Buyer beware – the “Pyrex” trademark has been licensed to companies which don’t make cooking glassware to the same standards as the original one. CC-licensed photo by ricky shore on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Hot in here. 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 world still hasn’t made sense of ChatGPT • The Atlantic
Charlie Warzel on the third anniversary of the introduction of ChatGPT:
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This is disruption, in the less technical sense of the word. In August, I wrote that “one of AI’s enduring impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing it.” If you genuinely believe that we are just years away from the arrival of a paradigm-shifting, society-remaking superintelligence, behaving irrationally makes sense. If you believe that Silicon Valley’s elites have lost their minds, foisting a useful-but-not-magical technology on society, declaring that it’s building God, investing historic amounts of money in its development, and fusing the fate of its tools with the fate of the global economy, being furious makes sense.
The world that ChatGPT built is a world defined by a particular type of precarity. It is a world that is perpetually waiting for a shoe to drop. Young generations feel this instability acutely as they prepare to graduate into a workforce about which they are cautioned that there may be no predictable path to a career.
Older generations, too, are told that the future might be unrecognizable, that the marketable skills they’ve honed may not be relevant. Investors are waiting too, dumping unfathomable amounts of capital into AI companies, data centers, and the physical infrastructure that they believe is necessary to bring about this arrival. It is, we’re told, a race—a geopolitical one, but also a race against the market, a bubble, a circular movement of money and byzantine financial instruments and debt investment that could tank the economy. The AI boosters are waiting. They’ve created detailed timelines for this arrival. Then the timelines shift.
We are waiting because a defining feature of generative AI, according to its true believers, is that it is never in its final form. Like ChatGPT before its release, every model in some way is also a “low-key research preview”—a proof of concept for what’s really possible. You think the models are good now? Ha! Just wait.
Depending on your views, this is trademark showmanship, a truism of innovation, a hostage situation, or a long con. Where you fall on this rapture-to-bullshit continuum likely tracks with how optimistic you are for the future. But you are waiting nonetheless—for a bubble to burst, for a genie to arrive with a plan to print money, for a bailout, for Judgment Day. In that way, generative AI is a faith-based technology.
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“Anniversary journalism” is usually a poor excuse for an article, but it’s important here to take stock of how truly disruptive this has all been. Not often in a good way.
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Someone is trying to ‘hack’ people through Apple’s Podcasts app • 404 Media
Joseph Cox:
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Something very strange is happening to the Apple Podcasts app. Over the last several months, I’ve found both the iOS and Mac versions of the Podcasts app will open religion, spirituality, and education podcasts with no apparent rhyme or reason. Sometimes, I unlock my machine and the podcast app has launched itself and presented one of the bizarre podcasts to me. On top of that, at least one of the podcast pages in the app includes a link to a potentially malicious website. Here are the titles of some of the very odd podcasts I’ve had thrust upon me recently (I’ve trimmed some and defanged some links so you don’t accidentally click one):
“5../XEWE2′””"″onclic…”
“free will, free willhttp://www[.]sermonaudio[.]com/rss_search.asp?keyword=free%will on SermonAudio”
“Leonel Pimentahttps://play[.]google[.]com/store/apps/detai…”
“https://open[.]spotify[.]com/playlist/53TA8e97shGyQ6iMk6TDjc?…”There was another with a title in Arabic that loosely translates to “Words of Life” and includes someone’s Gmail address. Sometimes the podcasts do have actual audio (one was a religious sermon); others are completely silent. The podcasts are often years old, but for some reason are being shown to me now.
I’ll be honest: I don’t really know what exactly is going on here. And neither did an expert I spoke to. But it’s clear someone, somewhere, is trying to mess with Apple Podcasts and its users.
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Security experts agree: something weird is going on, apparently with the intent of launching an XSS (cross-site scripting) attack. Apple didn’t respond to Cox – which implies that it’s having a think about what’s going on here.
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Survey says 97% of people struggle to identify AI music – but it’s not as bad as it seems • The Verge
Terrence O’Brien:
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Streaming service Deezer ran an experiment recently, with the help of research firm Ipsos. The finding — that 97% of people can’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated and human-made music — was alarming. But it’s also not the whole story.
In the survey, 9,000 participants listened to three tracks and were asked to guess which, if any, were completely AI-generated. If the participant failed to guess all three correctly, they were put in the fail pile. That means if you got two of three correct, Deezer and Ipsos still said you couldn’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated music and the real deal.
Deezer sent me the three tracks it used in the study, and so I decided to run my own (less scientific) experiment. I had ten people listen to the same tracks and gave them the same prompt. People did have trouble identifying which songs were fully AI. Only one person got all three right. But if I didn’t bundle the responses, the results were much less dire. People were able to successfully identify whether a track was AI or human-generated 43% of the time.
It’s also worth noting that several people told me one of the songs was so terrible, so obviously AI, that they thought it had to be a trap and guessed it was real.
Unsurprisingly, participants in Deezer’s study were a little caught off guard by how poorly they performed: 71% were surprised by the results, and 51% said it made them uncomfortable to not be able to tell the difference between AI- and human-created art.
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This might get like autotune, which was reviled at first (when Cher’s Believe was a huge hit in 1998, music executives insisted the voice effect was a vocoder, not autotune. Nowadays, it’s all over the place. AI tunes with human vocals? Human musicians with AI vocals? It’s all on the table now.
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From Olympic dreams to Nairobi jail: how an Indian teen got embroiled in doping scandal in Kenya • The Indian Express
Mihir Vasavda and Nihal Koshie:
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Iten, a Kenyan town that runners consider their mecca and where world-beaters are forged at altitude, is where Aman Malik, all of 17, chose to go in May 2023. The budding cross-country and long-distance runner from Haryana’s Sonipat was convinced that the road to the Olympics ran through this town in East Africa.
Two years on, the script has flipped completely.
In September 2025, a Nairobi court handed Aman, now 19, a three-year sentence for being a part of an organised network that allegedly traffics prohibited substances into the country and gives banned substances to Kenyan athletes.
Now in a four-room enclosure that houses 30 inmates, Aman has been navigating an environment far removed from the training camps he once lived in. “They could have banned me from athletics or deported me to India, where I could have served a jail term,” he tells The Indian Express from the Nairobi jail, where he gets to use his phone for one hour daily.
A high-altitude town in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, Iten enjoys global fame as the ‘home of champions’ for the sheer number of world and Olympic winners it has produced, including David Rudisha, the 800m Olympic and world record holder; and Beatrice Chebet, the multiple Olympic and world championship gold medallist.
However, of late, this distance-running powerhouse has been battling a surge in doping violations, besides accounting for the highest number of doping cheats in track and field.
Aman left for Iten in May 2023. Two years later, while returning from training, Kenya’s Directorate of Criminal Investigations sleuths followed him and raided his room. According to Kenyan court documents, they found an “entire suitcase filled with prohibited substances, supplements and medication” in his possession. These “prohibited substances” included meldonium, a drug that had led to a 15-month ban on tennis star Maria Sharapova; a human growth hormone (HGH) made infamous by the Lance Armstrong doping scandal; and Mannitol, a masking agent.
The sleuths also allegedly seized a one-page agreement between Aman and athlete Reubin Mosin that states the Indian would “supply all that it takes” in return for 50% of the latter’s winnings.
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Kenya has a colossal doping problem, and this starts to clarify how and why.
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Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: learning from Stoppard • Creative Screenwriting
Mike Fitzgerald:
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Comparing two drafts of a script can be hugely instructive, revealing point-by-point how a writer went about improving the story. When I stumbled upon an earlier draft of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, I discovered a dazzling, glittering trove of lessons as nourishing as eternal life itself. Well, nearly so.
Last Crusade was written by Jeffrey Boam, from a story by George Lucas and Menno Meyjes. So say the opening credits. Boam’s final draft, dated March 1, 1988 (ten weeks before production) differs drastically from the published script which reflects the released version of the film. Differences come as no shock, but with Last Crusade they aren’t just a few deleted scenes and some line changes. Whole sections of the Boam draft were reimagined, major set pieces were added, and the pacing and tone were markedly transformed. Whoever made these changes possessed a profound grasp of story craft.
So who was that? Spielberg himself made certain revisions, such as expanding the desert tank sequence from a few pages to over eleven – injecting some much-needed action into the story. Some scenes were filmed but omitted during the edit, like an extended chase through the Zeppelin in which Indy and Henry are pursued by a Gestapo agent and a World War One flying ace.
And then there was the uncredited script polish by Barry Watson – you know, the Barry Watson? Never heard of him? Perhaps if we peek under his pseudonym… ah, yes: Sir Tom Stoppard, a four-time Tony winner who later bagged an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love. Since we can’t know whose pen revised which pages (although Spielberg did say that “Tom is pretty much responsible for every line of dialogue.” Let’s just call it a collaboration of some titans of storytelling.
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There’s a similar breakdown elsewhere – which goes into scene-by-scene comparison. Apart from the pleasure of realising how much better the Stoppard-revised version is, it’s also a valuable lesson in writing generally: focus on character, learn how to time suspense, learn what amplifies a joke or tragedy. Useful for all writing. Well, all writing for humans.
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San Francisco’s robotaxi takeover, as seen from city hall • Bloomberg
David Zipper:
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…As the director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency since 2019, Jeffrey Tumlin has been immersed in his city’s self-driving saga. With unified oversight of transit, taxis, curbs and streets in San Francisco, SFMTA is more powerful than most urban transportation departments. Still, Tumlin and his colleagues struggled to handle robotaxi companies that are accountable only to state and federal regulators, not city officials.
DZ: You had worked in the transportation sector for decades before joining SFMTA, and you were already familiar with autonomous vehicles. What have you learned about self-driving technology in the last few years that most surprised you?
JT: As a regular Waymo user, I have watched the cars become better than I am at seeing pedestrians hidden from view and predicting their behavior. I didn’t think that was going to happen. I am surprised by how sophisticated they are with erratic human behavior, which I had assumed would be very challenging.DZ: Overall, are robotaxis a positive or negative for San Francisco?
JT: So far, there is no net positive for the transportation system that we’ve been able to identify. The robotaxis create greater convenience for the privileged, but they create problems for the efficiency of the transportation system as a whole.DZ: What do you mean by that?
JT: What I like about Waymo is that the user interface design works well. I don’t have to talk to a human, and the vehicle’s driving behavior is slow and steady. I think robotaxis offer the potential for significant upsides for personal convenience, but it remains to be seen whether they offer any overall benefit to the transportation system.DZ: How would you respond to those who say robotaxis are making San Francisco a better city because the experience of using them is superior to other ways to travel?
JT: I agree that there are qualities or Waymos that outperform other modes. The vehicles are very nice. The driving behavior is slow and steady and predictable, and there is chill music.But those are qualities that you can replicate in any mode. If we mandated speed governors, passenger cars can be slow and steady. If we regulated taxis in order to optimize for user convenience and safe driving behavior, taxis could emulate those same qualities as well. Similarly, if we had massive private funding, we could achieve the same level of quality in public transit.
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(Article is free to read, apparently.)
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It pays to speak fluent LinkedIn — if you can crack the bro code • The Times
Harry Wallop:
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As on all social media platforms, LinkedIn does not show users a straightforward chronology of all the updates from the people they follow. Instead they are shown posts by a mix of people they follow, as well as those of strangers the algorithm thinks they might find interesting.
One woman, Cindy Gallop, was so suspicious LinkedIn had changed its algorithm that she conducted an experiment. Gallop, who is quite a big cheese on LinkedIn with 141,000 followers, got a fellow female businesswoman, Jane Evans, and two male colleagues to publish exactly the same post as her. Gallop’s reached 0.6% of her followers. Evans’s reached 8.3% of her 19,100 followers. The two men reached 51% and 143% of their respective follower numbers.
Some women have reacted by changing their profile on LinkedIn to pretend they are men. They have even started using “masculine” words to trick the LinkedIn algorithm into thinking they are men. Lots of “drive”, “accelerate”, “transform”, apparently, sees your posts reach more people. This is bro-coding. Speak like an obnoxious Silicon Valley tech bro, refer to forward-deployed engineers and how you are protein-maxxing when you get out of your ice bath at 5am, and your thoughts will be seen by more people.
Gallop and Evans are so enraged by this discovery they have started a petition. “We’re calling on LinkedIn to take urgent action,” they say, demanding “an independent equity audit of the algorithm and its impact on under-represented voices”.
At this point, you may want to scream. Who cares if LinkedIn, which has always been home to plenty of self-promoting, self-regarding and self-appointed “thought leaders”, amplifies the voices of some boastful men? If you hate LinkedIn so much, there’s no reason to spend time on this Microsoft-owned platform.
This fails to accept the reality of the modern business world. Over the past few years, being on LinkedIn has become almost mandatory. Microsoft claims LinkedIn has 1.3 billion users globally, with 44 million in Britain — an almost unbelievable number that is more than the 43.4 million adults in the country of working age.
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It’s such an unserious platform, and yet because it’s become essential to people in business, it’s also unavoidable.
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UK ‘not in favor’ of dimming the sun • POLITICO
Karl Mathiesen:
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The British government said it opposes attempts to cool the planet by spraying millions of tons of dust into the atmosphere — but did not close the door to a debate on regulating the technology.
The comments in parliament Thursday came after a POLITICO investigation revealed an Israeli-US company Stardust Solutions aimed to be capable of deploying solar radiation modification, as the technology is called, inside this decade.
“We’re not in favor of solar radiation modification given the uncertainty around the potential risks it poses to the climate and environment,” Leader of the House of Commons Alan Campbell said on behalf of the government.
Stardust has recently raised $60m in finance from venture capital investors, mostly based in Silicon Valley and Britain. It is the largest ever investment in the field.
The emergence of a well-funded, private sector actor moving aggressively toward planet cooling capability has led to calls for the global community to regulate the field.
Citing POLITICO’s reporting, Labour MP Sarah Coombes asked the government: “Given the potential risks of this technology, could we have a debate on how Britain will work with other countries to regulate experiments with the Earth’s atmosphere, and ensure we cooperate with other countries on solutions that actually tackle the root cause of climate change?”
Campbell signalled the government was open to further discussion of the issue by inviting Coombes to raise the point the next time Technology Secretary Liz Kendall took questions in parliament.
…Stardust is proposing to use high-flying aircraft to dump millions of tons of a proprietary particle into the stratosphere, around 12 miles above the Earth’s surface. The technology mimics the short-term global cooling that occurs when volcanoes blow dust and gas high into the sky, blocking a small amount of the sun’s heat.
Most scientists agree this could temporarily lower the Earth’s surface temperature, helping to avert some impacts of global warming. The side effects, however, are not well researched.
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What Is the difference between the two types of Pyrex? • Allrecipes
Meghan Glass:
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Three basic types of glassware are typically found in most home kitchens: soda-lime, tempered, and borosilicate. Borosilicate glass includes boron trioxide, which has a low thermal expansion. This suggests unlike normal glass, it won’t break when exposed to major temperature shifts such as taking a dish from a fridge to an oven. This is thanks to boron trioxide, the element that makes glass resistant to major temperature changes. Pyrex is a sub-group of borosilicate.
Soda-lime glass is the most common glass type in kitchens since it’s used for most drinkware from juice cups to jars. Untreated soda-lime glass is more susceptible to breaking from extreme temperature changes. This shock expands the glass at different rates, resulting in cracks and fissures.
Tempered glass is just soda-lime glass that’s been heat-treated to make it more durable. During that heat-tempering process, the exterior of the glass is force-cooled so that it solidifies quickly, leaving the center to cool more slowly. As the inside cools, it pulls at the stiff, compressed outer layer, which puts the center of the glass in tension.
Are “PYREX” and “pyrex” the same? Historically, both trademarks were used interchangeably in the marketing of kitchenware products made up of both borosilicate and soda-lime glass. However, now Corning has licensed out the use of their PYREX (upper case lettering) and pyrex (lower case lettering) logos to other companies.
Lowercase “pyrex” is now mostly used for kitchenware sold in the United States, South America, and Asia. In Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, uppercase PYREX is still available.
Pyrex used to be made of the more heat-resistant borosilicate glass, which is more resistant to breakage when subjected to extreme shifts in temperature. Pyrex eventually switched to tempered glass most likely because boron is toxic and expensive to dispose of. Although tempered glass can better withstand thermal shock than regular soda-lime glass can, it’s not as resilient as borosilicate. This is what causes the shattering reaction people are talking about. Watch out for those casseroles.
In short: if the logo is in upper case lettering – PYREX – it’s most likely made of borosilicate, and thus safer.
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Just in case anyone is thinking of doing some cooking this month. Too late for all the Americans at Thanksgiving, of course. Sorry folks!
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 