Would you know, or care, that the meat in your burger was grown in a bioreactor? A lot of people care, even if they don’t know. CC-licensed photo by Ian Turk on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Chewing it 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.
Sony reportedly mulling PS6 delay while Nintendo eyes Switch 2 price hike as AI-driven RAM shortages continue • Eurogamer.net
Matt Wales:
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Sony is reportedly looking to push back the launch of PlayStation 6 in response to memory shortages caused by tech giants’ continuing AI expansion drive, while Nintendo is said to be considering a price hike for Switch 2.
Memory shortages and soaring prices have made headlines in recent times, both issues arising as tech companies continue their push into AI. Substantial amounts of RAM are required to power AI platforms, so as the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta continue to throw money at AI data centres in order to stay competitive, the demand for RAM has increased dramatically.
Supply issues and spiralling costs could have a significant impact on consumer electronics, with Valve having already announced a delay for its Steam Machines as it grapples with memory and storage shortages. Similarly, Microsoft is reportedly looking to increase the price of its Xbox Series X/S yet again in response to global RAM shortages.
As to how Xbox’s closest rivals might respond, Bloomberg – citing “people familiar with the company’s thinking” – now reports Sony is considering shifting the release of PlayStation 6 to 2028 or 2029. While the company has never publicly discussed a launch window for its next-gen console, documents leaked in 2022 suggested it wouldn’t release PS6 until at least 2027.
Since then, reports have surfaced claiming Sony is looking to begin manufacturing its next-gen console early next year for a 2027 release, but some analysts have more recently suggested a launch in 2028 or beyond is now likelier.
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The blast radius from the AI ..project? continues to widen. Perhaps Sony is hoping either that by 2028 the AI bubble will have collapsed, and prices will be approaching reason, or else that supply will have expanded to meet the enlarged demand. Either way, the disruption isn’t going to please people. Especially gamers.
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Meta’s own research found parental supervision doesn’t really help curb teens’ compulsive social media use • TechCrunch
Sarah Perez:
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An internal research study at Meta dubbed “Project MYST” [for Meta Youth and Social Trends], created in partnership with the University of Chicago, found that parental supervision and controls — such as time limits and restricted access — had little impact on kids’ compulsive use of social media. The study also found that kids who experienced stressful life events were more likely to lack the ability to moderate their social media use appropriately.
This was one of the notable claims revealed during testimony at the social media addiction trial that began last week in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The plaintiff in the lawsuit is identified by her initials “KGM” or her first name, “Kaley.” She, along with her mother and others joining the case, is accusing social media companies of creating “addictive and dangerous” products that led the young users to suffer anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia, eating disorders, self-harm, suicidal ideation, and more.
The case is now one of several landmark trials that will take place this year, which accuse social media companies of harming children. The results of these lawsuits will impact these companies’ approach to their younger users and could prompt regulators to take further action.
In this case, the plaintiff sued Meta, YouTube, ByteDance (TikTok), and Snap, but the latter two companies had settled their claims before the trial’s start.
In the jury trial now underway in L.A., Kaley’s lawyer, Mark Lanier, brought up an internal study at Meta, which he said found evidence that Meta knew of, yet didn’t publicize, these specific harms.
In Project MYST, Meta’s research concluded that “parental and household factors have little association with teens’ reported levels of attentiveness to their social media use.”
Or, in other words, even when parents try to control their children’s social media use, either by using parental controls or even just household rules and supervision, it doesn’t impact whether or not the child will overuse social media or use it compulsively. The study was based on a survey of 1,000 teens and their parents about their social media use.
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Wouldn’t it be amazing if Meta were to publish all the studies like this that it carries out internally. Instead they come out in dribs and drabs at trial or in embarrassing media reports, and it looks shady.
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Lab-grown meat exists, but the problem is nobody wants to eat it • My Digital Dive
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In 2013, scientists unveiled the first lab-grown burger at a cost of $330,000. By 2023, the FDA approved cultivated chicken for sale. The price had dropped to around $10-$30 per pound, and over $3bn in investor money had poured into more than 175 companies developing meat grown from animal cells instead of slaughtered animals.
The promise is straightforward: real meat, no slaughter required. You could eat beef without killing cattle, chicken without industrial farming, steak without ethical compromise. The technology works. Federal regulators approved it as safe. And nearly a third of US states have banned it or are trying to. Not because it’s dangerous — because it threatens something deeper than food safety.
Start with a small sample of animal cells — a biopsy, not a slaughter. Place them in a bioreactor with nutrients. The cells multiply, forming muscle tissue identical to conventional meat at the cellular level. Nutritionally comparable, same protein content, but grown without raising and killing an animal.
The process uses 64-90% less land than conventional meat production and drastically reduces greenhouse gas emissions. No factory farms, no slaughterhouses, no ethical compromise for people who love meat but hate industrial animal agriculture. For vegetarians who gave up meat for ethical reasons, it offers something impossible before: guilt-free steak.
…Here’s where the dream hits reality. Consumer surveys show people perceive conventional meat as tastier and healthier than lab-grown alternatives. Fewer consumers are willing to try cultivated options than expected. The words “lab-grown” and “cultivated” don’t exactly make mouths water.
Something about meat grown in a bioreactor triggers deep discomfort for many people, even those who claim to care about animal welfare and environmental impact. It’s the same psychological barrier that made “Frankenfood” stick as a label for GMOs. Meat is supposed to come from animals, raised on farms, connected to land and tradition. Growing it in a facility feels wrong to people in ways they struggle to articulate.
At $10-$30 per pound, cultivated meat still costs more than conventional options despite the massive reduction from the $330,000 burger. Companies need economies of scale to compete on price. Scaling requires market access and consumer acceptance. But before they can build that acceptance, states are shutting down the possibility entirely.
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Maybe it’s the word “bioreactor”? I think it would put me off. But it’s worth bearing in mind too that cattle don’t just produce meat. (Thanks Wendy G for the link.)
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99% of adults over 40 have shoulder “abnormalities” on an MRI, study finds • Ars Technica
Beth Mole:
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Up to a third of people worldwide have shoulder pain; it’s one of the most common musculoskeletal complaints. But medical imaging might not reveal the problem—in fact, it could even cloud it.
In a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine this week, 99% of adults over 40 were found to have at least one abnormality in a rotator cuff on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The rotator cuff is the group of muscles and tendons in a shoulder joint that keeps the upper arm bone securely in the shoulder socket—and is often blamed for pain and other symptoms. The trouble is, the vast majority of people in the study had no shoulder problems.
The finding calls into question the growing use of MRIs to try to diagnose shoulder pain—and, in turn, the growing problem of overtreatment of rotator cuff (RC) abnormalities, which includes partial- and full-thickness tears as well as signs of tendinopathy (tendon swelling and thickening).
“While we cannot dismiss the possibility that some RC tears may contribute to shoulder symptoms, our findings indicate that we are currently unable to distinguish clinically meaningful MRI abnormalities from incidental findings,” the study authors concluded.
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The shoulder joint is (according to a physio) the most complicated in the body because of its multiple degrees of freedom. But the problem of overdiagnosis through MRIs (and CAT scans and X-rays) is quite widespread throughout medicine.
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Police arresting 1,000 paedophile suspects a month across UK • The Guardian
Vikram Dodd:
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Child sexual abuse in the UK is soaring, police have said, with 1,000 paedophile suspects being arrested each month and the number of children being rescued from harm rising by 50% in the last five years.
The National Crime Agency said the growth in offending across the UK was driven by technology and linked to the radicalisation of offenders in online forums, encouraging people to view images of child sexual abuse by reassuring them it was normal.
Most contact with children happened on mainstream social media platforms, with algorithms pushing paedophilic material to people who have shown a previous interest in it.
The significant increase in every measure “really worries us”, said Rob Jones, the NCA’s director general of operations.
Leads about people interested in sexually abusing children had risen tenfold in a decade, he said, with 1,200 children a month being safeguarded.
Jones added that the majority of images of abuse were “known images” that had been in circulation for some time, and that tech companies had the ability to stop them.
“The threat is getting worse, despite our best efforts… There is more access to children online,” he said.
“Children are more reliant on the internet, and what we see from offenders is a move to collaborate and coordinate activities on the dark web, but to use the open web as a discovery platform to identify and abuse vulnerable children.”
Police were “racing” to get to the worst offenders, who were in positions of trust or had access to children and made up 15% of more than 33,000 leads last year.
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The obvious question is whether these people were doing the same before the internet was around, and the answer seems to be: no. The availability of this content has made it worse.
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KPMG partner fined over using AI to pass AI test • Financial Times
Nic Fildes:
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A partner at KPMG Australia has been fined A$10,000 (US$7,000) by the Big Four firm after using AI tools to cheat on an internal training course about using AI.
The unnamed partner was forced to redo the test after uploading training materials into an AI platform to help answer questions on the use of the fast-evolving technology.
More than two dozen staff have been caught over this financial year using AI tools for internal exams, according to KPMG.
The incident is the latest example of a professional services company struggling with staff using artificial intelligence to cheat on exams or when producing work for clients.
“Like most organisations, we have been grappling with the role and use of AI as it relates to internal training and testing,” said Andrew Yates, chief executive of KPMG Australia. “It’s a very hard thing to get on top of given how quickly society has embraced it.”
He added: “Given the everyday use of these tools, some people breach our policy. We take it seriously when they do. We are also looking at ways to strengthen our approach in the current self-reporting regime.”
The world’s largest accounting body, the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, scrapped remote tests late last year, saying its safeguards could not keep up with the “sophistication” of cheating systems. All of the Big Four accounting firms have been hit with fines over cheating scandals across multiple countries in recent years.
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Seems like the partner was doing.. exactly what one should do.
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How generative and agentic AI shift concern from technical debt to cognitive debt • Margaret Storey
Margaret-Anne Storey:
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The term technical debt is often used to refer to the accumulation of design or implementation choices that later make the software harder and more costly to understand, modify, or extend over time. Technical debt nicely captures that “human understanding” also matters, but the words “technical debt” conjure up the notion that the accrued debt is a property of the code and effort needs to be spent on removing that debt from code.
Cognitive debt, a term gaining traction recently, instead communicates the notion that the debt compounded from going fast lives in the brains of the developers and affects their lived experiences and abilities to “go fast” or to make changes. Even if AI agents produce code that could be easy to understand, the humans involved may have simply lost the plot and may not understand what the program is supposed to do, how their intentions were implemented, or how to possibly change it.
Technical debt lives in the code; cognitive debt lives in developers’ minds.
Cognitive debt is likely a much bigger threat than technical debt, as AI and agents are adopted. Peter Naur reminded us some decades ago that a program is more than its source code. Rather a program is a theory that lives in the minds of the developer(s) capturing what the program does, how developer intentions are implemented, and how the program can be changed over time. Usually this theory is not just in the minds of one developer but fragments of this theory are distributed across the minds of many, if not thousands, of other developers.
I saw this dynamic play out vividly in an entrepreneurship course I taught recently. Student teams were building software products over the semester, moving quickly to ship features and meet milestones. But by weeks 7 or 8, one team hit a wall. They could no longer make even simple changes without breaking something unexpected. When I met with them, the team initially blamed technical debt: messy code, poor architecture, hurried implementations. But as we dug deeper, the real problem emerged: no one on the team could explain why certain design decisions had been made or how different parts of the system were supposed to work together. The code might have been messy, but the bigger issue was that the theory of the system, their shared understanding, had fragmented or disappeared entirely. They had accumulated cognitive debt faster than technical debt, and it paralyzed them.
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Storey is Professor of Computer Science, University of Victoria. Simon Willison, who has been on top of agentic coding for ages, comments:
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I’ve experienced this myself on some of my more ambitious vibe-code-adjacent projects. I’ve been experimenting with prompting entire new features into existence without reviewing their implementations and, while it works surprisingly well, I’ve found myself getting lost in my own projects.
I no longer have a firm mental model of what they can do and how they work, which means each additional feature becomes harder to reason about, eventually leading me to lose the ability to make confident decisions about where to go next.
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Vibe coded apps are great. Now try to change them to accommodate a changed API or new feature.
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Apple is reportedly planning to launch AI-powered glasses, a pendant, and AirPods • The Verge
Emma Roth:
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Apple is pushing ahead with plans to launch its first pair of smart glasses, along with an AI-powered pendant and camera-equipped AirPods, according to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The three devices come with built-in cameras and will connect to the iPhone, allowing Siri to use “visual context to carry out actions,” Bloomberg reports.
Apple is reportedly aiming to start production of its smart glasses in December, ahead of a 2027 launch. The new device will compete directly with Meta’s lineup of smart glasses and is rumored to feature speakers, microphones, and a high-resolution camera for taking photos and videos, in addition to another lens designed to enable AI-powered features.
The glasses won’t have a built-in display, but they will allow users to make phone calls, interact with Siri, play music, and “take actions based on surroundings,” such as asking about the ingredients in a meal, according to Bloomberg. Apple’s smart glasses could also help users identify what they’re seeing, reference landmarks when offering directions, and remind wearers to complete a task in specific situations, Bloomberg reports.
The company is reportedly planning to develop the frames for the smart glasses in-house, instead of partnering with a third-party company like Meta does with Ray-Ban and Oakley. Prototypes of the glasses use a cable to connect to a battery pack and an iPhone, but Bloomberg reports that “newer versions have the components embedded in the frame.”
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As usual, the secondhand report is written far more comprehensibly than Gurman’s original. Gurman might be good at getting the occasional scoop, but even robots might feel a bit insulted if you called his writing robotic.
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Apple reveals how many iPhones are running iOS 26 • MacRumors
Joe Rossignol:
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Apple has shared updated iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 adoption figures, revealing how many iPhones and iPads are running those software versions.
These adoption numbers are based on iPhones and iPads that transacted on the App Store on February 12, 2026, according to Apple.
The statistics are as follows:
• 74% of all iPhones introduced in the last four years are running iOS 26
• 66% of all iPhones are running iOS 26
• 66% of all iPads introduced in the last four years are running iPadOS 26
• 57% of all iPads are running iPadOS 26Here is how that compares to the iOS 18 adoption figures that Apple shared based on iPhones and iPads that transacted on the App Store on January 21, 2025:
• 76% of all iPhones introduced in the last four years were running iOS 18
• 68% of all iPhones were running iOS 18
• 63% of all iPads introduced in the last four years were running iPadOS 18
• 53% of all iPads were running iPadOS 18.At first glance, the iOS 26 and iOS 18 adoption figures appear to be similar, but this is only because Apple released the iOS 26 statistics later than usual. iOS 26’s statistics are based on devices that transacted with the App Store approximately 150 days after the update was released to the public, compared to 127 days for iOS 18. In other words, iOS 26 was available for around three weeks longer by comparison.
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Ehh, I don’t think the three weeks are really material here. The growing number of devices in use, plus marginal statistical variation, points to this not having any meaningful impact. There aren’t people holding back from iOS 26 per se.
However: if people could revert from iOS 26 to iOS 18, what would the statistics looks like?
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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 