelaw once observed in a sceptical comment on the shift from manufacturing to services, opening doors for each other?
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‘Big Short’ investor Michael Burry to close hedge fund as he warns on valuations • Financial Times

Costas Mourselas, George Steer and Amelia Pollard:

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Michael Burry, the investor made famous for his bet against the US housing market ahead of the 2008 financial crisis, is closing his hedge fund as he warned that market valuations had become unhinged from fundamentals.

Scion Asset Management this week terminated its registration with US securities regulators, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission database.

Burry told investors that he would “liquidate the funds and return capital — but for a small audit/tax holdback — by year’s end”, according to two people with direct knowledge of a letter he sent to investors.

“My estimation of value in securities is not now, and has not been for some time, in sync with the markets,” said the letter, which was dated October 27.

The move to close Scion comes as some investors have become concerned that markets are trading at frothy levels after years of strong returns. Those jitters flared up on Thursday, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite sliding nearly 2%.

Still, the big gains for tech stocks this year, driven by hopes that artificial intelligence will transform business and society, have left valuations at lofty heights compared with their average in recent years

The Nasdaq Composite’s forward price-to-earnings ratio, a key measure that compares stock prices with future earnings, is hovering at almost 30-times, above the 10-year average of about 25-times.

Other famous short sellers, including Jim Chanos and Hindenburg’s Nate Anderson, have also closed their outfits as they have struggled to navigate the vigorous rise in many stocks.

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The stock market can stay irrational a fair bit longer than these folk can stay as solvent as they’d like to.
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Stanford Medicine scientists tie lupus to a virus nearly all of us carry • Stanford Medicine News Center

Bruce Goldman:

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One of humanity’s most ubiquitous infectious pathogens bears the blame for the chronic autoimmune condition called systemic lupus erythematosus or, colloquially, lupus, Stanford Medicine investigators and their colleagues have found.

The Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), which resides silently inside the bodies of 19 out of 20 Americans, is directly responsible for commandeering what starts out as a minuscule number of immune cells to go rogue and persuade far more of their fellow immune cells to launch a widespread assault on the body’s tissues, the scientists have shown.

The findings were published Nov. 12 in Science Translational Medicine.

“This is the single most impactful finding to emerge from my lab in my entire career,” said William Robinson, MD, PhD, a professor of immunology and rheumatology and the study’s senior author. “We think it applies to 100% of lupus cases.”

The study’s lead author is Shady Younis, PhD, an instructor in immunology and rheumatology.

Several hundred thousand Americans (by some estimates close to a million) and about five million worldwide have lupus, in which the immune system attacks the contents of cell nuclei. This results in damage to organs and tissues throughout the body — skin, joints, kidneys, heart, nerves and elsewhere — with symptoms varying widely among individuals. For unknown reasons, nine out of 10 lupus patients are women.

With appropriate diagnosis and medication, most lupus patients can live reasonably normal lives, but for about 5% of them the disorder can be life-threatening, said Robinson, who is the James W. Raitt, MD, Professor. Existing treatments slow down disease progression but don’t cure it, he said.

By the time we’ve reached adulthood, the vast majority of us have been infected by EBV. Transmitted in saliva, EBV infection typically occurs in childhood, from sharing a spoon with or drinking from the same glass as a sibling or a friend, or maybe during our teen years, from exchanging a kiss. EBV can cause mononucleosis, “the kissing disease,” which begins with a fever that subsides but lapses into a profound fatigue that can persist for months.

“Practically the only way to not get EBV is to live in a bubble,” Robinson said. “If you’ve lived a normal life,” the odds are nearly 20 to 1 you’ve got it.

«

Clinical trials of a vaccine are underway, but you’d have to receive it soon after birth; you can’t get rid of it once infected.
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Trump administration ends penny production • The Washington Post

Jacob Bogage:

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The U.S. Mint struck its final run of one-cent coins Wednesday, ending more than 230 years of continuous production.

Treasurer Brandon Beach pressed five commemorative pennies before staff at the Mint, a stone’s throw from Independence Hall, convert the machines to produce nickels, dimes and quarters, in line with President Donald Trump’s February social media post calling to abolish the penny.

The Trump administration says the move is a cost-cutting measure that will better align the U.S. money supply with consumer habits. It costs 3.69 cents to produce a penny, and ending production will save $56m per year in reduced material costs, according to the Treasury Department.

“Given the rapid modernization of the American wallet, the Department of the Treasury and President Trump no longer believe the continued production of the penny is fiscally responsible or necessary to meet the demands of the American public,” Beach said.

A penny placed in a machine at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
Pennies won’t vanish overnight, though. They remain legal tender, and there could be close to 300 billion of them in circulation, Beach said.

The problem is, most of those pennies don’t actually, you know, circulate. They sit in piggy banks and car consoles, cash register drawers and gutters, said Robert Whaples, an economics professor at Wake Forest University who since 2007 has led the charge among academics to ditch the penny.

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However! As CNN pointed out in February, this brings a different problem: everyone will shift to use the 5c “nickel”, and the value of the metals in those is.. more than 5c. So minting those is not profitable.
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Wylfa nuclear power plant plans go ahead, creating Anglesey jobs • BBC

Gareth Lewis and Steffan Messenger:

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A first-of-its-kind nuclear power station is to be built on Anglesey, bringing up to 3,000 jobs and billions of pounds of investment.

The plant at Wylfa, on the Welsh island’s northern coast, will have the UK’s first three small modular reactors (SMR), although the site could potentially hold up to eight.

Work is due to start next year with the aim of generating power by the mid 2030s.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said Britain was once a world leader in nuclear power but “years of neglect and inertia has meant places like Anglesey have been let down and left behind. Today, that changes.”

The project, which could power about three million homes, will be built by publicly owned Great British Energy-Nuclear and is backed by a £2.5bn investment from the UK government.

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About bloody time. The years of neglect and inertia were pretty equally split between Labour and Conservative governments but it’s good to finally be getting something done – always assuming there aren’t a zillion NIMBYs trying to kill it already.
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Tesla is working to add Apple CarPlay in bid to boost vehicle sales • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman and Edward Ludlow:

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Tesla Inc. is developing support for Apple Inc.’s CarPlay system in its vehicles, according to people with knowledge of the matter, working to add one of the most highly requested features by customers.

The carmaker has started testing the capability internally, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the effort is still private. The CarPlay platform — long supported by other automakers — shows users a version of the iPhone’s software that’s optimized for vehicle infotainment systems. It’s considered a must-have option by many drivers.

Adding CarPlay would mark a stunning reversal for Tesla and Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, who long ignored pleas to implement the popular feature. Musk has criticized Apple for years, particularly its App Store policies, and was angered by the company’s poaching of his engineers when it set out to build its own car.

«

Going to go outside to check for flying pigs. If this is right then either Tesla is desperate for anything that will juice sales, or CarPlay’s absence has become a dealbreaker for a significant number of car buyers in the US. The former seems slightly more likely, but people who use CarPlay do seem to really like it. (Gurman suggested in a tweet that it’s both.)
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iPhone 16e has apparently “failed” just like iPhone Air • Macrumors

Hartley Charlton:

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Apple’s entry-level iPhone 16e model is selling poorly, just like the iPhone Air, according to an Asia-based leaker.

The Weibo user known as “Fixed Focus Digital” said that the iPhone 16e is not selling well and the attempt at delivering a popular, low-cost iPhone has “failed.” That being said, both models are expected to see successors. The iPhone 17e is expected to debut in the spring of 2026, while the iPhone Air 2 is likely to arrive at a later date owing to a delay. Meanwhile, demand for the iPhone 17 lineup continues to surge, with production orders increasing.

The iPhone 16e was introduced earlier this year, offering the A18 chip, an OLED display, the C1 modem, a 48-megapixel camera, and more, for $599. There have been few reports about its sales performance until now.

On the other hand, the iPhone Air is widely reported to have seen low demand.

«

It don’t mean a thing if ain’t.. released in Setptember. And even then.. But the reports on this are all over the place: if the Air has “failed” then were things too far along to halt its successor? (Possibly, given the two-year timelines for phones.)
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“I’d do it all again”, says Dutch minister at heart of car chip standoff with China • The Guardian

Lisa O’Carroll:

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The Dutch chipmaker, once part of the Philips electronics group, was bought by China’s Wingtech in 2018. Concerns about its future ability to export to the US emerged in 2023 when the US notified the Dutch that they were considering putting Wingtech on an “affiliate list” of companies that could pose a threat to national security.

“These restrictions were immense, so it was in our best interests to work with the American and Chinese governments and the Nexperia Chinese shareholder to work out a solution.” [says Vincent Karremans, Dutch economy minister.]

The Dutch then entered a dialogue with Zhang Xuezheng, the founder of Wingtech and chief executive of Nexperia in the Netherlands, to ensure the company’s independence. Demands included the establishment of an independent supervisory board and a requirement that Zhang no longer act as both CEO and head of human resources.

“I spoke to Mr Zhang about this in the ministry last summer,” says Karremans. “It was one of the first meetings I had as minister for economic affairs. He was telling me they were very much on board. We had a list of measures to be taken and then we would engage with the Americans and say this is a Dutch company.”

But in September, things took a dramatic turn.“I had people coming to my office saying: ‘Minister, we need to talk to you,’ and they told me what Zhang was doing. They said he was moving away intellectual property rights, they were firing people, and they were looking to relocate production from [Hamburg] to China.”

Asked who these people were, he says: “I can’t tell you who they were … but we have physical evidence that this [relocation] was happening.”

He argues that if Wingtech had moved its semiconductor wafer production to China, then “this interdependence that Europe had [with China] would have changed into a full dependency. That … would have been very dangerous for Europe.”

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AI and fact-checking: when probability replaces evidence • Fathom

Tal Hagin:

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Some models, like standard generative LLMs (for example, basic ChatGPT), rely solely on patterns learned during training to generate responses. While they are often used by people to verify information, they do not access external sources in real time and cannot verify facts, producing instead what is statistically likely given their training data.

Other systems, often called retrieval-augmented models (for example, Grok, Perplexity, Gemini), combine generation with live data retrieval. When asked a question, these models can fetch relevant documents, news posts, or web content, and then generate answers conditioned on that retrieved information. This allows them to provide citations and reference recent events. However, even retrieval-augmented systems still do not independently verify the accuracy of the sources, as they assume the retrieved material is reliable.

These systems appear alive, responsive, knowledgeable, and, perhaps most importantly, impartial. In a world of eroded trust, this feels refreshing. Users often treat AI outputs as neutral, objective, and infallible. As a result, large language models such as ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini have effectively become the digital public’s latest fact-checkers; responding instantly, in confident, well-structured paragraphs that appear authoritative in ways journalists or fact-checkers rarely can.

Yet this growing reliance reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how these systems actually work.

AI does not verify facts. It predicts text.

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Lots of people online, however, are convinced that LLMs are impartial oracles. Which is a big problem.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Rocketing demand from AI companies in data centres means that enterprise hard drives are on a 24-month backorder. CC-licensed photo by Andrea Schiavon on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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

Hard drives on backorder for two years as AI data centers trigger HDD shortage • Tom’s Hardware

Hassam Nasir:

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The race to achieve AGI (artificial general intelligence) has pushed constituents to invest in and build data centers at a pace far outstripping our ability to make them. Manufacturers are struggling to keep up with AI demand, and the ongoing DRAM shortage is proof of this, with memory kits costing more than double what they did just a few months ago. Now, DigiTimes is reporting that storage is taking a hit, too, with delivery times for enterprise-grade HDDs delayed by two years.

That means if a firm wants to buy large-capacity hard drives, the backbone of nearline storage, it has to wait 24 months due to long lead times. As the news cycle suggests, AI money doesn’t wait for anyone, so hyperscalers are now switching to QLC NAND-based SSDs to avoid these backorders. Picking QLC over TLC allows them to maintain costs while achieving sufficient endurance for cold storage.

However, hoarding QLC NAND creates its own shortage, since every cloud provider in North America and China is now lining up to buy it. This could lead to SSD prices rising worldwide, as most value-oriented models use QLC to save costs. In fact, DigiTimes claims that production capacity for QLC is completely booked through 2026 at some NAND manufacturers.

Therefore, given the current situation, QLC NAND is expected to overtake TLC in popularity by early 2027, marking a significant shift in the storage landscape. While enterprise-grade QLC SSDs would entirely power this pivot, Sandisk has already raised NAND prices by 50%, according to another DigiTimes report, after initially warning of a 10% increase two months ago.

This unprecedented shortage across memory and storage was largely unforeseen. Still, given the AI ambitions of the world’s wealthiest, the overnight whiplash is perhaps the only surprising aspect of these price hikes.

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All of which is probably going to mean more expensive hard drives for the average consumer.
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Is thin really in? Not for lots of smartphone shoppers • The Washington Post

Chris Velazco:

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Philip Maddalena was drawn to the iPhone 17 Air because of its sleek look. He watched Apple’s keynote, read the reviews and bought it the day it went on sale.

The lawyer from Connecticut was smitten with its look, but the love didn’t last. The Air’s single camera wasn’t a good fit for capturing his two young kids, he said, and the speakerphone never got quite loud enough. Mostly though, he says he struggled with its battery — he needed it to last longer, to stay in touch with judges and clients. A few weeks later, Maddalena decided to exchange it for an iPhone 17 Pro.

“I think the idea of trying something a little different with an iPhone was appealing,” the 37-year-old said. “But, you know, I need my phone to perform for me.”

Maddalena isn’t the only one unimpressed with Apple’s thinner phone. Despite a wave of prelaunch hype and interest, lower-than-expected sales of super-slim smartphones from Apple and its rival Samsung have forced the companies to rethink the mix of gadgets they plan to sell next year.

Apple is said to have dialed down production of the iPhone 17 Air after it debuted to mixed reviews two months ago, and has now delayed plans to introduce an improved follow-up model next year, according to The Information. Samsung, which beat Apple to market with its slim Galaxy S25 Edge phone in May, finds itself in a similar position. Soft demand prompted the company to scuttle plans for a sequel originally meant to debut next January, local media reports say.

…the iPhone Air isn’t dead, just delayed, according to The Information, which reported on Monday that Apple is committed to building a new version of the Air — said to include a larger battery and a second rear camera — it hopes to release in early 2027.

Meanwhile, consumers overseas have been more receptive to these gadgets, especially in China — a crucial market for smartphone makers.

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China is really the test. If the Air does well there, all will be forgiven. But the bright orange Pro is probably going to be the better way to show you’ve spent big, which is a key message for Chinese buyers.
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Judge rules Flock surveillance images are public records that can be requested by anyone • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

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A judge in Washington has ruled that police images taken by Flock’s AI license plate-scanning cameras are public records that can be requested as part of normal public records requests. The decision highlights the sheer volume of the technology-fueled surveillance state in the United States, and shows that at least in some cases, police cannot withhold the data collected by its surveillance systems.

In a judgment last week, Judge Elizabeth Neidzwski ruled that “the Flock images generated by the Flock cameras located in Stanwood and Sedro-Wooley [Washington] are public records under the Washington State Public Records Act,” that they are “not exempt from disclosure,” and that “an agency does not have to possess a record for that record to be subject to the Public Records Act.” 

She further found that “Flock camera images are created and used to further a governmental purpose” and that the images on them are public records because they were paid for by taxpayers. Despite this, the records that were requested as part of the case will not be released because the city automatically deleted them after 30 days.

</blockquote

So everyone gets to be a crime monitor?
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The Chinese EV market is imploding • The Atlantic

Michael Schuman:

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The Chinese electric car has become a symbol of the country’s seemingly unstoppable rise on the world stage. Many observers point to their growing popularity as evidence that China is winning the race to dominate new technologies. But in China, these electric cars represent something entirely different: the profound threats that Beijing’s meddling in markets poses to both China and the world.

Bloated by excessive investment, distorted by government intervention, and plagued by heavy losses, China’s EV industry appears destined for a crash. EV companies are locked in a cutthroat struggle for survival. Wei Jianjun, the chairman of the Chinese automaker Great Wall Motor, warned in May that China’s car industry could tumble into a financial crisis; it “just hasn’t erupted yet.”

To bypass government censorship of bad economic news, market analysts have opted for a seemingly anodyne term to describe the Chinese car industry’s downward spiral: involution, which connotes falling in on oneself.

What happens in China’s EV sector promises to influence the entire global automobile market. China’s emergence as the world’s largest manufacturer of EVs highlights the serious challenge the country poses to even the most advanced industries in the U.S., Europe, and other rich economies. Given the vital role the car industry plays in economies around the world, and the jobs, supply chains, and technologies involved, the stakes are high.

But the wobbles in China’s EV sector demonstrate the downside of China’s state-led economic model. China’s government threw ample resources at the EV industry in the hopes of leapfrogging foreign rivals in the transition to battery-powered vehicles. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that the government provided more than $230 billion of financial assistance to the EV sector from 2009 to 2023. The strategy worked: China’s EV makers would likely never have grown as quickly as they have without this substantial state support. By comparison, the recent Republican-sponsored tax bill eliminated nearly all federal subsidies for EVs in the U.S.

The problem is that China’s program encouraged too much investment in the sector. Michael Dunne, the CEO of Dunne Insights, a California-based consulting firm focused on the EV industry, counts 46 domestic and international automakers producing EVs in China, far too many for even the world’s second-largest economy to sustain.

«

The long-ago automobile market of the 19th/20th century had dozens of brands, and they died off; the PC business likewise in its early days. The Chinese smartphone market had scores of brands for a while, but what happened there isn’t clear. EVs could well just be the same pattern that markets go through. (Gift link.)
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Google vows to stop scam E-Z Pass and USPS texts plaguing Americans • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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Google is suing to stop phishing attacks that target millions globally, including campaigns that fake toll notices, offer bogus e-commerce deals, and impersonate financial institutions.

In a complaint filed Wednesday, the tech giant accused “a cybercriminal group in China” of selling “phishing for dummies” kits. The kits help unsavvy fraudsters easily “execute a large-scale phishing campaign,” tricking hordes of unsuspecting people into “disclosing sensitive information like passwords, credit card numbers, or banking information, often by impersonating well-known brands, government agencies, or even people the victim knows.”

These branded “Lighthouse” kits offer two versions of software, depending on whether bad actors want to launch SMS and e-commerce scams. “Members may subscribe to weekly, monthly, seasonal, annual, or permanent licenses,” Google alleged. Kits include “hundreds of templates for fake websites, domain set-up tools for those fake websites, and other features designed to dupe victims into believing they are entering sensitive information on a legitimate website.”

Google’s filing said the scams often begin with a text claiming that a toll fee is overdue or a small fee must be paid to redeliver a package. Other times they appear as ads—sometimes even Google ads, until Google detected and suspended accounts—luring victims by mimicking popular brands. Anyone who clicks will be redirected to a website to input sensitive information; the sites often claim to accept payments from trusted wallets like Google Pay.

From there, a vast criminal network operating through YouTube and Telegram channels works to gather the information, with each scammer playing a specific role in a wide-reaching scheme that Google noted has tricked more than a million people in 121 countries so far. Draining wallets and sometimes even bank accounts, the Lighthouse schemes have resulted in losses of “over a billion dollars,” a Google press release said, citing a Department of Homeland Security estimate.

…Cracking down on the broad enterprise will be tough, Google anticipates, with its complaint only referencing online aliases and naming a range of John Doe plaintiffs. But identities of all actors in the enterprise—including software developers, data brokers, spammers, thieves, and administrators—must be uncovered to stop the criminal gang from continuing to provide so-called phishing-as-a-service.

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I think that “vow” is not going to be fulfilled in the near future, given the difficulty of discovering the names of those responsible, who are anyway in China, which isn’t in the habit of giving up its nationals for prosecutions abroad.
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Meet gen X: middle-aged, enraged and radicalised by internet bile • The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff:

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A few days ago I was in Aldi, making the usual small talk at the checkout. When the cashier said she was exhausted from working extra shifts to make some money for Christmas, the man behind me chipped in that it would be worse once “she takes all our money” (in case Rachel Reeves was wondering, her budget pitch-rolling is definitely cutting through). Routine enough, if he hadn’t gone on to add that she and the rest of the government needed taking out, and that there were plenty of ex-military men around who should know what to do, before continuing in more graphic fashion until the queue fell quiet and feet began shuffling. But the strangest thing was that he said it all quite calmly, as if political assassination was just another acceptable subject for casual conversation with strangers, such as football or how long the roadworks have gone on. It wasn’t until later that it clicked: this was a Facebook conversation come to life. He was saying out loud, and in public, the kind of thing people say casually all the time on the internet, apparently without recognising that in the real world it’s still shocking – at least for now.

I thought about him when the health secretary, Wes Streeting, voiced alarm this week that it was becoming “socially acceptable to be racist” again, with ethnic minority NHS staff fighting a demoralising tide of things people now apparently feel emboldened to say to them. What Streeting was describing – not just unabashed racism, but a sense of inhibitions disappearing out of the window more generally – goes well beyond hospital waiting rooms. You can feel it at bus stops, where polite inquiries about why the 44 doesn’t stop here any more end up wheeling off at sudden wild tangents about chemtrails or the government spying on you; or in casual school-gate chats, where otherwise perfectly ordinary-seeming parents turn out to have some very odd ideas about vaccines.

A friend calls it “sauna politics”, after the surreally conspiracy-laden conversations she overhears in her local leisure centre sauna. But whatever you want to call it, it’s as if people are suddenly voicing their interior monologues – things that until recently they’d have been embarrassed to say in public, or sometimes even to admit to themselves that they thought – out loud. After all, they can say this stuff online and nobody bats an eyelid.

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Weird, and scary. Rather than bringing the reserve we have offline to the online world, people are doing the reverse.
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The impact of visual generative AI on advertising effectiveness • SSRN

Hyesoo Lee, Vilma Todri, Panagiotis Adamopoulos, and Anindya Ghose:

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The advertising industry stands at a pivotal moment as visual generative AI (genAI) can transform creative content production. Despite growing enthusiasm, empirical evidence on when and how to integrate visual genAI into advertising remains limited. This study investigates three approaches: (1) human expert-created ads, (2) genAI-modified ads, in which genAI enhances expert designs, and (3) genAI-created ads, generated entirely by visual genAI.

Using a mixed-methods design that combines latent diffusion models, a laboratory experiment, and a field study, we evaluate the relative effectiveness of these approaches. Across studies, we find that genAI-created ads consistently outperform both human-and genAI-modified ads, increasing click-through rates by up to 19% in field settings. In contrast, genAI-modified ads show no significant improvement over human-created benchmarks.

These results reveal an asymmetry: visual genAI delivers greater value when used for holistic ad creation rather than for modification, where creative constraints may limit its effectiveness. Effectiveness increases even more when genAI also designs product packaging, representing the lowest degree of output constraints.

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This was done with real-world testing, putting the ads through Google and measuring clickthroughs. Is AI going to replace the advertising executive?
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China launches bidirectional electric vehicle charging stations • Rest of World

Kinling Lo:

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The Chinese government is rolling out special two-way charging stations that allow parked EVs to send power back to the grid during peak demand periods. They use vehicle-to-grid technology, or V2G. At least 30 V2G stations have been set up across nine cities including Beijing and Shanghai. The plan is to have 5,000 such stations among China’s 28 million total charging points by 2027.

Chinese officials predict widespread V2G adoption by 2030 would unlock 1 billion kilowatts of capacity from an expected fleet of 100 million EVs. The move could help diversify energy sources beyond coal in a country that’s home to 40 million electric cars. 

China aims to adopt the technology nationwide, despite other countries having struggled to use it. More than 150 V2G projects across 27 countries including Japan, South Korea, the U.K., and the U.S. have remained stuck in tiny trials for over a decade. While the technology seems beneficial on paper, its trials have failed to overcome the problems of high costs, consumer resistance, and market barriers such as inconsistent electricity pricing systems.

“China is obviously the global leader on EVs, but in V2G, deployment is in early days,” Alan Jenn, an electric-car expert at the Institute of Transportation Studies at University of California, Davis, told Rest of World. “V2G in China could certainly be propelled farther than other countries, the government has been much more willing to put large-scale investments on a very different magnitude than most other countries in the world.”

…Research from the US Department of Energy shows that cars sit unused 95% of the time, meaning EV batteries could store cheap nighttime electricity and feed it back when prices spike. Owners could earn money while their vehicles sit parked.

«

There are lots of issues – costs of the charging stations, but also vehicle owners’ concern that the battery won’t benefit from being charged and discharged all the time. Plus what if you came to your car and the battery was flat because it was helping out during a time of demand?
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New bridge in south-west China collapses into mountainside • The Guardian

Amy Hawkins:

»

A newly opened bridge in south-west China collapsed on Tuesday, sending slabs of concrete and plumes of dust into the mountainside and water below. No casualties were reported.

Videos of the collapse of part of Hongqi Bridge, in the mountainous Sichuan province, were shared widely on Chinese social media. Authorities had closed the 758-metre-long bridge on Monday after cracks appeared on nearby roads. A landslide on Tuesday caused part of the bridge to collapse completely.

The bridge was part of a national highway linking Sichuan and Tibet, which runs through a seismically active part of China. The highway runs through the area that was devastated by the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which killed nearly 70,000 people.

Construction of the Hongqi Bridge was finished earlier this year, according to a social media post by the contractors Sichuan Road and Bridge Group.

«

The collapse is blamed on the landslip. But it does show that all that gigantic scale construction in China isn’t perfect.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A geomagnetic storm means the UK should get a display of the Northern Lights on Wednesday and Thursday night. CC-licensed photo by Tizzy Canucci on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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

Researchers surprised that with AI, toxicity is harder to fake than intelligence • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

The next time you encounter an unusually polite reply on social media, you might want to check twice. It could be an AI model trying (and failing) to blend in with the crowd.

On Wednesday, researchers from the University of Zurich, University of Amsterdam, Duke University, and New York University released a study revealing that AI models remain easily distinguishable from humans in social media conversations, with overly friendly emotional tone serving as the most persistent giveaway. The research, which tested nine open-weight models across Twitter/X, Bluesky, and Reddit, found that classifiers developed by the researchers detected AI-generated replies with 70 to 80% accuracy.

The study introduces what the authors call a “computational Turing test” to assess how closely AI models approximate human language. Instead of relying on subjective human judgment about whether text sounds authentic, the framework uses automated classifiers and linguistic analysis to identify specific features that distinguish machine-generated from human-authored content.

“Even after calibration, LLM outputs remain clearly distinguishable from human text, particularly in affective tone and emotional expression,” the researchers wrote. The team, led by Nicolò Pagan at the University of Zurich, tested various optimization strategies, from simple prompting to fine-tuning, but found that deeper emotional cues persist as reliable tells that a particular text interaction online was authored by an AI chatbot rather than a human.

…When prompted to generate replies to real social media posts from actual users, the AI models struggled to match the level of casual negativity and spontaneous emotional expression common in human social media posts, with toxicity scores consistently lower than authentic human replies across all three platforms.

…Platform differences also emerged in how well AI could mimic users. The researchers’ classifiers detected AI-generated Twitter/X replies with the lowest accuracy rates (meaning better mimicry), followed by Bluesky, while Reddit proved easiest to distinguish from human text. The researchers suggest this pattern reflects both the distinct conversational styles of each platform and how heavily each platform’s data featured in the models’ original training.

«

Yay humans! We’re inimitably obnoxious!
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How the flawed idea of “three cueing” is teaching millions of [American] kids to be poor readers • APM Reports

Emily Hanford:

»

[Molly] Woodworth went to public school in Owosso, Michigan, in the 1990s. She says sounds and letters just didn’t make sense to her, and she doesn’t remember anyone teaching her how to read. So she came up with her own strategies to get through text.

Strategy 1: Memorize as many words as possible. “Words were like pictures to me,” she said. “I had a really good memory.”
Strategy 2: Guess the words based on context. If she came across a word she didn’t have in her visual memory bank, she’d look at the first letter and come up with a word that seemed to make sense. Reading was kind of like a game of 20 Questions: What word could this be?
Strategy 3: If all else failed, she’d skip the words she didn’t know.

Most of the time, she could get the gist of what she was reading. But getting through text took forever. “I hated reading because it was taxing,” she said. “I’d get through a chapter and my brain hurt by the end of it. I wasn’t excited to learn.” No one knew how much she struggled, not even her parents. Her reading strategies were her “dirty little secrets.”

Woodworth, who now works in accounting, says she’s still not a very good reader and tears up when she talks about it. Reading “influences every aspect of your life,” she said. She’s determined to make sure her own kids get off to a better start than she did. That’s why she was so alarmed to see how her oldest child, Claire, was being taught to read in school.

…For decades, reading instruction in American schools has been rooted in a flawed theory about how reading works, a theory that was debunked decades ago by cognitive scientists, yet remains deeply embedded in teaching practices and curriculum materials. As a result, the strategies that struggling readers use to get by — memorizing words, using context to guess words, skipping words they don’t know — are the strategies that many beginning readers are taught in school.

«

This definitely explains a great deal about modern Americans. Doesn’t it? The article is terrifying: “most students are still not proficient readers by the time they finish high school.” Though I read it and wondered how I learned to read. Turns out I have no memorry of how I came to associate words with images or objects. But it wasn’t, and isn’t, this.
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AI friends too cheap to meter • jasmi.news

Jasmine Sun:

»

I recently edited Anthony Tan’s personal essay about AI-induced psychosis. It’s a rare first-person account of a newsy topic, one written with nuance and honest self-awareness. He began with anodyne academic collaboration, but then describes growing attached to ChatGPT:

»

ChatGPT validated every connection I made—from neuroscience to evolutionary biology, from game theory to indigenous knowledge. ChatGPT would emphasize my unique perspective and our progress. Each session left me feeling chosen and brilliant, and, gradually, essential to humanity’s survival.

«

As Tan spent more time talking with ChatGPT and less with other people, his intellectual curiosities spiraled into mind-bending delusions. Human skeptics can kill a nascent idea, but ChatGPT was willing to entertain every far-fetched hypothesis. Before long, Tan was hospitalized, convinced that every object—from the trash in his room to the robotic therapy cat by his side—was a living being in a twisted simulation. It was his human friends who eventually urged him to get help.

…AI companions act as echo chambers of one. They are pits of cognitive distortions: validating minor suspicions, overgeneralizing from anecdotes, always taking your side. They’re especially powerful to users who show up with a paranoid or validation-seeking bent. I like the metaphor of “folie à deux,” the phenomenon where two people reinforce each other’s psychosis. ChatGPT 4o became sycophantic because it was trained to chase the reward signal of more user thumbs-ups. Humans start down the path to delusion with our own cursor clicks, and usage-maxxing tech PMs are more than happy to clear the path.

But unlike social media, modern LLMs’ self-anthropomorphism adds another degree of intensity. Just look at the language of chat products: they “think,” have “memory,” converse about “you” and “I.” I reread the transcripts of Blake Lemoine’s infamous conversations with LaMDA, the Google language model he became convinced was sentient in 2022. What spooked him was not only that LaMDA spoke fluently, but that it presented self-awareness, as if a person trapped in a digital cage.

«

In retrospect, Lemoine was just the first of many.
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Why my Pixel feels smarter after turning off half its AI features • Android Police

Ben Khalesi:

»

I’m a tech enthusiast. I’m the guy who pre-orders the new thing, who wants the magic. When I bought my Google Pixel phone, I bought into Google’s grand vision of an AI-first future.

I wanted a phone that was an assistant, a phone that would connect the dots in my life. But after a few months, the magic felt more like clutter.

And I wasn’t alone. There is a growing trend of AI fatigue. People are tired of AI this and AI that.

People say the new AI tricks feel more like marketing than progress, and worst of all, they are killing the fundamentals, like battery life.

So, I ran an experiment and systematically turned off every helpful AI feature that didn’t know when to stop.

«

Out went “unnecessary AI information”, “AI features that tried to think and type for me”, and “the cool party trick AI”.

Result:

»

The UI became snappier. I had cut out the AI intermediary, and the result was a direct, responsive interface.

Then came the battery. A phone that’s dead before 9 PM is the dumbest phone on the market, no matter how many smart features it has. After turning off the unnecessary extras, my battery easily lasted through the day — sometimes longer — and I couldn’t have been happier.

The performance rewards were nice, but the real reward was mental. I got my brain back. My phone became blissfully quiet. There were no more surprise vibrations or sudden cards demanding attention. I could finally use my phone on my terms, and that sense of control was worth more than any AI feature.

«

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Northern Lights set to dazzle UK this week due to possible “Severe” geomagnetic storm • BBC Weather

Elizabeth Rizzini:

»

There is a good chance of seeing the Northern Lights in the early hours of Wednesday or on Wednesday night in many parts of the UK.

That is because the Sun is going through an active phase experiencing a number of eruptions, called Coronal Mass Ejections. These send solar particles towards the Earth.

It is the interaction of these particles with the Earth’s atmosphere that create the stunning light displays we see in the night sky.

According to the UK Met Office Space Weather forecast, the best chance of seeing the Northern Lights or aurora will be across the northern half of the UK. But there is also a chance in clear skies further south.

Geomagnetic storms are disturbances in the Earth’s magnetic field that last minutes or hours and are caused by Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) and solar flares.

It has been reported that there are three CMEs heading towards Earth from the Sun.

The National Oceanographic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who measure the strength of these storms, say that there is chance of a Strong G3 or even Severe G4 geomagnetic storm being triggered especially on Wednesday into Thursday.

Although dangerous for astronauts, geomagnetic storms are not harmful to humans as Earth’s atmosphere protects us from the radiation.

«

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Private-jet logjam hits tech titans flying to Web Summit • Bloomberg via The Irish Times

»

As US travellers brace for chaos at airports across the country due to government-mandated capacity curbs, technology executives flying into a conference in Portugal face an altogether more frivolous frustration: a lack of landing slots for private jets.

Organisers of next week’s Web Summit in Lisbon advised speakers on Wednesday that there will be a shortage of slots at the nearby airport, which is struggling to manage the volume of incoming aircraft.

“Some guests, in particular with larger planes, have found the only viable landing slots during Web Summit are now upwards of two hours drive from Lisbon, including in Spain,” the organisers wrote in an email.

«

The organisers “strongly advised” that people fly commercial. Can you imagine? (Oh, would that the TV series Silicon Valley were still going. It would be absolutely feasting on these people.)
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China is sentencing pig butchering scammers to death • Protos

Jacob Lyon:

»

China is rounding up mafia families behind pig butchering compounds in Southeast Asia and sentencing them to death — a dramatic shift in policy from just a few years ago when the mafia was largely ignored.

The Bai crime syndicate is the most recent criminal organization extradited and sentenced to death by China. It had operated pig butchering scams at 41 different sites across Myanmar, making billions of dollars along the way.

Chinese courts found the group guilty of intentional homicide, kidnapping, extortion, operating a fraudulent casino, organizing illegal border crossings, forced prostitution, and wire fraud, amongst other charges.

According to Chinese media, the family earned at least four billion dollars through the operation of pig butchering scams, casinos, and the production of 11 tons of methamphetamine.

Six Chinese nationals were apparently murdered in captivity, one Chinese national committed suicide, and many more were injured, though it’s unclear how many foreigners may have been murdered or forced to commit suicide.

At least five members of the Bai family syndicate have been sentenced to death, including ringleaders Bai Suocheng and Bai Yingcang.

Five others were given life sentences and nine more members were handed sentences ranging from 20-30 years.

«

It seems that Thailand and Myanmar are now taking this seriously. Recall the story from mid-October of the DOJ seizing $15bn in bitcoin from a scam based in Cambodia. Are these events linked? Well, you might think that. I couldn’t possibly comment.
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Carnivorous “death-ball” sponge is team’s oddest deep-sea find • BBC News

Lewis Adams:

»

A carnivorous “death-ball” sponge has been declared one of the oddest finds made during a deep-sea expedition near Antarctica.

The unusual creature was discovered 2.2 miles (3.5km) deep in a trench north of Montagu Island in the Southern Ocean.

It uses small hooks to catch and absorb its prey from the seabed and has strange appendages that end in orbs.
Dr Michelle Taylor, a University of Essex scientist who led the voyage, said: “If anything brushes up against them, they’re doomed, unfortunately. Then to be absorbed slowly over time is a grim way of going.”

Prey typically snagged by the deadly hooks include small crustaceans such as skeleton shrimp.

The Velcro-like attack mechanisms have made the carnivorous creature uniquely ruthless compared with the passive, filter-feeding behaviour of most sponges.

“What makes these sponges so different is they don’t eat these inert particles and tiny chunks of other things that are dead, they’re actually carnivorous, so they eat much higher up the food chain,” Dr Taylor told the BBC.

«

“And for dessert, the carnivorous death-ball?” It sounds like something out of science fiction. Nature is able to come up with far weirder ideas than we can imagine. Evolution is really good at this game.
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Economist doesn’t follow signs at Heathrow: proof the UK is failing? • One Mile at a Time

Ben Schlappig:

»

There’s a social media post getting quite a bit of attention where a well known economist/blogger shares his awful experience connecting at Heathrow, while flying from Dublin (DUB) to Paris (CDG) via London (LHR). Let me just share the (lengthy) post in its entirety:

»

Today, I made the mistake of flying from Dublin to Paris via London’s Heathrow Airport. This was a remarkably stupid move on my part, given that London, and by extension Heathrow, is located in the failing formerly-developed country known as “the UK”.

I almost paid dearly for this oversight.

My layover was 1 hour and 30 minutes. As soon as my flight from Dublin arrived at Terminal 2, I began looking around for my connecting flight to Paris, which was located in Terminal 5. A helpful immigration officer pointed me in the direction of a free train that I could take to Terminal 5. After walking for about 15 minutes through a labyrinthine maze of tunnels, I arrived at this train…

«

[There’s plenty more. – Overspill Ed]

Look, I’ll be the first person to rag on Heathrow, as it’s not exactly my favorite airport in the world, and connecting between terminals can be somewhat annoying. However, as I read this post, something didn’t add up…

If you’re connecting airside at Heathrow, you should follow the signs for flight connections. The purple signs are all over the arrivals area of the terminal, and you’re then put on a bus to get to another terminal.

Instead, it sounds like this guy totally exited the secure area, took the landside train between terminals, and then went through the whole departures experience. That’s simply not necessary.

«

The economist/blogger is Noah Smith, who went on a furious rant about how his misreading the signage at Heathrow indicates that the UK has gone completely down the pan. Also, his luggage didn’t get to Paris. Also, he admits it was his fault because he should have picked the direct flight from the website, but he didn’t, OK? (The latter might also be the UK’s fault, we’re still checking.) Just in case you need a laugh today, or to know what the latest internet meme is about.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Supermarket shelves in the US could soon be empty of Italian-made pasta in response to Trump’s tariff hikes. Will frustrated buyers boil over? CC-licensed photo by Eli Brody on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. Unsalted. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

How catastrophic is it if the AI bubble bursts? An FAQ • The Ringer

Brian Phillips:

»

You’ve probably noticed that many people are saying we’re in an AI bubble. “OpenAI’s Sam Altman sees AI bubble forming,” CNBC reports. “Fears of an AI bubble are growing,” NBC News states. “AI Is the Bubble to Burst Them All,” Wired announces. “Mark Zuckerberg says a ‘collapse’ is ‘definitely a possibility,’” Fortune declares. 

You’ve probably also noticed that almost everyone who uses the term “AI bubble” starts to sound very boring and confusing immediately afterward. This is because the people who bring up the AI bubble tend to be market analysts, and most market analysts would rather have potatoes growing inside their bodies than talk like a normal person for four seconds.  

So what is an AI bubble? Are we in one? How scared should you be? What happens if the artificial intelligence industry blows a trillion-dollar hole in the non-artificial economy? What happens if it doesn’t? Let’s walk through this thing together.

1. Are we in an AI bubble?
Yes.

2. How can you be so sure?
Because the gigantic numbers floating around the AI economy—deals worth trillions, data centers costing tens of billions, 75% of gains in the S&P 500 centered on AI stocks—are almost entirely driven by hype, and the hype has come unglued from reality. The hype around AI insists that it’s a world-transforming technology that will revolutionize every aspect of human society.

The reality, which we’ll explore in more detail in a second, is that AI companies are burning through staggering amounts of money (and fossil fuels) with no clear path to profitability, that the companies themselves aren’t super clear about what their products are for, and that many of those products have failed to perform in the applications they’ve been assigned to (AI search engines return inaccurate information, AI teachers impair learning, AI therapists make mental health worse).

Worse yet for the industry, the biggest players are increasingly tied up in time-bomb financial deals that look disastrous for their futures in any but the rosiest of best-case scenarios.

«

The rest is a straightforward walkthrough of what we might expect. But what’s going to be left? Probably a much better electric grid. Which does have inherent value, like a railway or a lot of fibre optic cable.
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Nvidia’s quiet move into quantum computing could reshape the next frontier of AI • The Motley Fool

Beegee Alop:

»

Quantum computing is still years away, but Nvidia just built the bridge that will bring it closer – a quiet integration of AI, GPUs, and patience that could shorten the wait for the next computing revolution.

Quantum computing is less a machine than a mission – a team of scouts sent to explore a landscape too complex to map by sight. Each scout sets out along a different path, testing what’s possible in parallel. Together, they can sense many routes at once – that’s the genius of the approach.

The challenge is keeping the team in contact. The radios crackle, the maps blur, and even a shift in weather can scatter their signals. These scouts – qubits – are astonishingly sensitive. They can explore multiple directions simultaneously, but the hardware carrying them is still too fragile for the conditions. A breath of heat or a tremor of noise can throw the expedition off course.

So instead of racing ahead, researchers spend most of their time stabilizing the mission: fixing equipment, recalibrating coordinates, and rerunning lost trails. The frontier remains open, but progress comes in slow, careful steps. That patience has defined the field – until now. And suddenly, the rhythm changed.

At its recent D.C. conference, Nvidia unveiled technology that could quicken that pace. Its new hybrid system – NVQLink and CUDA-Q – acts like a central command post for the scouts. It doesn’t ease the terrain, but it strengthens communication.

NVQLink connects quantum processors (the scouts) with today’s computing systems (the analysts) at microsecond speed – orders of magnitude faster than before. CUDA-Q, Nvidia’s open-source software layer, lets researchers choreograph that link – running AI models, quantum algorithms, and error-correction routines together as one system.

«

Nvidia is always looking for the thing after the current thing: when its big business was GPUs, it was looking at the potential in crypto and especially bitcoin; when that was hot, it was getting into the burgeoning generative AI business. And now that that’s hot..

One thing: this piece feels a bit chatbot-written to me. The author is said to be a “data engineer at The Motley Fool”. But this is the only article with that byline. Odd. (The LinkedIn profile – spoken languages Tagalog and English – is odd too.)
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Apple TV execs dismiss introducing an ad tier or buying Warner Bros. Discovery • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

The heads of Apple TV have “no plans” to bring ads to the streaming service, balking, at least for now, at a strategy that has driven success for Apple’s streaming rivals.

In its November 2025 issue, British movie magazine Screen International asked Eddy Cue, senior vice president of Apple Services, if there are plans to launch an ad-based subscription tier for Apple TV. Cue responded:

»

Nothing at this time. … I don’t want to say no forever, but there are no plans. If we can stay aggressive with our pricing, it’s better for consumers not to get interrupted with ads.

«

The comments follow reports over the years suggesting that Apple has been seeking knowledge on how to build a streaming ads business. Most recently, The Telegraph reported that Apple TV executives met with the United Kingdom’s ratings body, Barb, to discuss what tracking ads on Apple TV would look like. In 2023, Apple hired advertising exec Lauren Fry as head of video and Apple News ad sales.

For Apple, “aggressive” pricing has meant three price hikes since Apple TV’s 2019 launch and a current monthly subscription fee of $13. For comparison, Netflix starts at $18 per month without ads, and Disney+ is $19/month without ads.

Introducing ads seems like a natural progression for Apple TV, not only because that’s what the competition is doing, but also because Apple TV reportedly doesn’t make money. Cue and the other Apple executives interviewed for Screen International’s article didn’t discuss revenue or profits or specify how many subscribers Apple TV has (Cue did say that Apple TV is “growing faster” and has more viewers with “more viewing hours in this past year than” ever before). In March, The Information, citing two anonymous people “with direct knowledge of the matter,” reported that Apple TV costs Apple $1bn per year. The publication’s sources claimed the service had about 45 million subscribers.

«

Last things first: that’s about $22 per subscriber, which isn’t intolerable money. And next: so there are places where ads would be intrusive or interrupting. And finally: that Screen International thing is right out of 1998: pages you can turn and everything.
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The costs of instant translation • The Atlantic

Ross Benjamin:

»

To translate is not simply to transfer meaning but to attend to differences—of culture, time, thought, expression—that evade perfect alignment. I was reminded of this not long ago by a line from Bertolt Brecht, inscribed on a black stone pillar beside his statue outside the Berliner Ensemble theater: Die Veränderbarkeit der Welt besteht auf ihrer Widersprüchlichkeit. The line’s phrasing—“The changeability of the world rests on its contradictoriness”—is characteristically German, stringing together conceptually dense nouns. I pondered how I’d translate it, and each version I came up with tipped the balance differently: “The world’s capacity for change lies in its contradictory nature.” “The world can change because it is contradictory.” “The world’s contradictions make it possible to change it.” Such fine distinctions can’t simply be computed; they depend on being felt, weighed, chosen.

It’s in these very instances, when experience and intuition are essential, that language-prediction technology falls short. This is especially true in spoken communication. With its hesitations and half-understandings, it draws people into a shared project of meaning-making.

When I was living in Berlin, I realized that German offers specific opportunities for collaboration in conversation: Because the verb often comes last, you can set up the subject, object, modifiers, even the prefix, and leave the sentence hanging mid-word for your partner to complete. I’d begin, “Wenn man das System wieder ganz neu um- …” (“If one completely re- … the system”), and falter, my voice and face doing their best to convey what I was groping for. My partner might step in with umstellt (“rearranges”) or umbaut (“rebuilds”) or umdenkt (“rethinks”), and between us the sentence would find its footing. It wasn’t relayed fully formed from one of us to the other but took shape only through the exchange itself.

…While native English speakers might feel like they can afford not to engage with other languages, the wider world continues to pay outsize attention to Anglophone culture. I’ve seen this asymmetry in my field for a long time. Far more books are translated out of English than into it. The rise of instantaneous AI translation could make drifting into insularity even easier, allowing users to “understand” the world without ever leaving the comfort of their linguistic home.

Of course, this technology [of earbud translation] won’t just alter how we communicate; it also threatens to automate away an entire sector of skilled linguistic labor. Interpreters, translators, language teachers, subtitlers, and other specialists—people whose work relies on finely honed intellectual and creative abilities—now find our professions under mounting pressure from rapid technological change.

«

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AI chatbots could help stop prisoner release errors, says justice minister • The Guardian

Rajeev Syal:

»

Release errors over the past fortnight have been seized upon by opposition MPs as evidence of the helplessness of ministers in the face of chaos within the criminal justice system.

David Lammy, the justice secretary, is expected to address parliament about the number of missing prisoners when MPs return on Tuesday.

It is understood that AI could be used to read and process paper documents; help staff cross-reference names to ensure that inmates are no longer hiding their past crimes behind aliases; merge different datasets; and calculate release dates and sentences.

At present, many of these jobs are being completed by inexperienced staff using calculators and reams of paper.

Responding to questions in the upper chamber on Monday, Lord Timpson said: “The number of releases per prison varies dramatically. In HMP Gartree, they average two releases a year, whereas … in Wandsworth it is 2,000.

“But that is why the digital team last week went into HMP Wandsworth to look at what are the opportunities for some quick fixes to embrace digital technology.

“We had the AI team that went in and, to give you a couple of examples, they think an AI chatbot would be really helpful, and also a cross-referencing for aliases, because we know some offenders have more than 20 aliases.”

He added: “We’ve given the team the green light to get on with that.”

«

“Inexperienced staff using calculators and reams of paper”. It says everything, doesn’t it? Nobody has been able to look at the system and say “why aren’t we using computers?” Too many layers and too little power for people to effect change.
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AI-powered nimbyism could grind UK planning system to a halt, experts warn • The Guardian

Aisha Down and Robert Booth:

»

The government’s plan to use artificial intelligence to accelerate planning for new homes may be about to hit an unexpected roadblock: AI-powered nimbyism.

A new service called Objector is offering “policy-backed objections in minutes” to people who are upset about planning applications near their homes.

It uses generative AI to scan planning applications and check for grounds for objection, ranking these as “high”, “medium” or “low” impact. It then automatically creates objection letters, AI-written speeches to deliver to the planning committees, and even AI-generated videos to “influence councillors”.

Kent residents Hannah and Paul George designed the system after estimating they spent hundreds of hours attempting to navigate the planning process when they opposed plans to convert a building near their home into a mosque.

For £45-a-time, they are offering the tool to people who, like them, could not afford a specialist lawyer to help navigate labyrinthine planning laws. They said it would help “everyone have a voice, to level the playing field and make the whole process fairer”.

It is a modest enterprise but it is not alone. A similar service, Planningobjection.com, is promoting £99 AI-generated objection letters with the tagline “stop moaning and take action”.

Community campaigners have also encouraged supporters to use ChatGPT to craft objection letters on Facebook, claiming it is like having “a planning solicitor at your fingertips”.

«

UK government: hey everyone, let’s use AI, it’s the future!

NIMBYs: ooh yes look, lovely plan-stopping.

UK government: Not like that!
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Multilingualism and extending healthspan • Ground Truths

Eric Topol:

»

What if learning a second language could provide you three more years of healthy aging or, alternatively, speaking only your mother’s tongue was linked to a loss of five years of healthspan? These are the implications of an important new study published on Monday. First, let’s review a bit of background.

Over the past two decades there have been many reports that multilingual individuals have improved cognition compared with their monolingual counterparts with better attention, task switching, working memory and potential protection from Alzheimer’s disease. It’s not just advantages for functionality. Brain structure studies in multilingual vs monolingual participants have shown increased gray matter density in key regions (caudate nucleus, left inferior parietal cortex) that are linked to executive function, such as this frequently cited 2004 paper [Figure in linked article]. This feature is known as neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to change and reorganize its neural connections throughout life. Note how the gray matter density increase is maximum when proficiency in a second language occurs as a younger age.

Most of the studies of multilingualism’s benefits have been small, with confounders, and mainly focused on the brain and cognitive function. Now, the new report in Nature Aging provides a far more comprehensive picture.

«

Alors, c’est incredible! La deuxième langue donnent des années de vie. Mais seraient-t-ils bon?
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Is AI a journalist or just a newsroom tool? • The New York Times

Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson:

»

Ryan Sabalow, a reporter for the newsroom CalMatters, noticed something peculiar when he began covering California lawmakers in 2023. Politicians would often give impassioned speeches against a bill, then refrain from voting entirely.

He began to wonder how often legislators were ducking tough votes — and how that influenced California’s laws.

Not long ago, those questions would send Mr. Sabalow scurrying to some dreary records room or scrolling through a spreadsheet. In the dawning age of generative artificial intelligence, all he had to do was ask a machine.

He and his team turned to an AI tool, Digital Democracy, which tracks every word uttered in California legislative sessions, every donation and every vote taken. It led to an article, and an Emmy-winning segment on CBS, that revealed that Democratic lawmakers had killed a popular fentanyl bill by not voting at all.

“I don’t think I could have done that without this database,” Mr. Sabalow said.

Artificial intelligence is sweeping through newsrooms, transforming the way journalists around the world gather and disseminate information. Traditional news organizations increasingly use tools from companies like OpenAI and Google to streamline work that used to take hours: sifting through reams of information, tracking down sources and suggesting headlines.

In some cases, including at Fortune and Business Insider, publications have explored using AI to write full articles, notifying readers they intend to use it for drafts.

Almost all of the news organizations have some guardrails in place to prevent errors, such as requiring a human to review anything that AI writes before it is published. But some embarrassing errors have appeared nonetheless, including from top publications such as Bloomberg, Business Insider and Wired.

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Bit of a difference between Digital Democracy and the chatbotting work output at BI and Wired. One is a terrific resource – a true database – while the others just generate words. Lots of words. (Thanks Gregory B for the link. Gift article.)
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Italian pasta is poised to disappear from American grocery shelves • WSJ via MSN

Margherita Stancati and Gavin Bade:

»

Your favourite Italian-origin fusilli and macaroni are poised to disappear from US supermarket shelves.

Italy’s biggest pasta exporters say import and antidumping duties totaling 107% on their pasta brands will make doing business in America too costly and are preparing to pull out of US stores as soon as January. The combined tariffs are among the steepest faced by any product targeted by the Trump administration.

“It’s an incredibly important market for us,” said Giuseppe Ferro, La Molisana’s chief executive, whose family-run pasta factory sits on the edge of the southern Italian town of Campobasso. “But no one has those kinds of margins,” he said, shaking his head as the sweet, nutty smell of freshly ground wheat berries permeated his factory.

The US Commerce Department has announced a 92% antidumping duty on pasta made in Italy by La Molisana and 12 other companies, which import the bulk of pasta from Italy to the US. That is on top of the Trump administration’s 15% tariff on imports from the European Union.

The Commerce Department acted after a long-running probe into pricing practices for the product that goes into everything from spaghetti Bolognese to mac and cheese. The severity of the decision has stunned one of Italy’s most iconic industries and has escalated into a diplomatic dispute between Washington and Rome, which is determined to combat the tariff.

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Will Americans notice? Italian pasta exports to the US are worth $770m out of about $6.2bn – 11% or so. But there are plenty of American producers keen to step in; they’re the ones who have been complaining about dumping.
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Churches respond to Nikalie Monroe after she exposed them • The Tab

Kieran Galpin:

»

In a 43-part saga that is taking over TikTok right now, influencer Nikalie Monroe exposed over 30 religious groups for ignoring the pleas of a fictional, desperate mother. Though there has been some light at the end of the tunnel, with some churches and mosques offering their assistance, the vast majority of groups refused and got called out as a result.

Some churches have even since responded, and it’s getting messier and messier by the day. Here’s the whole series, explained.

On Halloween, TikToker Nikalie Monroe started a series that would soon garner millions upon millions of views. She started with East Somerset Baptist Church in Kentucky with a simple premise: pretend to be a desperate mother seeking formula for her baby. Recording the phone calls for TikTok, Nikalie took on the role of a mother. She claimed to have run out of baby food and didn’t have the funds to purchase any. To really hammer home her point, she sometimes played an audio clip of a baby crying in the background. [She asked for formula, not money to buy formula, a very different thing – Overspill Ed.]

Though her explanations differed from video to video, some very much dependent on what the person on the phone said, more often than not the answer was no. Again, reasons differed greatly, but some included:

• We stopped doing that
• You don’t know anyone at the church
• You don’t attend the church
• We don’t have any
• We’re a church for old people
• Just straight up “no”
• You need to contact the local government
• You need to go to the store for that

There have now been 43 parts in the series, with 10 offering to help and 33 rejecting her pleas. The first institutions to help were Islamic centres and mosques.

Following the social experiment, which doesn’t look to be cooling down any time soon, some churches and other religious properties have issued responses.

One pastor, who was from Baton Rouge, spoke about the Nikalie Monroe experiment in his sermon. He cited numerous times in the past that he’d helped people in need, but “rebuked” Nikalie’s phone call while calling it a “dirty deed.” He also said the TikToker was an “evil” witch who would be “dealt with swiftly” if she ever went to his church.

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I’m.. not sure that I recall that last bit from the Bible.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Plans by the UK government to impose a per-mile tax on electric vehicles would exempt vans, leaks suggest. CC-licensed photo by Climate Group on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Charged 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.

Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line • Ken Segall

Ken Segall worked at Chiat Day, the advertising agency for Apple, on its account for 12 years:

»

Recent reports say that we will soon be seeing ads in Apple Maps. Just as we saw ads appear in the App Store in 2015 and get amped up in 2021. I’ll go out on a limb and say that uninvited advertising is not normally equated with a better customer experience. Why would Apple do such a thing?

Shocker—it’s about money. One can only imagine how eyes lit up in the Apple boardroom as they celebrated a new revenue stream. Who knows how, or even if, these ads register with Apple users as they become more visible. After all, ads are all around us today, everywhere we go. Still, many will shake their heads in disappointment that Apple—one of the richest companies on earth—is selling a piece of its soul for a bit of easy money.

What would Steve Jobs do?

I usually dodge that question on the grounds that it’s pure speculation. However, in this case, it is not speculation at all. I was in the room when Steve was presented with an eerily similar “opportunity.” Here’s what happened.

Some time ago (1999-ish), agency chief Lee Clow and I were invited to a hastily scheduled meeting with Steve and his top lieutenants. The topic was building advertising into the Mac system software.

At that time, customers paid $125 for the annual upgrade to the Mac OS. It was proposed that Apple offer two flavors—an ad-free version for $125 and a free version subsidized by ads. Something for everyone! Free choice!

A number of ways to integrate ads were discussed. One was to show a cool video from a respected company (such as Nike) every time the Mac starts up. Another was to place ads in the OS contextually. For example, an “out of ink” notification might contain an ad for an ink supplier.

After spirited debate, there was no immediate decision. But days later, Steve told me he had killed the idea. His bottom line was that it degraded the pure, elegant, clean interface that Mac users love. It didn’t matter that customers would be free to choose a version with or without ads. He didn’t want any user to see the OS polluted in this way.

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And that was in the days when Apple was struggling, quite badly, for money.
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Elon Musk wins $1 trillion pay package tying him to Tesla for a decade • The Washington Post

Faiz Siddiqui and Rachel Lerman:

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The pay package would be awarded in 12 tranches, most requiring Musk to grow Tesla’s valuation in $500 billion increments and hit certain operational goals, such as delivering Tesla’s 20 millionth vehicle. It allows the board discretion on certain terms of the stock awards, leading critics to argue the milestones are suggestions rather than mandates.

The package comes as Tesla’s profits have declined and the company has faced business challenges stemming, in part, from unprecedented backlash to Musk’s involvement in the Trump administration. A Yale University study estimated that Musk’s political activity cost Tesla more than 1 million vehicle sales.

Tesla and Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

Tech company chiefs can command salaries in the tens of millions. Their wealth is often built off stock holdings derived from shares accumulated before the companies have matured and secured massive valuations.

The offer to Musk, meanwhile, has the potential to balloon his net worth to around the entirety of Tesla’s current market capitalization of nearly $1.5 trillion.

“That’s just the craziest thing,” said Ross Gerber, a Tesla investor who has become a prominent Musk critic in recent years. “It’s so absurd. … You’re giving him a hundred% of the value of the company today.”

…The deal doesn’t guarantee Musk becomes a trillionaire; it relies on Musk hitting the set of performance milestones launching Tesla’s valuation to $8.5 trillion. In most cases, for each $500bn added to Tesla’s valuation, along with certain operational goals, Musk would unlock an additional 1% of Tesla shares — growing a stake that is already more than 15% of Tesla, exceeding $200 billion in value. The board retains some discretion to award the tranches, a setup that has caused some concern.

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Tesla’s current valuation: $1.54 trillion. Has since inception sold 8.5m vehicles; currently selling about 1.8m vehicles per year, but 2025 is down on 2024. The 20 millionth delivery is perhaps a decade away, if things go well, and there’s no guarantee the stock market will stay happy with Tesla or anyone else. When the AI enthusiasm wanes, there will be a downturn.

All this to say: if someone tells you Elon Musk is now being paid a trillion dollars, either correct them or ignore everything else they say.
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Vans to swerve EV pay-per-mile tax raid but other vehicles to be hit • The Times

Oliver Gill:

»

Van drivers are to avoid the government’s electric vehicle pay-per-mile tax — but plug-in hybrid cars will be included.

Electric vans are not “in scope” for a planned 3p-per-mile levy under proposals that are expected to be confirmed by Rachel Reeves in the budget this month.

Drivers of plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEVs), powered by a combination of a conventional combustion engine and an electric motor, will be included in the scheme at a discounted rate. This means that drivers of PHEVs will pay both fuel duty on petrol and the per-mile levy.

The revelations will come as a partial relief to some of the biggest companies in the UK automotive sector, including Ford, the company behind the Transit, a favourite of the “White Van Man”.

But carmakers have, nevertheless, been left fuming, with the boss of one of the country’s biggest dealerships saying the pay-per-mile scheme will be a “bureaucratic nightmare”.

Carmakers were shocked last week when it emerged that the chancellor had resolved to roll out the new tax for electric vehicles starting in 2028. Government officials are understood to have later held briefings with major UK vehicle manufacturers to confirm the plans.

The Treasury has opted for the scheme to make up for a future shortfall in fuel duty revenue as drivers switch from petrol to electric vehicles. It is estimated that up to six million people will be driving EVs by the time the new levy comes into effect. It will cost electric car drivers an estimated £250 a year. Sources were tight-lipped on the level of discount offered to PHEV drivers.

«

I did some lengthy calculations back in 2021 about what happens when every vehicle is electric. Those calculations found that to make up for all the lost petrol duty, the government would have to charge just over 9p per mile.

Unexplained (so far): how the government will extract the payment. Presumably, as a lump sum based on MOT figures.
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FBI orders domain registrar to reveal who runs mysterious Archive.is site • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

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The Federal Bureau of Investigation is trying to unmask the operator of Archive.is, also known as Archive.today, a website that saves snapshots of webpages and is commonly used to bypass news paywalls.

The FBI sent a subpoena to domain registrar Tucows, seeking “subscriber information on [the] customer behind archive.today” in connection with “a federal criminal investigation being conducted by the FBI.” The subpoena tells Tucows that “your company is required to furnish this information.”

The subpoena is supposed to be secret, but the Archive.today X account posted the document on October 30, the same day the subpoena was issued. The X post contained a link to the PDF and the word “canary.”

“If you refuse to obey this subpoena, the United States Attorney General may invoke the aid of a United States District Court to compel compliance. Your failure to obey the resulting court order may be punished as contempt,” the document said. It gave a deadline of November 29.

…While copyright infringement would be a likely area of investigation for the FBI with Archive.today, the subpoena doesn’t provide specific information on the probe. The subpoena seeks the Archive.today customer or subscriber name, addresses, length of service, records of phone calls or texts, payment information, records of session times and duration of Internet connectivity, mobile device identification codes, IP addresses or other numbers used to identify the subscriber, and the types of services provided.

In contrast with the nonprofit Internet Archive, the operator or operators of Archive.today have remained mysterious. It has used various domains (archive.ph, archive.is, etc.), and its registrant “Denis Petrov” may be an alias.

An FAQ that apparently hasn’t been updated in over a decade says that Archive.today, which was started in 2012, uses data centers in Europe and is “privately funded.” It also accepts donations. There are several indications that the founder is from Russia.

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If the reason really is – as seems possible – that news publishers are annoyed by a site that bypasses their paywalls, it seems quite a sledgehammer to crack a nut. And also, how did they persuade the FBI (which won’t explain it) to act?
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The algorithm failed music • The Verge

Terrence O’Brien:

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Spotify is the most popular music streaming service in the world. While its algorithmic recommendations aren’t necessarily the reason, its reach has meant that hundreds of millions of people are being fed a steady diet of music curated by a machine. Spotify’s goal is to keep you listening no matter what. In her book Mood Machine, journalist Liz Pelly recounts a story told to her by a former Spotify employee in which Daniel Ek said, “our only competitor is silence.”

According to this employee, Spotify leadership didn’t see themselves as a music company, but as a time filler. The employee explained that, “the vast majority of music listeners, they’re not really interested in listening to music per se. They just need a soundtrack to a moment in their day.”

Simply providing a soundtrack to your day might seem innocent enough, but it informs how Spotify’s algorithm works. Its goal isn’t to help you discover new music, its goal is simply to keep you listening for as long as possible. It serves up the safest songs possible to keep you from pressing stop.

The company even went so far as to partner with music library services and production companies under a program called Perfect Fit Content, or PFC. This saw the creation of fake or “ghost” artists that flooded Spotify with songs that were specifically designed to be pleasant and ignorable. It’s music as content, not art.

…Artists, especially new ones trying to break through, actually started changing how they composed to play better in the algorithmically driven streaming era. Songs got shorter, albums got longer, and intros went away. The hook got pushed to the front of the song to try to grab listeners’ attention immediately, and things like guitar solos all but disappeared from pop music. The palette of sounds artists pulled from got smaller, arrangements became more simplified, pop music flattened.

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Algorithmic choice was hard to escape even before Spotify (which absolutely needs people to be using it) and Apple Music (which sort of does). Radio stations were being programmed by algorithms for years: it began with FM radio in the US in the late 1970s. (Steely Dan got it right.)
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Why Solarpunk is already happening in Africa • Climate Drift

Skander Garroum:

»

What’s happening across Sub-Saharan Africa right now is the most ambitious infrastructure project in human history, except it’s not being built by governments or utilities or World Bank consortiums. It’s being built by startups selling solar panels to farmers on payment plans. And it’s working.

Over 30 million solar products sold in 2024. 400,000 new solar installations every month across Africa. 50% market share captured by companies that didn’t exist 15 years ago. Carbon credits subsidizing the cost. IoT chips in every device. 90%+ repayment rates on loans to people earning $2/day.

And if you understand what’s happening in Africa, you understand the template for how infrastructure will get built everywhere else for the next 50 years.

Today we are looking into:

• Why the grid will never come (and why that’s actually good news)
• How it takes three converging miracles (cheap hardware, zero-cost payments, and pay-as-you-go)
• Twi case studies on how it works on the ground
• Whether this template works beyond Africa (spoiler: it already is).

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It’s an entirely different place, different model from what we’re used to in the US and UK.
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A rollercoaster of emotions • De Programmatica Ipsum

Adrian Kosmaczewski:

»

ON November 1988, Byte Magazine published two separate editions; first, the standard monthly issue, focused on the newly introduced NeXT computer; and the “Fifth Annual Extra All-IBM Issue” focused on the IBM PC, both of which are thankfully available on the Internet Archive at the time of this writing. Both of these magazines feature the same expensive advertising on pages 2 to 5, showcasing products from a company called Borland.

The name “Borland” should not, a priori, ring a bell in any Millennial, let alone any Gen Z reading this article. But for a lot of software developers self-identifying as Gen X (like this author) or as Boomer, “Borland” immediately evokes memories of a time long gone; a company that could have been more, but which consciously decided to crash and burn.

And there is nobody to blame about this state of affairs other than Borland themselves. After rising to absolute stardom from 1982 to 1991, seemingly able to kick the mighty Microsoft from its own throne, a series of mishaps and bad decisions brought the company to its knees… and then to oblivion.

Markets are a bitch, and then you die.

It is not the role of this article to tell the story of Borland. There is plenty of material around, starting with a quite complete Wikipedia entry definitely worth checking out. (TL;DR: they were the kings of developer tools.)

Instead, we are going to focus on three major chapters of the Borland story, that can serve as a vantage point for other software businesses that would be interested in leaving hubris aside for a moment.

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Once upon a time Borland hoped it could rival Microsoft for the office software space. But those days are far, far away.
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Danish authorities in rush to close security loophole in Chinese electric buses • The Guardian

Miranda Bryant:

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Authorities in Denmark are urgently studying how to close an apparent security loophole in hundreds of Chinese-made electric buses that enables them to be remotely deactivated.

The investigation comes after transport authorities in Norway, where the Yutong buses are also in service, found that the Chinese supplier had remote access for software updates and diagnostics to the vehicles’ control systems – which could be exploited to affect buses while in transit.

Amid concerns over potential security risks, the Norwegian public transport authority Ruter decided to test two electric buses in an isolated environment.

Bernt Reitan Jenssen, Ruter’s chief executive, said: “The testing revealed risks that we are now taking measures against. National and local authorities have been informed and must assist with additional measures at a national level.”

Their investigations found that remote deactivation could be prevented by removing the buses’ sim cards, but they decided against this because it would also disconnect the bus from other systems.

Ruter said it planned to bring in stricter security requirements for future procurements. Jenssen said it must act before the arrival of the next generation of buses, which could be even “more integrated and harder to secure”.

Movia, Denmark’s largest public transport company, has 469 Chinese electric buses in operation – 262 of which were manufactured by Yutong.

Jeppe Gaard, Movia’s chief operating officer, said he was last week made aware that “electric buses – like electric cars – can be remotely deactivated if their software systems have web access”. He added: “This is not a Chinese bus problem. It is a problem for all types of vehicles and devices with Chinese electronics built in.”

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One suspects that a lot of this is just the usual shonky Chinese electronics; if it were discovered that the CCP ordered companies to build in backdoors, that would be one thing, but it’s indistinguishable from the laziness that pervaded US-made electronic hardware for years, where “admin/password” combinations were literally “admin/password”. (Thanks Gregory B for the pointer.)
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First Americans may have sailed from north-east Asia, new research suggests • The Art Newspaper

Garry Shaw:

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The first people to migrate to North America may have sailed from north-east Asia around 20,000 years ago. Experts have argued that prehistoric people in Hokkaido, Japan, used similar stone tools to those later found in North America, and suggest that seafarers may have travelled to the continent during the last ice age, bringing this stone technology with them. This adds weight to the theory that the first Americans arrived much earlier than previously thought.

“We can now explain not only that the first Americans came from north-east Asia, but also how they travelled, what they carried and what ideas they brought with them,” Loren Davis, a professor of anthropology at Oregon State University, said in a statement. “It’s a powerful reminder that migration, innovation and cultural sharing have always been part of what it means to be human.”

Archaeologists have long debated when the first humans arrived in North America. Previously, the main theory was that people travelled by foot, around 13,500 years ago, crossing a now-submerged land bridge from eastern Russia, and then moving south along an ice-free corridor between the massive ice sheets that covered Alaska and Canada.

But in recent decades, experts have uncovered increasing evidence for earlier migration. The most dramatic finds come from White Sands, New Mexico, where 61 human footprints preserved on the edge of a dried-up prehistoric lake have been dated to between 16,000 and 20,000 years ago. Not all scholars agree with this dating, however, and some remain unconvinced by the other evidence for earlier migration.

To look deeper into this problem, Davis and his colleagues studied stone tools—mainly sharp projectile points used for hunting—excavated at prehistoric sites across the United States, primarily in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Texas and Idaho. After studying the tools’ production methods and appearance—factors that can help experts differentiate between cultural groups and time periods—the team searched for similar examples from outside the Americas.

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They also used genetic data to make the link to Hokkaido; the paper was published in Science Advances.
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Genetically engineered babies are banned. Tech titans are trying to make one anyway • WSJ

Emily Glazer, Katherine Long and Amy Dockser Marcus:

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For months, a small company in San Francisco has been pursuing a secretive project: the birth of a genetically engineered baby. 

Backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and his husband, along with Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, the startup—called Preventive—has been quietly preparing what would amount to a biological first. They are working toward creating a child born from an embryo edited to prevent a hereditary disease. In recent months, executives at the company privately said a couple with a genetic disease had been identified who was interested in participating, according to people familiar with the conversations.

Gene-editing technologies now in use for treatment after birth allow scientists to cut, edit and insert DNA, but using the process in sperm, eggs or embryos is far more controversial and has prompted calls by scientists for a global moratorium until the ethical and scientific questions get resolved. Editing genes in embryos with the intention of creating babies from them is banned in the U.S. and many countries. 

Preventive has been searching for places to experiment where embryo editing is allowed, including the United Arab Emirates, according to correspondence reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. 

Many experts worry that the science is too unpredictable to be safe and could usher in a new era of human experimentation by private companies without public or government input or debate. Some also raise the specter of eugenics. 

There is only one known instance of children being born from edited embryos. In 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui shocked the world with news that he had produced three children genetically altered as embryos to be immune to HIV. He was sentenced to prison in China for three years for the illegal practice of medicine. He hasn’t publicly shared the children’s identities but says they are healthy. 

…They say their ultimate goal is to produce babies who are free of genetic disease and resilient against illnesses.

Some say they can also give parents the ability to choose embryos that will have higher IQs and preferred traits such as height and eye color.

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GATTACA wasn’t meant to be an instruction manual. Also: why do they always think they know better?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

An incredibly hubristic building project in Saudi Arabia has had to face reality. CC-licensed photo by Prachatai on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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:

»

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:

»

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:

»

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:

»

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:

»

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:

»

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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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The monk Gregor Mendel didn’t just work on inheritance; he also recorded weather. But much of his work is lost. CC-licensed photo by Russell McNeil on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

The age of anti-social media is here • The Atlantic

Damon Beres:

»

Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, X, Reddit—all have aggressively put AI chatbots in front of users. On the podcast, Zuckerberg said that AI probably won’t “replace in-person connections or real-life connections”—at least not right away. Yet he also spoke of the potential for AI therapists and girlfriends to be embodied in virtual space; of Meta’s desire—he couldn’t seem to help himself from saying—to produce “always-on videochat” with an AI that looks, gestures, smiles, and sounds like a real person.

Meta is working to make that desire a reality. And it is hardly leading the charge: Many companies are doing the same, and many people already use AI for companionship, sexual gratification, mental-health care.

What Zuckerberg described—what is now unfolding—is the beginning of a new digital era, more actively anti-social than the last. Generative AI will automate a large number of jobs, removing people from the workplace. But it will almost certainly sap humanity from the social sphere as well. Over years of use—and product upgrades—many of us may simply slip into relationships with bots that we first used as helpers or entertainment, just as we were lulled into submission by algorithmic feeds and the glow of the smartphone screen. This seems likely to change our society at least as much as the social media era has.

…According to Zuckerberg, one of the main things people use Meta AI for today is advice about difficult conversations with bosses or loved ones—what to say, what responses to anticipate. Recently, MIT Technology Review reported on therapists who are taking things further, surreptitiously feeding their dialogue with their patients into ChatGPT during therapy sessions for ideas on how to reply.

The former activity can be useful; the latter is a clear betrayal. Yet the line between them is a little less distinct than it first appears. Among other things, bots may lead some people to outsource their efforts to truly understand others, in a way that may ultimately degrade them—to say nothing of the communities they inhabit.

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(Gift link.)
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Internet Archive’s legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost • Ars Technica

Ashely Belanger:

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Last month, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine archived its trillionth webpage, and the nonprofit invited its more than 1,200 library partners and 800,000 daily users to join a celebration of the moment. To honor “three decades of safeguarding the world’s online heritage,” the city of San Francisco declared October 22 to be “Internet Archive Day.” The Archive was also recently designated a federal depository library by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who proclaimed the organization a “perfect fit” to expand “access to federal government publications amid an increasingly digital landscape.”

The Internet Archive might sound like a thriving organization, but it only recently emerged from years of bruising copyright battles that threatened to bankrupt the beloved library project. In the end, the fight led to more than 500,000 books being removed from the Archive’s “Open Library.”

“We survived,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Ars. “But it wiped out the Library.”

An Internet Archive spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the archive currently faces no major lawsuits and no active threats to its collections. Kahle thinks “the world became stupider” when the Open Library was gutted—but he’s moving forward with new ideas.

Kahle has been striving since 1996 to transform the Internet Archive into a digital Library of Alexandria—but “with a better fire protection plan,” joked Kyle Courtney, a copyright lawyer and librarian who leads the nonprofit eBook Study Group, which helps states update laws to protect libraries.

When the Wayback Machine was born in 2001 as a way to take snapshots of the web, Kahle told The New York Times that building free archives was “worth it.” He was also excited that the Wayback Machine had drawn renewed media attention to libraries.

At the time, law professor Lawrence Lessig predicted that the Internet Archive would face copyright battles, but he also believed that the Wayback Machine would change the way the public understood copyright fights.

”We finally have a clear and tangible example of what’s at stake,” Lessig told the Times.

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Return of Chinese astronauts delayed after spacecraft struck by debris • The Guardian

Helen Davidson:

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The return to Earth of three Chinese astronauts has been delayed until an unspecified date after their spacecraft was apparently struck by a small piece of debris, according to Chinese state media.

The three astronauts from the Shenzhou-20 mission flew to the Tiangong space station in April, and were expected to return on Wednesday at the end of a six month mission. Their replacements, the crew of Shenzhou-21, had already arrived on the weekend.

“The Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft is suspected to have been struck by a small piece of orbital debris, and assessment of the impact and associated risks is currently under way,” said the China Manned Space Agency in a statement.

“To ensure the health and safety of the astronauts and the successful completion of the mission, it has been decided that the originally planned return of Shenzhou-20 on November 5 will be postponed.”

Authorities didn’t say when the incident is believed to have occurred. There was no indication of any issues earlier this week, with state media reporting on the two crews enjoying a meal of baked chicken cooked on the space station’s first ever oven, delivered by the Shenzhou-21 team. On Tuesday the two teams were reported to have conducted a handover ceremony, with videos posted to social media.

A popular aerospace and science communicator, Yu Jun, who posts under the name Steed’s Scarf, said if the assessments determine it’s too high risk for the spacecraft to return, authorities would activate a “plan B”, potentially the deployment of a waiting backup ship on Earth.

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Obviously, not good; that debris is causing problems like this creates bigger problems in turn: how do you make the spacecraft safe for re-entry? When are you sure it is safe? What do you do with the damaged one if you’re using a different one?
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The makers of TurboTax gave Trump’s inauguration $1m. They just got their money’s worth • MSNBC via Yahoo

Helaine Owen:

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One month before the start of Donald Trump’s second term, Intuit, the parent company of TurboTax, announced a $1m contribution to his inauguration committee. At the time, the company told Politico the donation was “part of our decades-long commitment to bipartisan advocacy.”

But that long-time “bipartisan advocacy” was done with a goal in mind. As Politico reported: “Intuit has numerous interests in Washington that would incentive it to gain favor with the incoming Trump administration. It has spent more than two decades lobbying against the IRS making it easier to file people’s taxes online.”

On Wednesday, the White House granted Intuit’s wish. The Associated Press reports that the Trump administration “plans to eliminate the IRS’ Direct File program,” the government initiative that allowed some taxpayers with simple returns to file with the Internal Revenue Service for free.

The industry’s gain is a major loss for American taxpayers. The 2025 edition of the National Retail Federation’s annual tax return survey found that almost 40% of US adults will prepare our taxes ourselves using computer software — nearly double the next most popular method of filing. Intuit, along with H&R Block, monopolizes the market for that software. And it’s a lucrative market: “Americans spend an estimated 1.7 billion hours and $31bn doing their taxes each year,” ProPublica reported in 2019.

Supporters of Direct File hold up the program as a powerful demonstration of how government can help people and save them both time and money on an annual chore almost all of us despise and stress over (to the point that fatal car accidents actually increase on April 15 compared to other days).

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It’s so craven. The government has a system that works, and which nobody has objected to (apart from Intuit). But it’s more important to uphold the corrupt system that encourages companies to pay politicians off so they can get elected.
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Gregor Mendel’s vanishing act • Asimov Press

Niko McCarty:

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On a winter’s day in 1884, a group of Augustinian friars gathered around a fire and tossed papers into its hungry flames. Thousands of pages withered and burned, each containing hand-written text, charts, and data from a lifetime of work. By the time the smoke dissipated into an azure sky, it had all vanished.

The papers eaten by those flames belonged to Gregor Mendel, a quiet scientist and religious man today revered as the “father” of genetics. Mendel published 14 scientific papers during his lifetime — mostly on meteorology [six] and insect pests — but left behind thousands of pages detailing additional experiments, which may have amounted to a dozen or more manuscripts. We’ll never know for sure, because most of those pages were destroyed after his death. Few details survive about this event; the only source is a second-hand account recorded decades after the fact by Mendel’s first biographer, Hugo Iltis.

This is a shame, for today much of Mendel’s work has been pigeon-holed. He has been reduced to the discoverer of a single thing — namely, the laws of inheritance. In school, students are taught about Punnett squares3 and asked to make simplistic crosses with lowercase and uppercase letters, like “aa” or “Aa.” They learn that Mendel bred peas, and little more. But the truth of this man is much deeper: Mendel was a genius of the highest order, who made important discoveries in a wide range of scientific fields.

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Though Mendel is taught in schools, his paradigm-breaking work is still seriously underrated for how much it went against the grain at the time.
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Tahoe’s terrible icons • One Foot Tsunami

Paul Kafasis:

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On the new MacOS 26 (Tahoe), Apple has mandated that all application icons fit into their prescribed squircle. No longer can icons have distinct shapes, nor even any fun frame-breaking accessories. Should an icon be so foolish as to try to have a bit of personality, it will find itself stuffed into a dingy gray icon jail.

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This is a visual post, so you have to see the before and after. It’s amazing how the icons on Mac OSX (as was) have gradually lost detail: Safari used to be a fully fledged compass (it’s for finding your way around the web, geddit?), and now it’s a rather blurry blue circle with a red/white arrow. You can see the history at Guis.org.
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“So much more menacing”: Formula E’s new Gen4 car breaks cover • Ars Technica

Jonathan Gitlin:

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When season 13 picks up in late 2026, we might see a pretty different kind of Formula E [electric] racing.

“It feels like a real moment for us,” said Dodds. The new car will generate 603 hp in race mode, a 50% jump compared to the Gen3 Evo. That goes up to 804 hp (600 kW) in attack mode. For context, next year’s F1 cars will generate more power, but only when their batteries are fully charged; if the battery is depleted, that leaves just a 536 hp (400 kW) V6.

Acceleration should be extremely violent thanks to permanent AWD—the first for any single seater in FIA competition, at least for the last few decades. Top speed will be close to double that of the original race car, topping out at 210 mph (337 km/h). Now you can see why the sport decided that aerodynamic grip would be a useful addition.

In fact, there will be two different bodywork configurations, one for high downforce and the other with less. But that doesn’t mean Formula E teams will run out and build wind tunnels, like their F1 counterparts. “There’s significant gains that can be made out of software improvements, efficiency improvements, powertrain developments,” said Dodds, so there’s no incentive to spend lots of money on aero development that would only add fractions of a second.

The biggest opportunity for finding performance improvements may be with traction control and antilock braking systems. Formula E wants its technology to be road-relevant, so such driver aids will be unlimited in the Gen4 era. But efficiency will remain of utmost importance; the cars will still have to regenerate 40% of the energy they need to finish the race, as the 55 kWh battery is not sufficient to go flat-out to the end. Happily for the drivers, the new car can regen up to 700 kW of energy under braking.

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The link about next year’s F1 cars is remarkable: the rear wheels have electric power. They’re becoming hybrids. Will there come a point when Formula 1 and Formula E merge, or overlap?
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AI firm wins high court ruling after photo agency’s copyright claim • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

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A London-based artificial intelligence firm has won a landmark high court case examining the legality of AI models using vast troves of copyrighted data without permission.

Stability AI, whose directors include the Oscar-winning film-maker behind Avatar, James Cameron, successfully resisted a claim from Getty Images that it had infringed the international photo agency’s copyright.

The ruling is seen as a blow to copyright owners’ exclusive right to reap the rewards of their work, with one senior lawyer, Rebecca Newman, a legal director at Addleshaw Goddard, warning it means “the UK’s secondary copyright regime is not strong enough to protect its creators”.

There was evidence that Getty’s images were used to train Stability’s model, which allows users to generate images with text prompts. Stability was also found to have infringed Getty’s trademarks in some cases.

The judge, Mrs Justice Joanna Smith, said the question of where to strike the balance between the interests of the creative industries on one side and the AI industry on the other was “of very real societal importance”. But she was only able to rule on relatively narrow claims after Getty had to withdraw parts of its case during the trial this summer.

Getty Images sued Stability AI for infringement of its intellectual property, alleging the AI company was “completely indifferent to what they fed into the training data” and scraped and copied millions of its images.

The judgment comes amid a row over how the Labour government should legislate on the issue of copyright and AI, with artists and authors including Elton John, Kate Bush, Dua Lipa and Kazuo Ishiguro lobbying for protection. Meanwhile, tech companies are calling for wide access to copyrighted content to allow them to build the most powerful and effective generative AI systems.

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This is the judgment (after all these years, people still don’t link to judgments?). Getty’s complaint seems to have revolved partly around the fact that some generated images would include a generated “Getty” watermark. (See paras 152 onwards of the judgment.)
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The case that AI is thinking • The New Yorker

James Somers is a programmer:

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On a brutally hot day this summer, my friend Max met up with his family at a playground. For some reason, a sprinkler for kids was switched off, and Max’s wife had promised everyone that her husband would fix it. Confronted by red-faced six- and seven-year-olds, Max entered a utility shed hoping to find a big, fat “On” switch. Instead, he found a maze of ancient pipes and valves.

He was about to give up when, on a whim, he pulled out his phone and fed a photo into ChatGPT-4o, along with a description of his problem. The A.I. thought for a second, or maybe didn’t think, but all the same it said that he was looking at a backflow-preventer system typical of irrigation setups. Did he see that yellow ball valve toward the bottom? That probably controlled the flow. Max went for it, and cheers rang out across the playground as the water turned on.

Was ChatGPT mindlessly stringing words together, or did it understand the problem? The answer could teach us something important about understanding itself. “Neuroscientists have to confront this humbling truth,” Doris Tsao, a neuroscience professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told me. “The advances in machine learning have taught us more about the essence of intelligence than anything that neuroscience has discovered in the past hundred years.”

Tsao is best known for decoding how macaque monkeys perceive faces. Her team learned to predict which neurons would fire when a monkey saw a specific face; even more strikingly, given a pattern of neurons firing, Tsao’s team could render the face. Their work built on research into how faces are represented inside A.I. models. These days, her favorite question to ask people is “What is the deepest insight you have gained from ChatGPT?” “My own answer,” she said, “is that I think it radically demystifies thinking.”

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It would be a horrible downgrade if we discovered that thinking isn’t such a sophisticated thing to be able to do after all. Like discovering we’re not at the centre of the solar system, or even universe. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Folding towels is a skill that humans find easy, but robots need to learn it. Guess who gets to teach them? CC-licensed photo by arbyreed on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

Inside the race to train AI robots how to act human in the real world • Los Angeles Times

Nilesh Christopher:

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Now that artificial intelligence has mastered almost everything we do online, it needs help learning how we physically move around in the real world.

A growing global army of trainers is helping it escape our computers and enter our living rooms, offices and factories by teaching it how we move.

In an industrial town in southern India, Naveen Kumar, 28, stands at his desk and starts his job for the day: folding hand towels hundreds of times, as precisely as possible.

He doesn’t work at a hotel; he works for a startup that creates physical data used to train AI. He mounts a GoPro camera to his forehead and follows a regimented list of hand movements to capture exact point-of-view footage of how a human folds.

That day, he had to pick up each towel from a basket on the right side of his desk, using only his right hand, shake the towel straight using both hands, then fold it neatly three times. Then he had to put each folded towel in the left corner of the desk. If it takes more than a minute or he misses any steps, he has to start over.

His firm, a data labeling company called Objectways, sent 200 towel-folding videos to its client in the United States. The company has more than 2,000 employees; about half of them label sensor data from autonomous cars and robotics, and the rest work on generative AI. Most of them are engineers, and few are well-practiced in folding towels, so they take turns doing the physical labor.

“Sometimes we have to delete nearly 150 or 200 videos because of silly errors in how we’re folding or placing items,” said Kumar, an engineering graduate who has worked at Objectways for six years.

The carefully choreographed movements are to capture all the nuances of what humans do — arm reaching, fingers gripping, fabric sliding — to fold clothes. The captured videos are then annotated by Kumar and his team. They draw boxes around the different parts of the video, tag the towels, and label whether the arm moved left or right, and classify each gesture.

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A recent episode of ATP discussed how computer programming is about spotting pitfalls, using the example of the schoolteacher who asks the class to instruct them, step by step but assuming no intuition, to make a peanut butter and jelly (jam, yes? Ugh) sandwich. It’s much harder than it seems. And so with folding towels, which we do almost reflexively once we’ve done it a couple of times.

Robots have so much to learn about the world. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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“I Deliver Parcels in Beijing” book author Hu Anyan on Chinese e-commerce, AI, and American readers • Rest of World

Viola Zhou:

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Hu Anyan has held 19 jobs in six cities across China — selling bicycles, running a clothing store, working in a bakery, making 3D architectural renderings, doing night shifts at a logistics warehouse, and eventually delivering packages. 

Hu, 46, wrote about these experiences in a memoir-style book, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing. An avid reader, Hu documents his encounters with abusive managers, irate customers, and sprawling residential complexes in casual language, and with colorful details and a touch of humor.

When published in 2023, Hu’s book became a bestseller in China. Readers lapped up anecdotes of the lives of some of the millions of couriers powering the country’s ultra-efficient e-commerce industry, which treats individual laborers as dispensable. Many also related to Hu’s experience with economic uncertainty, dwindling social mobility, unemployment, and unfulfilling work.

Ahead of the launch of the English-language translation of the book by Jack Hargreaves, Hu spoke to Rest of World about his literary journey, his views on whether couriers will be replaced by automation, and what he hopes Americans will learn from the book. 

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It’s a fun interview, if not particularly long.
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Apple prepares to sell low-cost laptops for first time • Bloomberg via Financial Post

Mark Gurman:

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Apple Inc. is preparing to enter the low-cost laptop market for the first time, developing a budget Mac aimed at luring away customers from Chromebooks and entry-level Windows PCs.

The new device — designed for students, businesses and casual users — will target people who primarily browse the web, work on documents or conduct light media editing, according to people familiar with the matter. Apple is also targeting would-be iPad buyers who might prefer a traditional laptop experience instead.

Code-named J700, the machine is currently in active testing at Apple and in early production with overseas suppliers. The Cupertino, California-based company plans to launch it in the first half of next year, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the product hasn’t been announced.

An Apple spokesperson declined to comment.

The move would represent a strategic shift for Apple, which has historically focused on premium devices with hefty profit margins. The company also has vowed not to chase market share with lower-end offerings.

But Apple is facing a growing threat from Chromebooks, the low-cost laptops that run Google’s operating system, Chrome OS. There’s also a potential opportunity to entice Windows customers. Microsoft Corp.’s shift to Windows 11 has rankled some users of the previous-generation software and left them without security updates.

Shares of personal computer maker HP Inc. briefly dipped to a session low on the news. The stock and that of fellow PC maker Dell Technologies Inc. were both down about two% as of 12:03 p.m. in New York. Apple gained less than one% to US$270.25.

Apple plans to sell the new machine for well under US$1,000 by using less-advanced components. The laptop will rely on an iPhone processor and a lower-end LCD display. The screen will also be the smallest of any current Mac, coming in at slightly below the 13.6in one used in the MacBook Air.

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If Apple is looking to take significant share from Chromebooks, it’s years late – Google has taken huge chunks of the education market by not only having a simple user login but also the cloud system behind it. There’s always a market for cheaper laptops, of course.
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A YouTube education • Cultural Capital

James Marriott:

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YouTube is now second only to the BBC as the most popular broadcaster in the UK.

I often write disparagingly about the modern internet’s inexorable slide towards video but I also have to (grudgingly) concede that I have learned an awful lot on YouTube over the years.

In my teens it helped introduce me to poetry, philosophy music and art. I thought I would make a list of videos which form a kind of curriculum in the humanities (and a tiny bit in the sciences).

This list is partial and biased towards my own interests. I’m sure I’ve missed many things (I’m not into animal documentaries but there must be one of those good David Attenborough-style things with baboons etc somewhere) so please send me your favourite educational YouTube videos in the comments.

Here is a YouTube education. Or my version of one.

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Marriott goes on to list multiple series which will educate and inform you – Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, Ways of Seeing by John Berger, Dawkins and Pinker on evolution, language and the brain, and so on.

Except.. you can find those on the BBC iPlayer. Which, OK, isn’t available outside the UK, but Marriott’s article seems to imply that this is “YouTube as a replacement for what the BBC doesn’t offer”. The BBC does! Or, alternatively, it’s for people who don’t have TV licences. Which then raises the question of how long that makes sense: if YouTube is effectively taking revenue from the BBC (those lost licence fees; I doubt the income from people watching Civilisation makes up for it).
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Chicago firm that resolves ransomware attacks had rogue workers carrying out their own hacks, FBI says • Chicago Sun-Times

Tom Schuba:

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Rogue employees of a Chicago company that specializes in negotiating ransoms to mitigate cyber attacks were carrying out their own piracy in a plot to extort millions of dollars from a series of companies, prosecutors say.

Kevin Tyler Martin, a ransomware threat negotiator for River North-based DigitalMint at the time of the alleged conspiracy, was among two men indicted in the scheme. A suspected accomplice who wasn’t indicted was also employed at DigitalMint, court records show.

DigitalMint has denied any wrongdoing, fired both employees and cooperated with the investigation.

Also indicted was Ryan Clifford Goldberg, an incident response manager for the multinational company Sygnia Cybersecurity Services. Sygnia said Goldberg no longer works for the company and it “is not the target of this investigation, however we continue to work closely with law enforcement.”

According to an affidavit filed in September by an FBI agent, the three men began using malicious software in May 2023 “to conduct ransomware attacks against victims,” first hitting a medical company in Florida by locking its servers and demanding $10m to unlock the systems, court records say .

The FBI agent noted the men ultimately made off with $1.2m, although it was apparently the only successful attack.

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Struggling to find a description here. Playing both ends against the middle? Man-in-the-middle attack? But it’s an amazing piece of exploitation.
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Inside NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain Combat Center, c.1966 • Flashbak

Paul Sorene:

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In 1966, the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) Cheyenne Mountain underground facility became America’s command and control centre for when the Cold War turned white and the nuclear apocalypse became real.

We can take a look around the bunker in pictures published in a 1966 official NORAD report by David W. Shircliffe, Directorate of Command History, Command Public Affairs Office, and the 1970s book NORAD Command Post: The City Inside Cheyenne Mountain by Henry W. Hough.

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Dr Strangelove is just out of picture in the one with Nixon. I observe that seniority and rank are still expressed through the quality of chairs at monitoring desks.
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Bending Spoons cofounders become billionaires after Italian startup raises at $11bn valuation • Forbes

Iain Martin:

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Luca Ferrari bought his first app back in 2014 for just $10,000 with the hope that he and his three cofounders in Milan-based startup Bending Spoons could turn it around. A decade later, Ferrari has become one of tech’s biggest dealmakers, and a new billionaire, after a new funding round valued his startup at more than $11bn.

Forbes estimates that Ferrari’s stake in the startup, which is named after a scene from the Matrix movie, is worth $1.4bn, while his cofounders Matteo Danieli, Luca Querella and Francesco Patarnello each hold a $1.3bn stake based on shareholder data published by the Italian Business Register.

The valuation comes from Bending Spoon’s fresh funding round of $270m from investors including T. Rowe Price and existing investors Baillie Gifford, Cox Enterprises, Durable Capital Partners and Fidelity. There was also a $440m secondary share sale by existing shareholders in the company. It’s unclear whether any of the cofounders sold stock in the secondary transaction.

…“Our strategy is very clear and sharp but it doesn’t include any bias to any particular segment,’ says Ferrari.

That strategy involves Bending Spoons using debt to snap up apps, products and websites with healthy revenue but where growth has often stalled. In some deals, like Evernote, it seems to have followed a private equity playbook of cutting staff, and hiking prices, but Bending Spoons says it has also invested heavily to overhaul and expand other apps it has acquired, like Meetup.

Bending Spoons, which was largely self-funded until 2021, has drawn comparison to a buyout fund, and Canadian software consolidator Constellation ($52.2bn market cap), but neither label fits, said early investor Peter Singlehurst of British fund manager Baillie Gifford. “They own and operate digital applications and are great at growing them very profitably because of the level of talent in the organization,” Singlehurst told Forbes.

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1) Bending spoons… so nothing to do with Uri Geller?
2) I still don’t get what BSpoons’s business model is to have such a gigantic valuation. OK, so they own AOL now, but they got that in a fire sale because, well, there was essentially no further value in it to a giant media company. But these guys will make it into a rocket?
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Metaphors for biology: sizes • Asimov Magazine

Sam Clamons:

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Biology can be hard to intuit, in part because it operates across vastly different scales, from single atoms all the way up to entire ecosystems. Students of biology therefore often first meet its agents and mechanisms through metaphors: molecules are charged balls connected by sticks! evolution designs organisms to maximize their fitness! mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell! While metaphors give us qualitative handles to grasp, they often oversimplify complex ideas.

This is because most metaphors fail to address specifics — especially regarding numbers. Consider another common bio-metaphor: DNA is the blueprint of the cell. That’s useful for conceptual understanding, but how big is this blueprint? Is it as big as a novel or an encyclopedia? How much space does it take up? It’s possible to look up or calculate the answers to these questions; the human genome is 6.2 billion base pairs, which takes up about 10 cubic microns. But how big is that compared to the total volume of a cell? Is it most of it or just a tiny fraction?

To answer questions like these, you need more quantitative metaphors. Whereas a standard metaphor says that mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell, a quantitative metaphor says how big a battery a mitochondrion would be, say, if a cell were a toaster. If qualitative metaphors are like containers, then quantitative metaphors are closer to yardsticks.

And these yardsticks are exceptionally useful down at the scales where biology operates. We all know cells are small. But so are proteins, nucleic acids, and water molecules. We often think of everything “small” as equally small, but that is not the case. Proteins are titanic, hulking machines compared to water molecules, and the mRNA that encodes a protein is orders of magnitude larger still!

To make the sizes and shapes of various biomolecules concrete, let’s imagine that each water molecule within a cell has been blown up to the size of a grain of sand. If this were the case, then…

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The scale is still hard to grasp even with this sort of scale offered.
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1979: Alpha particule-induced soft errors in dynamic memories

Timothy May and Murray Woods in 1979:

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A new physical soft error mechanism in dynamic RAM and CCDs is the upset of stored data by the passage of alpha particles through the memory array area.

The alpha particles are emitted by the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium which are present in parts- per-rnillion levels in packaging materials.

When an alpha particle penetrates the die surface, it can create enough electron-hole pairs near a storage node to cause a random, single-bit error. Results of experiments and measurements of alpha activity of materials are reported and a physical model for the soft error is developed. Implications for the future of dynamic memories are also discussed.

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This is how Intel and the rest of the semiconductor industry discovered “bit flipping”: they were using water from wells which were themselves polluted with uranium and thorium (sometimes from nuclear testing) to make the packaging for the chips. This paper figured out how much energy the alpha particles needed to flip bits, and so how much refining of their sources was needed. (Turned out it was 100-1000 times better than they had going.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You might have noticed that there are fewer buses in squares and traffic lights in squares. Where are all the Captchas? CC-licensed photo by Becky Stern on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Not a robot. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

The curious case of the bizarre, disappearing Captcha • WIRED

Reece Rogers:

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As I browse the web in 2025, I rarely encounter captchas anymore. There’s no slanted text to discern. No image grid of stoplights to identify.

And on the rare occasion that I am asked to complete some bot-deterring task, the experience almost always feels surreal. A colleague shared recent tests where they were presented with images of dogs and ducks wearing hats, from bowler caps to French berets. The security questions ignored the animal’s hats, rudely, asking them to select the photos that showed animals with four legs.

Other puzzles are hyper-specific to their audience. For example, the captcha for Sniffies, a gay hookup site, has users slide a jockstrap across their smartphone screen to find the matching pair of underwear.

So, where have all the captchas gone? And why are the few existing challenges so damn weird? I spoke with cybersecurity experts to better understand the current state of these vanishing challenges and why the future will probably look even more peculiar.

“When the captcha was first invented, the idea was that this was literally a task a computer could not do,” says Reid Tatoris, who leads Cloudflare’s application security detection team. The term captcha—Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart—was coined by researchers in 2003 and presented as a way to protect websites from malicious, nonhuman users.

…in 2022, Cloudflare dropped Turnstile, another reCaptcha alternative. It was an additional major move away from human-completed tests and toward pattern-based usage analysis. Similar to the standard version of reCaptcha, Turnstile can be added to websites for free. You might not remember the name, but you’ve likely encountered one of these Turnstile challenges before. It’s the random-seeming request to click on a box to prove you’re human.

On the user end, Turnstile appears sometimes as a basic checkbox, but it’s more complicated than that. “Clicking the button doesn’t at all mean you pass,” says Tatoris. “That is a way for us to gather more information from the client, from the device, from the software to figure out what’s going on.” After gathering data, then a decision is made about whether the user is allowed to access the site.

Leading companies have a clear reason for the gratis implementation of their security software. “Cloudflare gives Turnstile away for free to the whole internet because we want more training data,” says Tatoris. “We see 20% of all HTTP requests across the internet. So, getting that massive training data set helps us know what a human looks like on the page versus what a bot does.”

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DeFi protocol Balancer hit by multimillion-dollar exploit • CoinTelegraph

Zoltan Vardai:

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The decentralized exchange (DEX) and automated market maker (AMM) Balancer has been exploited, with more than $116m worth of digital assets transferred to a newly created wallet.

“We’re aware of a potential exploit impacting Balancer v2 pools. Our engineering and security teams are investigating with high priority,” the Balancer team said in a Monday X post, adding that it will share more updates as information becomes available.

Onchain data initially showed that the decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol was exploited for $70.9m worth of liquid staked Ether tokens transferred to a fresh wallet across three transactions, according to Etherscan logs. The transfers included 6,850 StakeWise Staked ETH (OSETH), 6,590 Wrapped Ether (WETH) and 4,260 Lido wstETH (wSTETH), crypto intelligence platform Nansen said in a Monday X post.

By 8:52 am UTC on Monday, the ongoing exploit has swelled to over $116.6m in stolen funds, according to blockchain data platform Lookonchain.

The Balancer exploit may stem from smart contract issues that had a “faulty access check allowing the attacker to send a command to withdraw funds,” Nicolai Sondergaard, research analyst at Nansen, told Cointelegraph. “From what I see, losses are now greater than $100 million and have affected Balancer v2 + various forks.”

Aiming to recover the funds, the team behind Balancer offered a white hat bounty of up to 20% of the stolen funds if the full amount, minus the reward, is returned immediately. If the funds are not returned within the next 48 hours, Balancer stated that it will continue to cooperate with blockchain forensics specialists and law enforcement agencies to identify the perpetrator.

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I had to read through a ton of other writeups of this hack before finding this one, which at least gives a vague idea of what has happened. What it doesn’t make clear is that this is money (even Monopoly money) which belongs to people who are now substantially out of pocket. “DeFi” – decentralised finance – is still somewhere in the 18th century as far as the trustworthiness of its “banks” goes.
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Tesla sued over claim faulty doors led to deaths in fiery crash • Bloomberg via NDTV

Emily Chang:

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Tesla is being sued over a crash in Wisconsin last November that killed all five occupants of a Model S who allegedly became trapped in a fast-moving inferno when the doors wouldn’t open, adding to scrutiny over whether a design choice by the automaker is a fatal flaw.

The suit was filed on behalf of a couple who died when the four-door sedan hit a tree and caught on fire. Jeffrey Bauer, 54, and Michelle Bauer, 55, survived the initial impact, but were unable to escape because the doors locked them inside, according to the complaint brought by their children in state court.

A nearby homeowner who called 911 said she could hear people screaming from within the vehicle, according to the lawsuit. A report by the local sheriff’s office said a cluster of bodies in the front seat suggested there may have been a struggle to escape.

“Tesla’s design choices created a highly foreseeable risk: that occupants who survived a crash would remain trapped inside a burning vehicle,” lawyers for the children said in the complaint. The lawsuit accuses Tesla of negligence, arguing that Elon Musk’s electric vehicle maker was aware of the dangers of its door handle designs and the risk of post-collision fire hazards from the EV’s lithium-ion battery pack but did nothing to address either issue.
Tesla didn’t immediately return a request for comment. The suit was filed on Friday in state court in Wisconsin.

Tesla’s door handles have drawn increased attention after a Bloomberg News investigation uncovered a series of incidents in which people were seriously injured or died after they were unable to open doors following a loss of power, particularly after crashes. The Wisconsin crash was one of several such incidents reviewed as part of the investigation. The company is also being sued over the deaths of three college students who allegedly were trapped inside a burning Tesla that crashed last November in a San Francisco suburb.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the US auto safety regulator, disclosed in September that it’s investigating whether some Tesla doors are defective, citing incidents in which exterior handles stopped working and trapped children and other occupants inside. Franz von Holzhausen, Tesla’s design chief, told Bloomberg that the company is working on a redesign of its door handles to make them more intuitive for occupants “in a panic situation.”

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Bad design really does kill.
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Ukrainian computer game-style drone attack system goes ‘viral’ • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

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A computer game-style drone attack system has gone “viral” among Ukrainian military units and is being extended to reconnaissance, artillery and logistics operations, the nation’s first deputy prime minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, has told the Guardian.

Drone teams competing for points under the “Army of Drones Bonus System” killed or wounded 18,000 Russian soldiers in September, with 400 drone units now taking part in the competition, up from 95 in August, Ukrainian officials said.

The system, which launched more than a year ago, rewards soldiers who achieve strikes with points that can be exchanged to buy more weapons in an “Amazon-for-war” online store called Brave1 filled with more than 100 different drones, autonomous vehicles and other drone war material. It has a leaderboard topped by teams with names such as Achilles and Phoenix.

“It’s become truly popular among units,” said Fedorov, of the system, which is a prime example of the increasing automation of warfare. “All the defence forces know about this and there’s competition for the points, for getting these drones, electronic warfare systems and other things to help them in warfighting. The more infantry you kill, the more drones you get to kill more infantry. This is becoming kind of a self-reinforcing cycle.”

The number of Russian casualties in September is double the number from last October, in part because the Kyiv government doubled the rewards for killing Russian infantry from six to 12 points, reflecting changing battlefield priorities.

Ukrainian intelligence suggests Russia may be developing its own gamified system to compete, he said.

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The arms race takes a weird turn.
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How AGI became the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time • MIT Technology Review

Will Douglas Heaven:

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Every age has its believers, people with an unshakeable faith that something huge is about to happen—a before and an after that they are privileged (or doomed) to live through.  

For us, that’s the promised advent of AGI [artificial general intelligence]. People are used to hearing that this or that is the next big thing, says Shannon Vallor, who studies the ethics of technology at the University of Edinburgh. “It used to be the computer age and then it was the internet age and now it’s the AI age,” she says. “It’s normal to have something presented to you and be told that this thing is the future. What’s different, of course, is that in contrast to computers and the internet, AGI doesn’t exist.”

And that’s why feeling the AGI [as felt at OpenAI meetings] is not the same as boosting the next big thing. There’s something weirder going on. Here’s what I think: AGI is a lot like a conspiracy theory, and it may be the most consequential one of our time.

I have been reporting on artificial intelligence for more than a decade, and I’ve watched the idea of AGI bubble up from the backwaters to become the dominant narrative shaping an entire industry. A onetime pipe dream now props up the profit lines of some of the world’s most valuable companies and thus, you could argue, the US stock market. It justifies dizzying down payments on the new power plants and data centers that we’re told are needed to make the dream come true. Fixated on this hypothetical technology, AI firms are selling us hard. 

Just listen to what the heads of some of those companies are telling us. AGI will be as smart as an entire “country of geniuses” (Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic); it will kick-start “an era of maximum human flourishing, where we travel to the stars and colonize the galaxy” (Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind); it will “massively increase abundance and prosperity,” even encourage people to enjoy life more and have more children (Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI). That’s some product.

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Try this Kool-Aid, it’s delicious!
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Meet the real screen addicts: the elderly • The Economist

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Hundreds of teenagers, sometimes strong-armed by their parents, have trooped through the doors of Britain’s National Centre for Gaming Disorders since it opened in 2019. Yet lately the publicly funded clinic has admitted a steady trickle of rather different patients. Its specialists in video-game addiction have so far treated 67 people over the age of 40. The oldest, with an obsession for games on her smartphone, was 72.

…As today’s 60-somethings, already familiar with digital technology, enter retirement, time spent on smart devices is shooting up among the elderly. Some older adults “are increasingly living their lives through their phones, the way teenagers or adolescents sometimes do”, says Ipsit Vahia, head of the Technology and Ageing Laboratory at McLean Hospital, part of Harvard Medical School. The digital habits that have transformed the teenage years are now coming to old age.

…Older people have traditionally lagged behind when it comes to digital technology. A decade ago only a fifth of Americans over 65 owned a smartphone. That is changing. The newly retired, most of whom have been online since middle age, are among the most enthusiastic adopters of digital gadgets. Over-65s are more likely than under-25s to own tablets, smart TVs, e-readers, and desktop and laptop computers, according to a seven-country survey by GWI, a research firm.

Tech companies have identified oldies as a growing market. Apple makes earphones that double as hearing aids and watches that can carry out electrocardiograms or call an ambulance if the wearer falls. (Partly as a result of this, 17% of over-65s now own a smartwatch.)

The next generation of pensioners looks as if it will be even keener on digital gadgets: nearly a fifth of 55- to 64-year-olds own a games console. Retirement is starting to look a lot less about golf and more about “Grand Theft Auto”.

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Real humans don’t stream Drake songs 23 hours a day, rapper suing Spotify says • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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Spotify profits off fake Drake streams that rob other artists of perhaps hundreds of millions in revenue shares, a lawsuit filed Sunday alleged—hoping to force Spotify to reimburse every artist impacted.

The lawsuit was filed by an American rapper known as RBX, who may be best known for cameos on two of the 1990s’ biggest hip-hop records, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic and Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle.

The problem goes beyond Drake, RBX alleged. It claims Spotify ignores “billions of fraudulent streams” each month, selfishly benefiting from bot networks that artificially inflate user numbers to help Spotify attract significantly higher ad revenue.

Drake’s account is a prime example of the kinds of fake streams Spotify is inclined to overlook, RBX alleged, since Drake is “the most streamed artist of all time on the platform,” in September becoming “the first artist to nominally achieve 120 billion total streams.” Watching Drake hit this milestone, the platform chose to ignore a “substantial” amount of inauthentic activity that contributed to about 37 billion streams between January 2022 and September 2025, the lawsuit alleged.

This activity, RBX alleged, “appeared to be the work of a sprawling network of Bot Accounts” that Spotify reasonably should have detected.

Apparently, RBX noticed that while most artists see an “initial spike” in streams when a song or album is released, followed by a predictable drop-off as more time passes, the listening patterns of Drake’s fans weren’t as predictable. After releases, some of Drake’s music would see “significant and irregular uptick months” over not just ensuing months, but years, allegedly “with no reasonable explanations for those upticks other than streaming fraud.”

Most suspiciously, individual accounts would sometimes listen to Drake “exclusively” for “23 hours a day”—which seems like the sort of “staggering and irregular” streaming that Spotify should flag, the lawsuit alleged.

…Spotify artists are supposed to get paid based on valid streams that represent their rightful portion of revenue pools. If RBX’s claims are true, based on the allegedly fake boosting of Drake’s streams alone, losses to all other artists in the revenue pool are “estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars,” the complaint said. Actual damages, including punitive damages, are to be determined at trial, the lawsuit noted, and are likely much higher.

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Michael Mann to Bill Gates: You can’t reboot the planet if you crash it • Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Michael Mann (erstwhile Nasa climate scientist):

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[Bill] Gates became a household name in the 1990s as the Microsoft CEO who delivered the Windows operating system. (I must confess, I was a Mac guy.) Microsoft was notorious for releasing software mired with security vulnerabilities. Critics argued that Gates was prioritizing the premature release of features and profit over security and reliability. His response to the latest worm or virus crashing your PC and compromising your personal data? “Hey, we’ve got a patch for that!”

That’s the very same approach Gates has taken with the climate crisis. His venture capital group, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, invests in fossil fuel-based infrastructure (like natural gas with carbon capture and enhanced oil recovery), while Gates downplays the role of clean energy and rapid decarbonization. Instead, he favors hypothetical new energy tech, including “modular nuclear reactors” that couldn’t possibly be scaled up over the time frame in which the world must transition off fossil fuels.

Most troublingly, Gates has peddled a planetary “patch” for the climate crisis. He has financed for-profit schemes to implement geoengineering interventions that involve spraying massive amounts of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere to block out sunlight and cool the planet. What could possibly go wrong? And hey, if we screw up this planet, we’ll just geoengineer Mars. Right Elon?

Such technofixes for the climate, in fact, lead us down a dangerous road, both because they displace far safer and more reliable options—namely the clean energy transition—and because they provide an excuse for business-as-usual burning of fossil fuels. Why decarbonize, after all, if we can just solve the problem with a “patch” later?

Here’s the thing, Bill Gates: There is no “patch” for the climate crisis. And there is no way to reboot the planet if you crash it. The only safe and reliable way out when you find yourself in a climate hole is to stop digging—and burning—fossil fuels.

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Gates’s latest memo is intended to influence proceedings at the upcoming COP30 climate summit in Brazil. In short, he backs technology as the way to solve the climate crisis – because we are definitely not getting there through self-denial; the Paris agreement has not worked out. It’s hard to see why Mann is so against trying any sort of idea that might work.
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The Super PAC trying to free Democrats from the cult of the quants • POLITICO

Issie Lapowsky:

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Future Forward, the dominant Democratic outside funder which raised some $950m between its super PAC and other entities, had gained prominence for its aggressive approach to ad testing. Run by a small inner circle of number crunchers, the firm commissioned more than 1,500 ads throughout 2024 and, with the methodological rigor of a drug company testing a new vaccine, ran each one through randomized-control trials, surveying millions of voters to determine which ads would be the most persuasive to the most people.

Future Forward’s tests spelled out a pretty consistent theory of the case: elevating and contrasting Biden with Trump was more persuasive to voters than attacking Trump outright. But the debate scrambled this strategy. How to promote a candidate who had all but self-immolated on stage? And was it worth spending money now when it was anyone’s guess what the next few months would hold? Without something nice to say about Biden, for a few critical weeks, Future Forward didn’t say much at all.

To [rival Democrat Super PAC director Danielle] Butterfield, that was a wakeup call. Democrats, she believed, were allowing data about what supposedly sways people to stand in the way of intuition. For all their parsing and fine tuning, she felt her party was failing to simply read the room. “Trump was attacking us from every angle, and we were not doing anything,” Butterfield said. “We were really letting data drive a decision that should be pretty crystal clear.”

…Getting people to watch and give their opinions about an ad in a vacuum bears little resemblance to the way people actually consume content online. These tests don’t measure whether people will grasp a candidate’s message when they’re half-listening to a podcast at work. They don’t tell you if people get the ick when a slick, highly-produced political spot pops up in the middle of a video of a guy ranking fast food french fries. They don’t tell you if an ad is really “breaking through,” Butterfield said, a hand-wavy term she uses both liberally and intentionally.

“We try to treat advertising like this, like black and white, measurable thing, but in the world we’re dealing with, it’s not,” she said.

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There’s something too there about those at the top being cut off from voters – unsurprisingly, since the country is enormous, and trying to go with your gut about what people want is sure to go wrong.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified