Fuel prices have jumped in response to reduced tanker traffic through the Straits of Hormuz as the Iran conflict intensifies. CC-licensed photo by Images Money on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Electric what? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
A medical journal says the case reports it has published for 25 years are, in fact, fiction • Retraction Watch
Kate Travis and James Heathers:
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A Canadian journal has issued corrections on 138 case reports it published over the last 25 years to add a disclaimer: The cases described are fictional.
Paediatrics & Child Health, the journal of the Canadian Paediatric Society, has published the cases since 2000 in articles for a series for its Canadian Paediatric Surveillance Program. The articles usually start with a case description followed by “learning points” that include statistics, clinical observations and data from CPSP. The peer-reviewed articles don’t state anywhere the cases described are fictional.
The corrections come following a January article in New Yorker magazine that mentioned one of the reports — “Baby boy blue,” a case published in 2010 describing an infant who showed signs of opioid exposure via breast milk while his mother was taking acetaminophen with codeine. The New Yorker article made public an admission by one of the coauthors that the case was made up.
“Based on the New Yorker article, we made the decision to add a correction notice to all 138 publications drawing attention to CPSP studies and surveys to clarify that the cases are fictional,” Joan Robinson, editor-in-chief of Paediatrics & Child Health, told Retraction Watch. “From now on, the body of the case report will specifically state that the case is fictional.”
The move came as a surprise to David Juurlink, professor of medicine and pediatrics at the University of Toronto, who has spent over a decade looking into the claim that infants can receive a meaningful or even lethal dose of opioids via breast milk when their mothers take acetaminophen with codeine.
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What is shocking about this is that other mothers will have had their babies taken away on the basis of the claims in those papers. It’s an astonishing failure of peer review, researcher honesty, and basically everything you thought science was meant to protect against.
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Diesel at 16-month high in UK as Iran war drives oil prices up further • Sky News
James Sillars:
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UK average diesel costs have hit a 16-month high, less than a week after war gripped the Middle East and sent oil costs rocketing.
Global energy prices have been the main financial market focus since Tehran launched attacks against Gulf nations in retaliation for the US-Israeli strikes on its country, disrupting production and deliveries of both oil and natural gas.
The narrow Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, between Iran and the United Arab Emirates, is used to more than 80 tankers a day passing through.
But shipping has been reduced to a trickle amid Iranian attacks and threats, with all the disruption to normal trade flows being quickly reflected in petrol and diesel prices across Europe and the US through higher wholesale prices.
Sky News was told on Tuesday how those for UK diesel had risen by 7p-per-litre and 2p for petrol in the wake of big rises to oil prices on Monday, when financial markets gave their first reaction to the US-led military strikes.
The Petrol Retailers’ Association (PRA) believed at the time that those higher wholesale costs would likely filter through to the pumps over the course of the next few weeks, but it warned that some forecourts would have to pass them on more quickly because of the nature of their fuel-buying contracts.
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The problem with these fossil fuel energy sources, you see, is that their supply is so intermittent and unreliable.
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I verified my LinkedIn identity. Here’s what I actually handed over • THE LOCAL STACK
“Rogi” (or possibly Igor, no last name given):
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I wanted the blue checkmark on LinkedIn. The one that says “this person is real.” In a sea of fake recruiters, bot accounts, and AI-generated headshots, it seemed like a smart thing to do.
So I tapped “verify.” I scanned my passport. I took a selfie. Three minutes later — done. Badge acquired. I felt a tiny dopamine hit of legitimacy.
Then I did what apparently nobody does. I went and read the privacy policy and terms of service.
Not LinkedIn’s. The other company’s.
Wait, what other company?
When you click “verify” on LinkedIn, you’re not giving your passport to LinkedIn. You get redirected to a company called Persona. Full name: Persona Identities, Inc. Based in San Francisco, California.
LinkedIn is their client. You are the face being scanned.
I had never heard of Persona before this. Most people haven’t. That’s kind of the point — they sit invisibly between you and the platforms you trust.
So I downloaded their privacy policy (18 pages) and their terms of service (16 pages). Here’s what I found.
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Turned out that his passport, and data, went far, far beyond LinkedIn or even Persona.
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Bits in, bits out • The Intrinsic Perspective
Erik Hoel:
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there’s a better form of argument about AI, one which I am finally comfortable making: the argument from experience. There simply has been enough time now to see clearly how LLMs transformed the intellectual work of writing, and how this reflects their fundamental nature. My proposal is that we simply extrapolate what has happened to text production to all the other intellectual domains LLMs will ever touch.
For if everything that anyone can do on a computer is soon to be automated (as Andrew Yang is now preaching will happen in the next 12-18 months), then this process should have started with writing years ago. Yet, beyond mass-producing stilted emails and stilted social media posts and stilted essays, the impact of LLMs on writing itself has not really been to improve or accelerate good writing overall. We are not in a glut of good writing. We are in a dearth of it. This is surprising and counterintuitive, because for an LLM, words are its womb, its mother, its literal atoms—yet their impact on writing as a whole has been mostly to generate mountains of slop, while, on the positive side, helping with efficiency and research and editing and feedback, all things that only marginally improve already-good pieces. There are no signs of a burgeoning “text singularity” seen in the words output by our civilization, and words are the most sensitive weathervane to AI capabilities.
If LLMs were a true source of intelligence to rival humans, then discovering them should be like discovering oil. And if we were climbing the curve of an intelligence explosion their surplus intellect would be improving our civilization’s text as a whole in noticeable ways. If LLMs are tools, then we should expect their impacts to be a mirror of us, and concern efficiency and scale, rather than quality, and depend strongly on how people use them.
So let me ask you: if you took an observer from 2016 and teleported them a decade ahead to our time, and then showed them your social media feed or your emails and other media in general, what would their main response be? Would it be “Wow, everything is more intelligent now!” Or would it be “Why is everyone writing like a pod person now?”
It’s been six years since GPT-3, and there has been no “move 37” moment for writing (as there was for AlphaGo’s creative play of Go). Not even close.
…Looking into the crystal ball that the last half-decade represents for writers reveals that, more likely than superintelligence, we are going to enter a world of immense, overwhelming, scientific and philosophical and mathematical slop.
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There’s also a graph showing the number of books on Amazon and their ratings, and that as time has gone on (and AI-written ones more plentiful) the ratings have gone down.
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In Iran war, AI and drones are outpacing global rules of war • Rest of World
Rina Chandran:
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Iran has launched thousands of drones across the Persian Gulf that have hit civilian, commercial, and military targets, upending global oil supplies and grounding thousands of aircraft in one of the busiest transport hubs in the world. These cheaply made and easily deployed UAVs are currently operated by pilots by remote control, but as AI becomes more integrated into militaries, the advancements will become even more pronounced with “unpredictable, risky, and lethal consequences,” Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank, told Rest of World.
The biggest role that AI now has in US military operations in Iran, as well as Venezuela, is in decision-support systems, or AI-powered targeting systems, Feldstein said. AI can process reams of surveillance information, satellite imagery, and other intelligence, and provide insights for potential strikes. The AI systems offer speed, scale, and cost-efficiency, and “are a game-changer,” he said.
“My concern is that untested systems with high degrees of lethality will be relied upon and can potentially lead to catastrophic results — e.g., strikes on civilian structures like hospitals and schools,” Feldstein said. “Additionally, I’m concerned that human accountability will be deemphasized, meaning that human operators will only have a limited means to ensure targeting recommendations are accurate before giving assent to proceed. This will harm accountability and lessen command and control oversight for militaries.”
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It seems unlikely that the world’s powers will sit around a table when this is all over (and what does one mean by “this”, anyway?) to agree a set of rules about the use of AI and/or drones. The artillery shell, the tank, the bomber, the nuclear weapon, and now both AI and drones arriving on the battlefield almost simultaneously all mark disjunctions in how war is fought.
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A visual guide to DNA sequencing • Asimov
Evan DeTurk:
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In the twenty years after the draft human genome was first released, the average sequencing cost per genome fell roughly one hundred thousand-fold, ending up just north of $500. In that same period, the cost to sequence a million letters or “megabase” of DNA fell to six tenths of a cent.2 This plummeting price is due largely to technological innovation, including new sequencing chemistries, computational methods for assembling raw reads into finished genomes, and highly efficient commercial sequencing machines.
Out of the many sequencing methods developed over the decades, five are particularly important. These are their histories.
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This is not short; it is thorough. But it’s also essential and educative. Asimov is a terrific new publication in the science space.
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Netflix acquires Ben Affleck’s AI filmmaker tools startup InterPositive • Variety
Todd Spangler:
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In a rare acquisition, Netflix has bought InterPositive, a startup founded by Ben Affleck that makes AI-powered tools for filmmakers.
Terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed. The entire 16-person InterPositive team of engineers, researchers and creatives will join Netflix through the acquisition, and Affleck will serve as a senior adviser to Netflix to provide ongoing guidance.
While Netflix historically is more often a builder than a buyer, the company said it saw Affleck’s InterPositive as providing a unique set of AI tools that “keeps filmmakers at the center of the process.” Netflix will offer access to InterPositive’s tech to its creative partners and does not have plans to sell it commercially in the marketplace.
Affleck’s L.A.-based company, which has been in stealth mode since he founded it in 2022, does not produce generative AI videos à la OpenAI’s Sora. “It’s not about text-prompting or generating something from nothing,” Affleck said about InterPositive’s approach in a video that Netflix shared with the acquisition announcement. “AI, people mostly think of it as making something from nothing: ‘I’m gonna type something into a computer and it’s gonna give me a movie.’ That’s not what this is.”
…InterPositive began filming a proprietary dataset on a controlled soundstage “with all the familiarities of a full production,” according to Affleck. “I wanted to build a workflow that captures what happens on a set, with vocabulary that matched the language cinematographers and directors already spoke and included the kind of consistency and controls they would expect.”
The startup’s first AI model was trained to understand “visual logic and editorial consistency,” while preserving cinematic rules under real-world production challenges such as missing shots, background replacements or incorrect lighting, Affleck said. “We also built in restraints to protect creative intent, so the tools are designed for responsible exploration while keeping creative decisions in the hands of artists — and ensuring that the benefits of this technology flow directly back to the story they’re trying to tell.”
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Affleck played a dumb guy in Good Will Hunting, but he’s actually very sharp.
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When AI writes almost all code, what happens to software engineering? • The Pragmatic Engineer
Gergely Orosz:
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Unexpectedly, LLMs like Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.2 did amazing jobs on the mid-sized tasks I assigned them: I ended up pushing a few hundred lines of code to production simply by prompting the LLM, reviewing the output, making sure the tests passed (and new tests I prompted also passed!), then prompting it a bit more for some final tweaking.
To add to the magical feeling, I then managed to build production software on my phone: I set up Claude Code for Web by connecting it to my GitHub, which let me instruct the Claude mobile app to make changes to my code and to add/run tests. Claude duly created PRs that triggered GitHub actions (which ran the tests Claude couldn’t) and I found myself reviewing and merging PRs with new functionality purely from my mobile device while travelling. Admittedly, it was low-risk work and all the business logic was covered by automated tests, but I hadn’t previously felt the thrill of “creating” code and pushing it to prod from my phone.
This experience, also shared by many others, suggests to me that a step change is underway in software engineering tooling. In this article – the first of 2026 for this publication – we explore where we are, and what a monumental change like AI writing the lion’s share of code could mean for us developers.
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Among the most intriguing comments from one developer: “What I learned over the course of the year [2025] is that typing out code by hand now frustrates me”.
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CDC issues travel advisory for 32 countries over spread of polio • People.com
Cara Lynn Shultz:
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A travel alert has been issued warning Americans to take precautions against polio, which is spreading in Europe and elsewhere across the globe.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control issued a level 2 alert, cautioning travelers to “practice enhanced precautions” before visiting 32 countries. The agency is advising people to make sure they’re up to date on their polio vaccines, adding that people who plan to travel to the listed countries are eligible for a single-dose booster of the vaccine.
The countries include European travel destinations like Spain, Finland, Germany, and Poland — as well as the U.K.
As the CDC explains, polio‚ which is caused by the extremely contagious poliovirus, is “a crippling and potentially deadly disease that affects the nervous system.” It lives in the feces of an infected person, but can also be spread via eating or drinking food that’s been contaminated.
Most people who contract polio do not exhibit symptoms — or if they do, they experience flu-like fevers, tiredness, nausea, headache, nasal congestion, and sore throat.
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This seems to be nonsense. The European dashboard for polio cases worldwide shows pretty much zero for any country in 2026, and nothing in Europe for 2025.
Is the CDC all right?
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BBC says ‘irreversible’ trends mean it will not survive without major overhaul • The Guardian
Michael Savage:
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The BBC has said it is facing “permanent and irreversible” trends that mean it cannot survive without a major overhaul, as it revealed a stark divergence between the number of people consuming its content and those paying the licence fee.
In its opening response to government talks over its future, the corporation said 94% of people in the UK continued to use the BBC each month, but fewer than 80% of households contributed to the licence fee.
It said the rise of streaming services and digital platforms such as YouTube had caused blurring and confusion around when the licence fee needed to be paid, suggesting there was “a mismatch” between TV licence rules – based on watching live TV – and the nation’s viewing habits.
“The BBC has gone from being a service almost every household paid for and used to one that almost every household uses but millions do not pay for,” it said.
The broadcaster suggested the licence fee could actually fall for some groups and become more progressive if the government found a way to ensure that more people paid for it, closing the gap between those consuming and those funding its output.
The BBC warned that without the change, there would be a “tipping point” at which those still paying the licence fee would resent having to do so, fuelling even greater non-payment. It said the current rules would leave a “diminishing number of people paying for a service designed for and made available to everyone”.
Its official response to the charter renewal process, in which it will negotiate with the government over its future, suggested that other platforms such as Netflix or YouTube could do more to alert people when they were watching content that required a TV licence.
Audiences watching any live TV on the likes of YouTube or streaming platforms need a TV licence, but this is apparently not well known and not effectively enforced.
…Overall, the document acknowledged the massive changes in media consumption to which the BBC was having to adapt. “The precise set of rules that require households to be licensed no longer reflect typical audience behaviour among many households in the UK,” it said.
“The TV licence is predicated upon content being consumed via ‘live TV’ (ie watched as it is being broadcast). But on-demand consumption is not licensable, unless it is BBC content consumed via iPlayer.”
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Sounds like you need better enforcement? That though is difficult and expensive. The puzzle of how you fund the BBC in an age of plenty truly is the Gordian Knot of broadcasting.
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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 