Ring-necked parakeets in Hertfordshire have developed a taste for.. mortar. CC-licensed photo by Marie Hale on Flickr.
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A selection of 11 links for you. No crackers? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
My Fitbit buzzed – and I understood enshittification • Software Design: Tidy First?
Kent Beck:
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My Fitbit started buzzing at me a year ago. “It looks like you’re exercising.”
Yeah. No shit. I’m walking. I know I’m exercising. I’m the one doing it.
I didn’t ask for this notification. I don’t want this notification. Nobody wants to be told what they’re already doing. And yet, here we are.
I was annoyed for about thirty seconds. Then I started thinking about what it must be like to be a product developer inside Fitbit. That’s the advantage of walking as exercise. Time to think.
You’re a product owner. You have a feature to ship: “Automatic Exercise Detection.” It’s a reasonable feature. The watch notices when you start moving in exercise-like ways and begins tracking.
But here’s your problem: how do you know the feature is working? How do you prove it’s valuable? How do you keep your job?
You need metrics. You need numbers that go up.
So you add a notification. “It looks like you’re exercising.” Now you can measure engagement. Users are responding to your feature. They’re seeing it. They’re interacting with it. Your numbers go up. Your feature is a success. You get to stay employed.
Then users get annoyed. Some of them complain. So you add a setting to turn it off. But you default it to “on” because that keeps your numbers up. Most users won’t find the setting. Most users will just… tolerate it.
I can’t blame this product owner. They’re playing the only game available to them. The company set up incentives that reward exactly this behavior. What else were they supposed to do?
I’ve been thinking about this pattern ever since Cory Doctorow coined “enshittification” to describe how platforms decay. But I don’t think we’ve been precise enough about the mechanism.
It’s not that companies decide to make their products worse. Nobody wakes up thinking, “Let’s annoy our users today.” The mechanism is subtler and more tragic
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A clever, sympathetic post which looks at how this happens with what seem like entirely reasonable decisions that lead, inexorably, to bad outcomes.
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Asus confirms its smartphone business is on indefinite hiatus • Ars Technica
Ryan Whitwam:
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Asus used to be a major player in the Android device ecosystem, offering myriad phones, tablets, phones that turned into tablets, and tablets that turned into PCs (sort of). The rapidly expanding market and advancing technology in the late 2000s and early 2010s left room for companies like Asus to operate alongside bigger OEMs like Samsung and Apple. Those were the days when every smartphone preference was served, from keyboarded sliders, to devices with integrated projectors, to the flat slab phones that eventually won out.
Today, smartphones have become a mature technology, and there simply isn’t as much room for improvement year-to-year. Combine that with rising prices, and people are apt to keep their devices longer. The continued rise of Chinese OEMs like Vivo, Xiaomi, and Huawei also makes it more difficult for niche players—particularly those focused on markets outside the US—to earn money designing and manufacturing a new smartphone every year. And as soon as you stop doing that, other brands are faster and more well-supported when the time does come to pick up a new phone.
So far, no Android device maker that has taken a break from releasing phones has ever ramped back up. Just ask LG, which once traded blows with hometown rival Samsung in smartphones. LG’s mobile division lost money for years, leading it to scale back its release schedule in 2019. At the time, the company was adamant it would release new phones when it had a good reason. A few years later, LG’s mobile division called it quits. [Sony also gave up on smartphones in the Twenty-teens – Overspill Ed]
The possible end of Asus phones further narrows the market, leaving phone buyers with fewer choices. That doesn’t matter to Asus, though, which is a company that exists to make money. While announcing an indefinite pause in smartphone releases, Shih also noted that the company saw a 26.1% increase in revenue for 2025, thanks in large part to a doubling of its AI server business.
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My reaction is the same as yours: Asus had a smartphone business?
Threads edges out X in daily mobile users, new data shows • TechCrunch
Sarah Perez:
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A report from market intelligence firm Similarweb suggests that Meta’s Threads is now seeing more daily usage than Elon Musk’s X on mobile devices. While X still dominates Threads on the web, the Threads mobile app for iOS and Android has continued to see an increase in daily active users over the past several months.
Similarweb’s data shows that Threads had 141.5 million daily active users on iOS and Android as of January 7, 2026, after months of growth, while X has 125 million daily active users on mobile devices.
This appears to be the result of longer-term trends, rather than a reaction to the recent X controversies, where users were discovered using the platform’s integrated AI, Grok, to create non-consensual nude images of women, including, sometimes minors. Concern around the deepfake images has now prompted California’s attorney general to open an investigation into Grok, following similar investigations by other regions, like the UK, EU, India, Brazil, and many more.
The drama on X also led social networking startup Bluesky to see an increase in app installs in recent days.
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All this may be true, but I’ve never seen a post on Threads go viral across other networks. It seems to be a write-only network, or some sort of black hole in social media: stuff goes in but never comes out.
As for Bluesky, the stats seem to show a small uptick – but it’s still very much a minority pursuit.
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October 2021: Adobe’s Scott Belsky on how NFTs will change creativity • The Verge
In October 2021 Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel interviewed Adobe’s chief product officer Scott Belsky:
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NP: I have a quote here from a Medium post that you wrote: “The NFT world is likely the greatest unlock of artist opportunity in a hundred-plus years. This isn’t a suboptimal or fringe version of the real-world art economy. It is a vastly improved one.” I would say I’m maybe less bullish on NFTs, but tell me why you think they’re so revolutionary.
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SB: And let me be clear; I’m revolutionary on the technology of NFTs. I am not suggesting that the current boom of people trading them and buying them and selling them and these series and all that stuff is here to stay. In fact, my opinion would be that there’s going to be more crashes before more booms. However, I have just never seen a more empowering and better-aligned system for creativity than NFTs. You make an NFT and you not only get the primary sale revenue of it, but then you also, based on the contract you’re using, can get a percentage of every secondary sale forever. That blows out of the water any other form of art, in galleries and anything else for that matter — the attribution is always there for you. You always have a connection to your collectors.
Again, it doesn’t exist in the real world with artists. It’s very good luck if you can even ever meet the artist that made your work. Just when you go down the line, it’s just better, better, better, better, better, better. And what it’s incentivizing is creativity. Artists are realizing, “Oh my goodness, I should make these NFTs that have this nature to them and I can airdrop new versions of this NFT to my collectors, just surprising them, delighting them, and I can have a relationship with them.
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A nice little bit of Totally Wrong, just to remind you that just because someone is in an exalted position at a Big Tech Company, it doesn’t mean they have the faintest idea about how things are going to pan out. Of course Elon Musk has been proving this to us again and again (along with making ridiculous predictions that can never come true), but it’s good to know the lack of insight goes much wider.
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Parakeets feeding on Welwyn barn wall display “Amazonian behaviour” • BBC News
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A flock of ring-necked parakeets that were filmed feasting on the wall of a 19th Century barn were echoing Amazonian feeding habits, an expert has explained.
A video of the birds, who were on a farm near Welwyn in Hertfordshire, was shared widely on social media last month.
Jack Baddams, an ornithologist and researcher for the BBC’s Springwatch programme, explained the parakeets were eating the barn’s mortar to consume its minerals and salts to supplement their diet: “This was really cool when I saw this video because I’ve seen a similar behaviour out in the Amazon.”
Natalie Bosher, who owns the barn, said: “I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing in Hertfordshire.”
The species are the UK’s only naturalised parrot, external.
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In Hertfordshire! Might make for an interesting insurance claim. “Cause of barn collapse: parakeets eating mortar.”
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New study reaffirms blue zones’ longevity claims • Longevity Technology
Kyle Umipig:
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“Blue zones” have occupied a strange place in the longevity conversation. Celebrated by wellness circles. Questioned by critics and skeptics. And of course, inevitably, caught in the crossroads between science and self-help.
These regions – including Okinawa in Japan, Sardinia in Italy, Ikaria in Greece and Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula – are known for producing unusually high numbers of people who live well into their 90s and beyond. Recently, however, critics outside the field of gerontology have argued that blue zones may be built on shaky foundations.
Now, a new peer-reviewed paper published in The Gerontologist offers the most detailed scientific response yet, and it lands firmly in defense of blue zones.
The paper, The validity of blue zones demography: a response to critiques, is leaving a straightforward message: the ages reported in the original blue zones have been validated using some of the strictest methods available in modern demographic science.
According to author Dr Steven Austad, Scientific Director of the American Federation for Aging Research, while remarkable assertions regarding lifespan require equally remarkable proof, the research demonstrates that the original blue zones consistently meet or exceed the rigorous global standards used to verify extreme longevity.
This is not a defense built on belief, but based on decades of work designed precisely to address one historical reality: that people have exaggerated their ages for centuries.
In this debate, there is one simple question: how do researchers know someone is really 100 years old? The study authors said the answer lies in cross-checking. Rather than relying on self-reported ages, blue zone research draws from multiple independent records. These include civil birth and death certificates, church archives, military and electoral registries and detailed family genealogies.
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I remain doubtful about this: the debunking of the “blue zones” concept in 2023 was pretty thorough, pointing out that many of the birth certificates were unreliable, and that some of the people weren’t actually alive – they were scams on the pension system.
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He called himself an ‘untouchable hacker god’. But who was behind the biggest crime Finland has ever known? • The Guardian
Jenny Kleeman:
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At 2am on 23 October 2020 – the day before the emails began to arrive in tens of thousands of inboxes – ransom_man had uploaded a much larger file. It contained every record of every single patient on Vastaamo’s database. Everyone’s therapy notes had already been published, for free, for everyone in the world to see.
Who was behind the biggest crime Finland had ever known? And might they have been motivated by something other than money? I have spent 18 months trying to answer these questions, following threads across Europe and the US. They culminated in a visit to a prison, and one of the most chilling conversations I have ever had.
…After ransom_man started leaking patient records to put pressure on the company, [security specialist and former cybercrime detective Antti] Kurittu kept a close eye on the server being used to publish them. He had a hunch whoever was behind this was either Finnish, or had lived in Finland for a long time: they knew which famous names to flaunt from the patient records.
…Police made a micropayment of 0.1 bitcoins to ransom_man. They were able to determine that, when it was laundered into real-world currency, it was transferred into [known hacker Aleksanteri “Julius”] Kivimäki’s bank account. The home folder ransom_man had accidentally uploaded had led the police to some servers, one of which had been paid for using a credit card linked to him – the same one he’d been using to pay for Apple services and an OnlyFans subscription.
…On 30 April 2024, Kivimäki was found guilty of all charges – including 9,600 counts of aggravated invasion of privacy and more than 21,300 counts of attempted aggravated extortion – and sentenced to six years and three months in prison: a long stretch by Finnish standards, but shy of the seven-year maximum he could have received. His appeal against his sentence is currently under way.
Even if his conviction is upheld, he will be a free man by the end of this year.
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Hardly surprising that someone who hacked a Finnish organisation is Finnish: it’s a uniquely difficult language, unrelated to its Nordic neighbours, so Kurittu’s job was surely made a lot easier. Most hackers grow out of it; Kivimäki is 28, but the interview in the article makes him sound like a psychopath.
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Is this man the future of music – or its executioner? AI evangelist Mikey Shulman says he’s making pop, not slop • The Guardian
Eamonn Forde:
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There remains debate about where exactly Suno sourced the music to train its systems – essentially breaking music into data strands for cataloguing – before its licensing deals were in place. “We train our models on medium- and high-quality music we can find on the open internet,” wrote Shulman in a 2024 blogpost. Suno’s initial legal defence was that this constituted fair use, and the music it drew on did not require prior permission. The record industry thought differently. “Fair use,” countered the RIAA, does not apply “when the output seeks to ‘substitute’ for the work copied.”
I ask Shulman what he means by the “open internet”. There is a clear distinction between what is copyrighted (recordings are typically protected for 70 years) and what is in the public domain. “Copyright is a different thing,” he says. “I can’t get into too many specifics because there is active legal stuff going on, and also some of it is trade secrets.”
Could Suno’s philosophy of “democratising” music-making be inherently anti-art? What once sprang from extraordinary human creativity now becomes ordinary. Shulman insists that, as with digital recording or sampling, this is just another example of how technology “pushes music forward”, how “new people get discovered” and “new genres get invented”.
The issue of so-called AI slop is wholly subjective, he says. “I made a really funny song with my four-year-old yesterday morning. That is ‘slop’ to you – you don’t care about it – but I love it. It’s fantastic.” He is keen to stress, meanwhile, that music generated by Suno can be extremely high quality.
And AI-powered music is flooding streaming services: Deezer says more than a third of music delivered to it each day is AI (equal to 50,000 tracks), and 70% of streams of AI music on Deezer are fraudulent (scammers get cheaply made AI tracks on to such services, then use bots to manipulate streams at scale in order to get royalty payments, although services are increasingly wise to this).
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Inventor building AI-powered suicide chamber • Futurism
Frank Landymore:
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The inventor of a controversial suicide pod is making sure his device keeps up with the times by augmenting it with AI tech — which, we regret to inform you, is not merely some sort of dark joke.
“One of the parts to the device which hadn’t been finished, but is now finished, is the artificial intelligence,” the inventor, Philip Nitschke, told the Daily Mail in a new interview.
Named the Sarco pod after the ancient sarcophagus, the euthanasia chamber, first built in 2019, has been championed by the pro-assisted dying organization The Last Resort. In 2024, it was used to facilitate the suicide of a 64-year-old woman in Switzerland. The 3D-printed pod is activated when the person seeking to take their own life presses a button, filling the sealed, futuristic-looking coffin with nitrogen that causes the user to lose consciousness and “peacefully” pass away within a few minutes.
To date, the woman’s death in Switzerland is the only case of the Sarco pod seeing real-world action. Soon after she died, Swiss authorities showed up at the sylvan cabin where the pod was located and arrested the late Florian Willet, then co-president of Last Resort, who was supervising her death, on suspicion of aiding and abetting a suicide. He was ultimately released two months later.
Assisted dying is technically legal in Switzerland, but only if the person seeking suicide is deemed to have the mental capacity to make the decision, and only if they carry out the suicide themselves, rather than a third-party.
That last bit is why the patient presses the button to activate the chamber, a workaround that stands on legally shaky ground as it is (hence Willet’s arrest). Even more contestable is determining whether the patient is capable of making their mortal decision — which, of course, is where AI enters the picture.
As Nitschke was designing a “Double Dutch” version of the Sarco pod that would allow couples to die together, he stumbled on the idea of using AI to administer a psychiatric “test” to determine their mental capacity. If they pass the AI’s judgment, it activates the “power to switch on the Sarco.”
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To be honest, I’m not reassured by AI entering the decision tree at that point, or at any point potentially involving my death.
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The longest solar eclipse for 100 years is coming. Don’t miss it • WIRED
Jorge Garay:
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The duration of a total solar eclipse always varies. In April 2024, the eclipse that crossed North America lasted 4 minutes and 28 seconds. By contrast, the one that will reach Spain in August 2026 will only last 1 minute and 43 seconds. In less than two years, both will be put to shame by the longest conjunction of the century.
According to NASA’s solar eclipse calendar, the longest solar eclipse in 100 years will occur on August 2, 2027. Its total phase will last 6 minutes and 23 seconds. During that time, regions of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East will be under the moon’s shadow.
According to the NASA map, the eclipse will begin in Morocco and southern Spain. It will then advance through Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, culminating in Yemen and the coast of Somalia. Its maximum duration will be recorded in Egypt, specifically in Luxor and Aswan, famous for their funerary temples.
Despite rampant conspiracy theories around every solar eclipse, they don’t affect your health or have any physical impact on the planet. It is a natural and predictable astronomical phenomenon, the result of the interaction between the sun, the moon and the Earth.
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I’ve never been in a totality; people say it’s an amazing experience. Maybe Morocco would be the place to see it?
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America is slow-walking into a Polymarket disaster • The Atlantic
Saahil Desai:
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The problem is that prediction markets are ushering in a world in which news becomes as much about gambling as about the event itself. This kind of thing has already happened to sports, where the language of “parlays” and “covering the spread” has infiltrated every inch of commentary. ESPN partners with DraftKings to bring its odds to SportsCenter and Monday Night Football; CBS Sports has a betting vertical; FanDuel runs its own streaming network. But the stakes of Greenland’s future are more consequential than the NFL playoffs.
The more that prediction markets are treated like news, especially heading into another election, the more every dip and swing in the odds may end up wildly misleading people about what might happen, or influencing what happens in the real world. Yet it’s unclear whether these sites are meaningful predictors of anything. After the Golden Globes, Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan excitedly posted that his site had correctly predicted 26 of 28 winners, which seems impressive—but Hollywood awards shows are generally predictable. One recent study found that Polymarket’s forecasts in the weeks before the 2024 election were not much better than chance.
…The irony of prediction markets is that they are supposed to be a more trustworthy way of gleaning the future than internet clickbait and half-baked punditry, but they risk shredding whatever shared trust we still have left. The suspiciously well-timed bets that one Polymarket user placed right before the capture of Nicolás Maduro may have been just a stroke of phenomenal luck that netted a roughly $400,000 payout. Or maybe someone with inside information was looking for easy money. Last week, when White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt abruptly ended her briefing after 64 minutes and 30 seconds, many traders were outraged, because they had predicted (with 98% odds) that the briefing would run past 65 minutes. Some suspected, with no evidence, that Leavitt had deliberately stopped before the 65-minute mark to turn a profit. (When I asked the White House about this, the spokesperson Davis Ingle told me in a statement, “This is a 100% Fake News narrative.”)
Unintentionally or not, this is what happens when media outlets normalize treating every piece of news and entertainment as something to wager on. As Tarek Mansour, Kalshi’s CEO, has said, his long-term goal is to “financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.”
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(Gift link for the full article.)
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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 