A new report reckons diesel fuel could disappear from some filling stations by 2030, as EVs replace older vehicles. CC-licensed photo by Rick Obst on Flickr.
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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.
I didn’t want to write about child sexual abuse images • Whatever Works
Naomi Alderman:
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[Grok producing sexualised images] is not like a cigar or even going to an adult sex club, and I am going to explain the two key reasons why.
My knowledge about this comes from the time I spent working at the children’s charity Barnardo’s in the 2000s, when they were researching the early internet and specifically I did some work with their child abuse team when they were learning how the internet was affecting abuse of children. I was never a front-line worker, but I wrote for and edited reports on their findings. The report I worked on was called Just One Click and you can read the recent update to that report here.
Reason 1: abusers use these images to groom and manipulate their victims
Abusers want to convince kids not to talk about what’s happening, to have them so confused that they think they ‘wanted it’ on some level or made it happen and are too ashamed to tell another adult. This is how abusers remain hidden.
Child abuse images can be an important tool for them. When I learned about this at Barnardo’s they explained to me that abusers show the images to children and say “look, this child is enjoying what is happening here”. That is a very powerful way to convince a child that what’s happening to them is normal.
In an incredibly stupid comment yesterday, shadow Technology Secretary Julia Lopez said that Grok isn’t a problem because: “from crude drawing to Photoshop, Grok is not the only tool capable of generating false or offensive imagery”.
People have always been able to make horrible images, yes. But “could someone make something distasteful to whack off to?” is not the test. The test is “could this image convince a child that it is real, so that the child believes that other children do this and enjoy it?”
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“Allowing AI image generation of child sexual abuse images will cause more children to be abused”, Alderman says. It’s a crucial point which has apparently escaped politicians such as Kemi Badenoch (who offered the adult sex club metaphor: “just keep the kids out of social media!” she offered) or her colleague Lopez. (There’s another reason why it’s bad; the outcome is the same.)
As a side note, Alderman is one of those rare very smart people who can distill complex problems down into their key strands and isolate the ones that do and don’t matter. Worth following.
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Instagram AI influencers are defaming celebrities with sex scandals • 404 Media
Emanuel Maiberg:
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AI generated influencers are sharing fake images on Instagram that appear to show them having sex with celebrities like LeBron James, iShowSpeed, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. One AI influencer even shared an image of her in bed with Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro. The images are AI generated but are not disclosed as such, and funnel users to an adult content site where the AI generated influencers sell nude images.
This recent trend is the latest strategy from the growing business of monetizing AI generated porn by harvesting attention on Instagram with shocking or salacious content. As with previous schemes we’ve covered, the Instagram posts that pretend to show attractive young women in bed with celebrities are created without the celebrities’ consent and are not disclosed as being AI generated, violating two of Instagram’s policies and showing once again that Meta is unable or unwilling to reign in AI generated content on its platform.
Most of the Reels in this genre that I have seen follow a highly specific formula and started to appear around December 2025. First, we see a still image of an AI-generated influencer next to a celebrity, often in the form of a selfie with both of them looking at the camera. The text on the screen says “How it started.” Then, the video briefly cuts to another still image or videos of the AI generated influencer and the celebrity post coitus, sweaty, with tussled hair and sometimes smeared makeup. Many of these posts use the same handful of audio clips. Since Instagram allows users to browse Reels that use the same audio, clicking on one of these will reveal dozens of examples of similar Reels.
LeBron James and adult film star Johnny Sins are frequent targets of these posts, but I’ve also seen similar Reels with the likeness of Twitch streamer iShowSpeed, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, MMA fighters Jon Jones and Connor McGregor, soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo, and many others…
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We are in a very strange place. OK, Meta, time to get on top of this. (Remember when deepfakes were just a theory? First use of “deepfake” here was December 2017.)
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Meta is closing down three VR studios as part of its metaverse cuts • The Verge
Jay Peters:
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Meta is laying off about 10% of its Reality Labs metaverse division, and the cuts include closing down some of its VR gaming studios.
Twisted Pixel Games, the developer of Marvel’s Deadpool VR, Sanzaru Games, the developer of the Asgard’s Wrath franchise, and Armature Studio, which worked on the Resident Evil 4 VR port, are all being closed down, according to an internal memo viewed by Bloomberg. The team behind the VR fitness app Supernatural will no longer develop new content or features for it, though the “existing product” will still be supported, Bloomberg says. Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton confirmed to The Verge that Bloomberg’s reporting is accurate.
Laid off staffers have posted about the closures online.
…Meta acquired Supernatural developer Within in 2023 (after a fight with the FTC), Twisted Pixel and Armature in 2022, and Sanzaru in 2020. The company closed Echo VR developer Ready at Dawn, which it also acquired in 2020, in 2024.
In a statement about the broader Reality Labs layoffs, Clayton said that “We said last month that we were shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward Wearables. This is part of that effort, and we plan to reinvest the savings to support the growth of wearables this year.”
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Translation: Zuckerberg is bored of the metaverse because it turned out he got it wrong, and it’s going to vanish under the waves in short order.
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You can now reserve a hotel room on the Moon for $250,000 • Ars Technica
Eric Berger:
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A company called GRU Space publicly announced its intent to construct a series of increasingly sophisticated habitats on the Moon, culminating in a hotel inspired by the Palace of the Fine Arts in San Francisco.
On Monday, the company invited those interested in a berth to plunk down a deposit between $250,000 and $1 million, qualifying them for a spot on one of its early lunar surface missions in as little as six years from now.
It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? After all, GRU Space had, as of late December when I spoke to founder Skyler Chan, a single full-time employee aside from himself. And Chan, in fact, only recently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley.
All of this could therefore be dismissed as a lark. But I must say that I am a sucker for these kinds of stories. Chan is perfectly earnest about all of this. And despite all of the talk about lunar resources, my belief is that the surest long-term commercial activity on the Moon will be lunar tourism—it would be an amazing destination.
So when I interviewed Chan, I did so with an open mind.
…If all that sounds audacious and unrealistic, well, it kind of is. But it is not without foundation. GRU Space has already received seed funding from Y Combinator, and it will go through the organization’s three-month program early this year. This will help Chan refine his company’s product and give him more options to raise money. Regarding his vision, you can read GRU Space’s white paper.
Presently, the company plans to fly its initial “mission” in 2029 as a 10-kg payload on a commercial lunar lander, demonstrating an inflatable structure capability and converting lunar regolith into Moon bricks using geopolymers. With its second mission, the company plans to launch a larger inflatable structure into a “lunar pit” to test a scaled-up version of its resource development capabilities.
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Longtime readers will recall that the Moon is really, really inhospitable. See “The Moon smells like gunpowder” from February 2023:
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lunar dust is the shattered remains of rocks, broken repeatedly by tiny meteorites striking the surface. It’s sharp. So sharp, in fact, that it slashed the seals on some of the vacuum-sealed bags meant to preserve moon dust on the way home; they wound up being contaminated with oxygen by the time the Apollo missions made their three-day trip back to Earth.
It clung so severely to the moonwalking space suits, that even brushing each other off before returning to the module effectively did nothing to remove the dust.
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LLM predictions for 2026, shared with Oxide and Friends • Simon Willison
Simon Willison:
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In 2023, saying that LLMs write garbage code was entirely correct. For most of 2024 that stayed true. In 2025 that changed, but you could be forgiven for continuing to hold out. In 2026 the quality of LLM-generated code will become impossible to deny.
I base this on my own experience—I’ve spent more time exploring AI-assisted programming than most.
The key change in 2025 (see my overview for the year) was the introduction of “reasoning models” trained specifically against code using Reinforcement Learning. The major labs spent a full year competing with each other on who could get the best code capabilities from their models, and that problem turns out to be perfectly attuned to RL since code challenges come with built-in verifiable success conditions.
Since Claude Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2 came out in November and December respectively the amount of code I’ve written by hand has dropped to a single digit percentage of my overall output. The same is true for many other expert programmers I know.
At this point if you continue to argue that LLMs write useless code you’re damaging your own credibility.
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There are predictions for the one-year, three-year and six-year timeline. Earlier on Tuesday, Willison pointed to one of his three-year predictions – “Someone will build a new browser using mainly AI-assisted coding and it won’t even be a surprise” – and observed “MiniJinja isn’t anywhere close to the scope of a web browser, but it’s still a noteworthy step towards this three year prediction I made last week”.
Observe that his six-year prediction is “Typing code by hand will go the way of punch cards”. Worth reading through all his predictions! There’s good new for parrots (this week’s theme, apparently – send in your parrot links) included.
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Mastodon creator shares what went wrong with Threads and ponders the future of the fediverse • Coy Wolf
Jon Henshaw interviews Eugen Rochko, creator of Mastodon:
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JH: I know the general answer to why people aren’t there [on Mastodon rather than other social networks]: their audience isn’t. And for many companies, they can’t advertise, and I know that’s important to them. With all that said, what do you think it’s gonna take in society, with technology, something political, or whatever, to get people to finally move over into something like we’re experiencing on Mastodon?
ER: Good question. I’ve been saying this for a long time: if everybody were using smoke signals, we’d all be on smoke signal dot social. The features matter a lot less than the people who are using the platform, and it’s always been that way.
It can sometimes be a bit misleading when you get a lot of ideas and feature requests in a community, and the conversations become, “We definitely need feature X to grow because that’s what’s stopping people from using the platform.” While that’s true in some cases, the sad reality is that any flaw can be overlooked as long as the people you want to reach are there. And that’s why so many people are still using X, which, by the way, is an absolutely god-awful platform.
The most basic answer to the question is that there needs to be more knowledge about what the Fediverse gives you, and that requires more knowledge about what the other platforms take away from you. I think there are promising developments on this front because more and more people care about digital sovereignty. People no longer want to rely on US tech companies, especially if they live in Europe, Asia, or anywhere else on Earth. And what Mastodon and the fediverse offer is a social media platform in your country, local to you, not subject to whatever is happening in the US or to any third-party developers of the software. And I think as more people and organizations realize this, the easier it becomes to convince others to join and use Mastodon on a personal and organizational level.
JH: I love that answer. It’s gonna take education. That answer actually excites me.
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As Benedict Evans observes, this is exactly like the Marxist idea of “false consciousness”. Who’s going to educate these people into disliking the networks they’ve been on for ages to switch over to one where they’d have to start all over again?
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Coal power generation falls in China and India for first time since 1970s • The Guardian
Jillian Ambrose:
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Coal power generation fell in China and India last year for the first time since the 1970s, in a “historic” moment that could bring a decline in global emissions, according to analysis.
The simultaneous fall in coal-powered electricity in the world’s biggest coal-consuming countries had not happened since 1973, according to analysts at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, and was driven by a record roll-out of clean energy projects.
The research, commissioned by the climate news website Carbon Brief, found that electricity generated by coal plants fell by 1.6% in China and by 3% in India last year, after the boom in clean energy across both countries was more than enough to meet their rising demand for energy.
“The drop in coal power and record increase in clean energy in China and India marks a historic moment,” according to the report, which could be “a sign of things to come”.
Together, the countries drove more than 90% of the increase in global carbon emissions between 2015 and 2024, meaning a permanent reduction in coal use could bring a peak in the world’s coal consumption and global emissions.
China added more than 300GW of solar power and 100GW of wind power last year – together, more than five times the UK’s total existing power generation capacity – which are both “clear new records for China and, therefore, for any country ever”, the report said.
India added 35GW of solar, 6GW of wind and 3.5GW of hydropower last year, according to the analysis. The faster clean-energy growth made up 44% of the reduction in India’s coal and gas, compared with the previous five years, marking the first time that clean-energy growth has played a significant role in driving down India’s coal-fired power generation.
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Some petrol stations set to stop selling diesel fuel by 2030 •The Independent
Neil Lancefield:
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Some filling stations in London will stop selling diesel within the next four years as demand dwindles, according to a new report.
The analysis by electric vehicle (EV) think tank New AutoMotive also predicted that many of the roughly 8,400 filling stations across the UK will have stopped selling the fuel by 2035. It predicted this will encourage more motorists to switch to EVs.
Diesel vehicle numbers and fuel use are consistently falling nationwide. In 10 years, there will only be about 250,000 diesel cars left on the roads, the report forecast, down from 15.5 million as of the end of June 2025.
London is expected to be the UK’s first city with no diesel cars. The expansion of the ultra-low emission zone in 2023 means using a diesel car registered before September 2015 anywhere in the capital incurs a £12.50 daily fee.
The report stated: “It is likely that some, and perhaps many, filling stations in London will stop stocking diesel before the end of the decade.” It added: “Nationwide, it is clear that diesel fuel sales are falling, and this is being driven by the reduction in car numbers. Whilst it is impossible to accurately predict when the majority of filling stations will stop stocking diesel, it is clear that there is a distinct possibility that many will over the 2030s.”
Some filling stations now offer EV charging. The Petrol Retailers Association (PRA) said last year only 57% of its members believe fuel will be a core source of their revenue in a decade.
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I think close to 0% of filling stations find fuel is a core source of their profits. The same might be true for electricity – but people will probably take longer to charge their cars (at least to begin with), offering more time to sell things to customers.
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2025 Holiday PC shipments exceed expectations as vendors accelerate inventory purchases amid supply concerns • IDC
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Global PC shipments grew 9.6% year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2025, reaching 76.4m units, according to preliminary results from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. The results cap off a tumultuous year for the PC market, marked by the end of support for Windows 10, which drove a wave of upgrade demand, and early year tariff concerns that prompted vendors to pull forward more inventory than originally planned. While the holiday season typically drives stronger demand, the surge in late 2025 was further amplified by emerging memory shortages that led buyers and brands to secure inventory ahead of anticipated price increases in 2026.
“IDC expects that the PC market will be far different in 12 months given how quickly the memory situation is evolving,” said Jean Philippe Bouchard, research vice-president with IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Device Trackers. “Beyond the obvious pressure on prices of systems, already announced by certain manufacturers, we might also see PC memory specifications be lowered on average to preserve memory inventory on hand. The year ahead is shaping up to be extremely volatile.”
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For perspective: the peak of the PC market was in 3Q-4Q 2011, when 95m PCs were sold in each quarter. Since then, sales have fallen; the 76.4m figure is large in that 15-year period. (Last year would have been about 70m.) RAM prices have risen on a hockey stick curve since then – by about fourfold. The reason why was well expressed in this X post:
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The reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that has not yet been produced was purchased with non-existent money to be installed in GPUs that also have not yet been produced, in order to place them in data centers that have not yet been built, powered by infrastructure that may never appear, to satisfy demand that does not actually exist and to obtain profit that is mathematically impossible.
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Don’t compare it to the US bank/housing bubble though!
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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 