Head designer Alan Dye has left Apple to join Meta. His resignation was written in grey ink on light grey paper. CC-licensed photo by Kris Arnold 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. Indecipherable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Rare win for renewable energy: Trump Administration funds geothermal network expansion • Inside Climate News
Phil McKenna:
»
The U.S. Department of Energy has approved an $8.6m grant that will allow the nation’s first utility-led geothermal heating and cooling network to double in size.
Gas and electric utility Eversource Energy completed the first phase of its geothermal network in Framingham, Massachusetts, in 2024. Eversource is a co-recipient of the award along with the city of Framingham and HEET, a Boston-based nonprofit that focuses on geothermal energy and is the lead recipient of the funding.
Geothermal networks are widely considered among the most energy-efficient ways to heat and cool buildings. The federal money will allow Eversource to add approximately 140 new customers to the Framingham network and fund research to monitor the system’s performance.
The federal funding was first announced in December 2024 under the Biden administration. However, the contract between HEET and the Department of Energy was not finalized until Sept. 30 and was just announced Wednesday. The agreement, which allows construction to move forward, comes as the Trump administration is clawing back billions of dollars in clean energy funding, including hundreds of millions of dollars in Massachusetts.
“This award is an opportunity and a responsibility to clearly demonstrate and quantify the growth potential of geothermal network technology,” Zeyneb Magavi, HEET’s executive director, said in a written statement.
The existing system provides heating and cooling to approximately 140 residential and commercial customers in the western suburb of Boston. The network taps low-temperature thermal energy from dozens of boreholes drilled several hundred feet below ground, where temperatures remain steady at 55ºF.
«
This is very small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. But as a New Yorker article points out, there’s enormous potential for geothermal energy (Iceland practically runs on it), and the techniques that fracking has refined make tapping geothermal power easier than ever. So maybe it could be the little acorn that grows into the big oak.
unique link to this extract
Apple design executive Alan Dye poached by Meta in major coup • Bloomberg via MSN
Mark Gurman:
»
Meta Platforms Inc. has poached Apple Inc.’s most prominent design executive in a major coup that underscores a push by the social networking giant into AI-equipped consumer devices.
The company is hiring Alan Dye, who has served as the head of Apple’s user interface design team since 2015, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Apple is replacing Dye with longtime designer Stephen Lemay, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the personnel changes haven’t been announced.
Apple confirmed the move in a statement provided to Bloomberg News.
“Steve Lemay has played a key role in the design of every major Apple interface since 1999,” Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said in the statement. “He has always set an extraordinarily high bar for excellence and embodies Apple’s culture of collaboration and creativity.”
The move represents a seismic shift in Silicon Valley and shows that Meta is committed to becoming a name-brand maker of hardware devices. For Apple, the departure extends an exodus of talent suffered by the design team since the exit of visionary executive Jony Ive in 2019.
Dye had taken on a more significant role at Apple after Ive left, helping define how the company’s latest operating systems, apps and devices look and feel. The executive informed Apple this week that he’d decided to leave, though top management had already been bracing for his departure, the people said.
With the Dye hire, Meta is creating a new design studio and putting him in charge of design for hardware, software and AI integration for its interfaces.
He will be reporting to Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth, who oversees Reality Labs. That group is tasked with developing wearable devices, such as smart glasses and virtual reality headsets.
«
This is absolutely wonderful news. You are not going to find anyone who appreciates Apple design who is going to be sorry about this. Dye’s approach to Apple’s software design has had a sort of indifference to users’ needs in favour of stuff that wows people at demos but doesn’t stand up to being used. This week’s Accidental Tech Podcast, for which this is timely, will treat this as an early Christmas present.
unique link to this extract
Apple replaces head of AI with executive poached from Microsoft • Financial Times
Rafe Rosner-Uddin:
»
Apple’s vice-president of artificial intelligence will be replaced by a top Microsoft executive as the iPhone maker struggles to recover from a slow start in the race to harness advanced AI.
John Giannandrea, senior vice-president for machine learning and AI strategy, will step down and serve as an adviser to Apple until retiring in the spring, the company said on Monday.
He will be replaced by former Microsoft executive Amar Subramanya, who leaves a job as a corporate vice-president for Microsoft six months after jumping ship from Google, where he worked on the Gemini chatbot.
Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said: “AI has long been central to Apple’s strategy, and we are pleased to welcome Amar . . . and to bring his extraordinary AI expertise to Apple.”
The leadership change in Apple’s AI division comes as Giannandrea faced mounting criticism for a faltering approach to deploying generative AI, the technology that underpins competitors’ products such as Gemini and ChatGPT.
Apple has been slow to catch up with the technology and roll out AI tools in recent years, as the popularity of chatbots has grown rapidly.
«
The roundabout continues. Microsoft-Google-Apple-Meta-OpenAI and everywhere, like a game of very well paid musical chairs.
unique link to this extract
John Mayer spotted playing Neural DSP Quad Cortex at Coachella • Guitar World
Matt Owen:
»
Tube amp loyalist and gear aficionado John Mayer has once again demonstrated his increasing affection for digital guitar gear by turning up to play at Coachella with an amp modeler – but it wasn’t one he has ever been spotted playing before.
On Sunday (April 13), the electric guitar giant joined German DJ and producer Zedd to perform two songs: Automatic Yes – a Zedd track Mayer features on – and Mayer’s own song, New Light, which was released in 2018.
For the short guest performance, though, the PRS signature artist opted against wheeling out his entire rig (it would have been entirely impractical to do so) and instead played through, for the first time on stage, a Neural DSP Quad Cortex.
As per the John Mayer’s Gear Instagram page, for the two-song cameo Mayer partnered his Faded Black Tee Satin Silver Sky with the acclaimed QC, which had been attached to what looked to be D’Addario’s XPND pedalboard.
Those familiar with Mayer’s guitar gear will be aware this isn’t the first time the guitarist has played through an amp modeler, either on stage or in the studio. At 2019’s Coachella, he performed with Khalid through a Fractal Axe-Fx III, and two years later he used a Fractal to record parts of Sob Rock.
Not only that, Mayer also reportedly owns a Kemper Profiler for casual use, and used a Fractal while supporting Ed Sheeran in 2023.
It is, however, the first time Mayer has opted to use the Neural DSP Quad Cortex in this capacity. Whether that means he’s decided to ditch his trusty Fractals altogether, or whether this was a one-time-only thing, it remains to be seen.
It also remains to be seen whether this is the start of a formal partnership with Neural DSP. Did the team use their T.I.N.A robot to model Mayer’s hugely sought-after and beloved Dumble-loaded rig? The tones, by all accounts (footage is yet to surface online) were on point during the set, so it’s not entirely out of the question.
«
OK, so to a lot of people (including me) this is incomprehensible – the feeling captured by the classic tweet “I’m 50. All celebrity news looks like this: ‘Curtains for Zoosha? K-smog and Batboy caught flipping a grunt’“.
Anyhow, the way that physical amplifiers are being replaced by digital versions is well explained in an Ars Technica article, which in effect riffs on the Mayer event. Software is eating the world. And its amplifiers.
unique link to this extract
Fraudulent gambling network may actually be something more nefarious • Ars Technica
Dan Goodin:
»
Researchers have previously tracked smaller pieces of the enormous infrastructure. Last month, security firm Sucuri reported that the operation seeks out and compromises poorly configured websites running the WordPress CMS. Imperva in January said the attackers also scan for and exploit web apps built with the PHP programming language that have existing webshells or vulnerabilities. Once the weaknesses are exploited, the attackers install a GSocket, a backdoor that the attackers use to compromise servers and host gambling web content on them.
All of the gambling sites target Indonesian-speaking visitors. Because Indonesian law prohibits gambling, many people in that country are drawn to illicit services. Most of the 236,433 attacker-owned domains hosting the gambling sites are hosted on Cloudflare. Most of the 1,481 hijacked subdomains were hosted on Amazon Web Services, Azure, and GitHub.
On Wednesday, researchers from security firm Malanta said those details are only the most visible signs of a malicious network that’s actually much bigger and more complex than previously known. Far from being solely a financially motivated operation, the firm said, the network likely serves nation-state hackers targeting a wide range of organizations, including those in manufacturing, transport, healthcare, government, and education.
The basis for the speculation is the tremendous amount of time and resources that have gone into creating and maintaining the infrastructure over 14 years. The resources include 328,000 separate domains, which comprise 236,000 addresses that the attackers bought and 90,000 that they commandeered by compromising legitimate websites. It’s also made up of nearly 1,500 hijacked subdomains from legitimate organizations. Malanta estimates that such infrastructure costs anywhere from $725,000 to $17m per year to fund.
…“This combination—longevity, scale, cost, and sophistication—goes well beyond a typical ‘quickhit’ gambling scam or financially motivated crew,” Malanta said. “That’s why we classify it as an APT and describe it as state sponsored-level, while being careful not to assert that we have direct evidence tying it to a specific government entity.”
The focus on compromising government agencies in the US and Europe and a wide swath of industries is another reason for the assessment.
«
This AI bubble is more memory than dot-com • Culpium
Tim Culpan:
»
Since the AI sector at the model and token-making level is just like memory, the industry shakeout is likely to play out in the same way. DRAM used to be a big deal. For a while it was Intel’s bread and butter. These chips are fundamental to any computing system because they temporary hold data — often for milliseconds — which a processor uses to make calculations. In the early PC era, DRAM supply was the bottleneck for computer sales.
By the early 2000s, there were around a dozen memory-chip makers across South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the US. Most were backed by industrial conglomerates. Hynix, for example, was spun off from the Hyundai group after the chaebol’s boss realized electronics were an increasingly important part of cars. Nanya Technology was born out of Taiwan’s massive Formosa Plastics Group. But heavy competition, unstable earnings, and an unwillingness by corporate parents and banks to keep funding them lead to a wave of consolidations and shutdowns by the early 2010s. Today, the DRAM sector is dominated by just three companies: Samsung, SK Hynix — both from South Korea — and Boise, Idaho-based Micron.
What kept the leaders atop the market was both an unrelenting pace of capacity expansion, and continued technological development using the latest equipment. Both are crucial to maintaining price competitiveness on a per-bit basis. Assuming the product is largely reliable, price is the factor which truly differentiates.
Today’s AI leaders can be sorted into two categories: stand alone, and conglomerate-backed. OpenAI and Anthropic are startups that stand alone. A recent series of circular deals muddies the water a little: Nvidia is taking a stake in Open AI2, while the startup has a warrant for shares in Nvidia rival AMD. And Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI makes the software giant as much a sugar daddy as a conglomerate parent: it’ll last as long as Microsoft’s AI friend provides benefits.3 These companies are kind of like Micron. Although it found a wealthy industrialist to back it, Micron never benefited from having a conglomerate parent.
«
Culpan used to be Bloomberg’s technology correspondent based in Taiwan, and has long experience writing about the sector. The longer part of this article looks at whether the AI bubble (come on, it is) resembles the dot-com bubble, or the RAM bubble.
unique link to this extract
Crucial is shutting down — because Micron wants to sell its RAM and SSDs to AI companies instead • The Verge
Emma Roth:
»
Micron is retiring the Crucial brand, marking the end of its line of budget-friendly solid-state drives (SSDs) and RAM kits, as reported earlier by VideoCardz. In an announcement on Wednesday, Micron says winding down its consumer-focused business will “improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments” — a.k.a. AI companies.
The brand’s shutdown is a huge blow for PC builders and hobbyists, who are already dealing with skyrocketing RAM prices linked to a surge in demand from AI companies. OpenAI, for example, struck a deal with SK Hynix and Samsung to make up to 900,000 DRAM per month for its Stargate project.
Now, there’s going to be one less brand selling consumer-focused memory for PCs, potentially intensifying the global memory shortage. Soaring demand for RAM is already impacting pricing at CyberPowerPC, Framework, and Raspberry Pi, while HP has even hinted at raising the prices of its devices or equipping them with less memory.
«
So RAM goes from being a hard-to-obtain specialist product in the 1970s to a ubiquitous, cheap product in the 2010s to a hard-to-obtain specialist product again.
unique link to this extract
WordPress’s vibe-coding experiment, Telex, has already been put to real-world use • TechCrunch
Sarah Perez:
»
WordPress’s experimental AI development tool, Telex, has already been put to real-world use, only months after its September debut. At the company’s annual “State of the Word” event on Tuesday in San Francisco, WordPress Project Cofounder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg shared several examples where Telex had been used within a working WordPress shop to do things like create price comparisons, price calculators, and pull in real-time business hours plus a map link to a retail store, among examples.
Telex, which Mullenweg previously described as a “v0 or Lovable, but specifically for WordPress,” is essentially the publishing platform’s attempt to build its own vibe-coding tool for the AI era. The software allows developers to generate Gutenberg blocks — the modular bits of text, images, columns, and more — that make up a WordPress website.
While the software is still labeled as an experiment, Mullenweg was able to demonstrate several real-world examples that had been built by community creator Nick Hamze.
In the first example, Mullenweg showed off a pricing comparison tool built with Telex, noting that these sorts of rich, interactive web elements were something that a developer used to have to custom-build, but could now be created in a few seconds.
«
This is getting closer and closer to the ordinary person being able to use it.
unique link to this extract
The fall of a prolific science journal exposes the billion-dollar profits of scientific publishing • EL PAÍS English
Manuel Ansede:
»
In the autumn of 2020, with humanity terrified by the deadly second wave of the coronavirus, a scientific journal published a study with a solution: jade amulets from traditional Chinese medicine could prevent COVID-19. The proposal was outlandish, but the editor-in-chief of the weekly, Spanish chemist Damià Barceló, defended its quality controls. That journal, Science of the Total Environment — one of the 15 that publishes the most studies worldwide — has just been expelled from the group of reputable publications by one of the leading evaluation companies, after dozens of irregular articles were discovered. The scandal exposes the windfall profits of scientific publishers, who in recent years have amassed billions of dollars in earnings from public funds earmarked for science.
Damià Barceló, 71, took over as editor of the journal in 2012. In just two years, he doubled the number of studies published. In a decade, he increased the number tenfold, with the journal reaching nearly 10,000 articles annually. As the number of articles increased, the quality declined, because there was a perverse incentive to accept mediocre work: to publish research open access in the journal, a scientist has to pay $4,150 plus taxes.
Emilio Delgado, professor of documentation at the University of Granada in Spain, explains it this way: “It’s clearly an open-door journal that takes almost anything. It’s what I call a mega-journal, that is, a mega-business.”
«
“Paper mills” are just there to make noise. As ever, Sturgeon’s Law applies: 90% of everything is crap. This was the crap.
unique link to this extract
| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 