Desalination plants are in widespread use in Gulf states, which rely on their output. But they haven’t been targeted in the latest conflict. Why? CC-licensed photo by GRID-Arendal 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. Salty. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
The talent pipeline is collapsing. Your team will feel it next • The Long Commit
Juan Cruz Martinez:
»
At the biggest tech companies, new graduates went from roughly a third of all hires in 2019 to somewhere around 7% today. In the US, entry-level hiring at the top 15 tech firms fell 25% from 2023 to 2024 alone.
The research paints an even starker picture. A Stanford Digital Economy Lab study analyzing millions of payroll records found that employment for software developers aged 22 to 25 declined nearly 20% from its late-2022 peak, while employment for those over 30 held steady or grew. A Harvard study tracking 62 million workers across 285,000 firms found that when companies adopt generative AI, junior employment drops 9 to 10% within six quarters. Senior employment barely moves.
The trend isn’t limited to quiet budget decisions either. Block cut 40% of its entire workforce just weeks ago, with CEO Jack Dorsey citing AI as the reason. Those weren’t junior-specific cuts, but the underlying logic is the same one driving this whole shift: smaller teams, more AI, fewer humans. Salesforce announced it would halt engineering hiring entirely for 2025, citing AI agents. Klarna froze developer hiring in late 2023 (then reversed course when the strategy failed). A LeadDev survey found that 54% of engineering leaders plan to hire fewer juniors, thanks to AI copilots enabling seniors to handle more.
The reasoning is consistent across every boardroom version of this story: why pay a junior $80-100K plus six months of ramp-up when a senior with AI tools can cover triple the output? The math makes sense. On paper, it looks clean.
I’ve been watching this unfold for two years now, and I believe it’s one of the most short-sighted decisions a generation of engineering leaders is making simultaneously.
I’ve been in this industry for over 20 years. What concerns me isn’t the individual company choosing to slow junior hiring for a quarter or two. It’s the industry-wide retreat happening all at once, with almost no public conversation about what it costs.
«
Soaring fuel prices to cast long shadow across US economy • Financial Times
Myles McCormick, Jamie Smyth, Gregory Meyer, Christian Davies and Martha Muir:
»
The US energy department has warned petrol and diesel prices are unlikely to recede to prewar levels until mid-2027 at the earliest, ratcheting up costs for industries from trucking and farming to airlines and retailers.
Official figures released on Tuesday show US petrol prices rose 19% over the past two weeks to $3.50 a gallon as the Middle East conflict throttled energy supplies, while diesel jumped 28% to $4.86 a gallon.
Petrol is not forecast to drop back below its $2.94 per gallon pre-conflict level before the end of 2027, according to the Energy Information Administration, the energy department’s statistics arm. Diesel — the lifeblood of American industry — will not fall below the $3.81 per gallon it sat at two weeks ago until the middle of next year.
The shift threatens to push up costs for industry, which in turn will ratchet up prices for consumers with far-reaching inflationary impacts for the world’s largest economy.
It will also pile pressure on Donald Trump, who campaigned for the presidency in 2024 on a platform to slash petrol and energy costs. Prices at the pump are now higher than at any time during his two terms in office.
“We’ve got a lot of costs moving their way through the system,” said Tom Kloza, an independent oil analyst. “We’re looking at some really scary inflation ratings — pervasive inflation throughout the country.”
The rise in the price of refined fuel products in the US comes as Iran’s threats to strike ships traversing the Strait of Hormuz have all but halted maritime traffic in an artery through which roughly a fifth of global oil supply flows.
«
The longer this goes on, the more people will ask: why exactly did the US join Israel in the attack on Iran, and what was the expected outcome, after how long? Because everything so far looks like don’t know, don’t know and don’t know. Meanwhile the adverse effects are piling up. If stock markets get spooked then venture capital money might get tighter, and then all the AI data centres get put on hold, and then the AI stimulus to the US economy goes away, and things get bad quickly.
unique link to this extract
How my life got 100x better when i stopped thinking about Google • Joost Boer
Joost Boer:
»
I started building niche websites in 2020. Within a few months, Google became the single biggest factor in my professional life. Not my skills. Not my ideas. Not the quality of my work. Google.
When 80% of your visitors come from one source, and that source can change its mind overnight with zero explanation, it shapes everything. What you write. How you write it. What you build. What you don’t build. It’s not a tool you use. It’s a landlord you try to keep happy.
…My main site, Start24, became the best resource in its niche: WordPress and web hosting reviews for Dutch beginners. Honest ratings, beautiful design, well-structured guides, fun to read. Start24 was and is a good site. Readers told me. Competitors knew it.
Core updates came and went. I wasn’t obsessively checking Search Console during them — that’s a level of anxiety I don’t need — but I was generally relaxed. Good site, good content, good rankings. The system seemed to work.
Then last year’s core update hit, and Start24 got nuked. Not “dropped a few positions.” Nuked. The kind of decline where you watch your traffic chart and wonder if the Y-axis is broken.
…I rebuilt Start24 from the ground up. Interactive content. Custom tools that actually help people make decisions. Radical honesty in reviews — not “every product is great in its own way” but “this one is genuinely bad and here’s why.” A free WordPress video course. A free WordPress theme I built myself. Dramatically better design across the board.
And Google’s response? Keywords dropped. Traffic fell. Again.
I made the site significantly better — more useful, more honest, more complete — and Google decided it deserved to rank lower. At some point during this process, something shifted. I stopped caring. Start24 was getting traffic through other channels — paid ads, direct visits, email, social. The site was doing fine. Not because of Google. Despite Google.
And once that clicked, the weight lifted.
«
A lot of site owners are probably going to have this revelation as they look at their referrer traffic this year. It’s not just updates; it’s the AI summaries. Referral might be dead.
unique link to this extract
Fake, AI-generated images and videos of the Iran war are spreading on social media • CNN Politics
Daniel Dale:
»
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, social media was littered with crude fakes that were presented as fresh images of the war but were either photoshopped phonies or mislabeled clips taken from video games, movies, past incidents and unrelated news coverage.
Those kinds of old-fashioned fakes are now spreading again during the war against Iran. This time, they have been joined by a form of deception that wasn’t readily available in 2022: high-quality videos and still images that have been custom-created with easy-to-use artificial intelligence tools.
Ten years ago, said Hany Farid, a University of California, Berkeley, professor specializing in digital forensics, “there’d be like one or two fake things out there; they’d get debunked pretty fast. … Now you see hundreds of them, and they’re really realistic.” Farid added: “It’s not just realistic, it’s landing — it’s landing hard. People believe it and they’re amplifying it.”
“What has changed in the last year or so is that generative AI has become much more widely accessible,” said BBC Verify senior journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh, a prominent debunker of war-related fakes, “and it’s now possible to create very believable videos and images appearing to show a significant war incident that is hard to detect to the untrained or naked eye.”
…Several fakes that have spread widely have been pushed as propaganda by pro-Iran social media accounts. The motivation behind the creation of many of the fakes, though, is hard to identify — perhaps social media views and the influence and money they can sometimes lead to, perhaps just because people were able to make them easily.
…Social media platform X did announce last week that it was taking some action to combat wartime AI fakes. Head of product Nikita Bier posted that if users who get paid by X as content “creators” spread AI-generated videos of armed conflicts without disclosing the videos were made with AI, they will be suspended from the payment program for 90 days and then permanently suspended if they commit additional violations.
Even if this policy is strictly enforced — Farid said he is skeptical — the overwhelming majority of X users are not part of the creator payment program.
«
A bad problem, getting worse. Remember when there were gatekeepers and making a video involving war footage required a huge budget? Are we sure this is better?
unique link to this extract
The usefulness of useless knowledge • Financial Times
Tim Harford:
»
In the 1970s, some basic ideas in supposedly useless number theory were deployed by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman. They developed the RSA algorithm, which enables public key cryptography, without which there would be no ecommerce. Cryptography is hardly valueless to the military, either. One never knows when useless knowledge will be useful after all.
Hardy’s number theory was not alone in being accidentally useful. In a famous article published around the same time — “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge” (1939) — the head of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, Abraham Flexner, made the case for apparently useless research. Flexner started with the radio and the radio telegraph — remarkable inventions for which many people thanked Guglielmo Marconi, the Nobel Prize-winning engineer.
Flexner argued that the “real credit” should go to James Clerk Maxwell and Heinrich Hertz, who had done the fundamental research. “Neither Maxwell nor Hertz had any concern about the utility of their work,” wrote Flexner, adding that Marconi contributed “merely the last technical detail . . . now obsolete”.
Some more recent examples have been gathered by the American Association for the Advancement of Science for its Golden Goose awards. Ten years ago, the awards recognised the Honey Bee Algorithm, which began with biologists painting tiny numbers on the backs of chilled (and thus immobile) bees, and then tracking the individual bees to figure out how they contributed to the hive’s search for nectar. Why? Because they wanted to know.
A couple of engineers became intrigued, figuring that maybe the bees had evolved a smart mechanism which the engineers might use to . . . well, do something. Perhaps they could use it to smooth the flow of traffic or suchlike. The bees had indeed evolved a clever approach, but the engineers couldn’t work out how to use it.
«
Turns out they could find a use. This article will appear at timharford.com in a couple of weeks for those who aren’t FT subscribers.
unique link to this extract
“Severe water stress”: why desalination plants are the Gulf’s greatest weakness • The Guardian
Damien Gayle:
»
In 1983, the CIA determined that the most crucial commodity in the Gulf was its desalinated potable water.
Although the loss of a single plant could be handled, “successful attacks on several plants in the most dependent countries could generate a national crisis that could lead to panic flights from the country and civil unrest”. And the greatest threat to the region’s water supply? “Iran.”
That’s why, four decades later, the world held its breath on Saturday when Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, accused the US of “a blatant and desperate crime” by attacking a desalination plant on the island of Qeshm, in the strait of Hormuz. “The US set this precedent, not Iran,” he said.
The US denied responsibility for the attack. But the next day, on the other side of the Gulf, Bahrain announced one of its own desalination plants had been hit. The alleged culprit: “Iranian aggression.”
It looked like the region, its cities and its industries, was poised to unravel in a frenzy of tit-for-tat assaults on critical water infrastructure. But then the attacks on desalination plants stopped. Why?
…According to the latest data, 70% of Saudi Arabia’s drinking water comes from desalination plants; in Oman the figure is 86%; the United Arab Emirates, 42%; and in Kuwait, 90%. Even Israel, which has access to the Jordan river, relies on five large coastal desalination plants for half its potable water.
Collectively, the Middle East accounts for roughly 40% of global desalinated water production, providing a combined desalination capacity of 28.96m cubic metres of water, every single day.
“In several Persian Gulf states, modern cities would simply not function without it,” said Nima Shokri, the director of the Institute of Geo-Hydroinformatics at the Hamburg University of Technology.
In 2026, just as in 1983, observers have pointed out that this crucial structural weak point can be used against its Arab neighbours. “Targeting desalination plants could quickly create water shortages in several Persian Gulf states,” Shokri said.
“Many cities depend on a small number of large coastal plants, meaning a successful strike could disrupt drinking water supplies within days. Unlike oil facilities, these plants cannot easily be replaced or repaired quickly. In extreme cases, governments could be forced to ration water for entire urban populations.”
«
Mutually assured destruction of those plants would probably kill millions – or force the biggest human movement in history. Neither is attractive.
unique link to this extract
America and public disorder • Chris Arnade Walks the World
Chris Arnade:
»
An epidemic of mental illness and/or addiction plays out in the US in public, with our streets, buses, parking lots, McDonald’s, parks, and Starbucks as ad hoc institutions for the broken, addicted, and tortured.
That is not the case for the rest of the world, including where I am now, Seoul. My train from the airport was spotless, and so is the ten-mile river park I walk each day here, which given that large parts of it are beneath roadways is especially impressive. In the US it would have impromptu homes of tents, cardboard, and tarps, smell of urine, and the exercise spots that dot its length probably couldn’t exist because of a fear of being vandalized.
You can learn more about the US by traveling overseas and comparing, and five years of that has taught me we accept far too much public disorder.
We are the world’s richest country, and yet our buses, parking lots, and city streets are filthy, chaotic, and threatening. Antisocial and abnormal behavior, open addiction, and mentally tortured people are common in almost every community regardless of size.
I’ve written about this many times before, because it is so striking, and it has widespread consequences, beyond the obvious moral judgement that a society should simply not be this way.
It’s a primary reason why we shy away from dense walkable spaces and instead move towards suburban sprawl. People in the US don’t respect, trust, or want to be around other random citizens, out of fear and disgust. Japanese/European style urbanism—density, fantastic public transport, mixed-use zoning, that so many American tourists admire—can’t happen here because there is a fine line between vibrant streets and squalid ones, and that line is public trust. The US is on the wrong side of it. Simply put, nobody wants to be accosted by a stranger, no matter how infrequent, and until that risk is close to nil, people will continue edging towards isolated living.
«
Arnade has spent the past ten years (perhaps longer?) walking first across America, and more recently all sorts of countries. His comparisons have weight, because he’s seen it all. The article is a dispiriting journey through the battered soul of America’s urban battleground. But he does offer a solution, of sorts.
unique link to this extract
Amazon holds engineering meeting following AI-related outages • Financial Times
Rafe Rosner-Uddin:
»
Amazon’s ecommerce business summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a “deep dive” into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools.
The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterised by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT.
Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established”.
“Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently,” Dave Treadwell, a senior vice-president at the group, told employees in an email, also seen by the FT.
The note ahead of Tuesday’s meeting did not specify which particular incidents the group planned to discuss.
Amazon’s website and shopping app went down for nearly six hours this month in an incident the company said involved an erroneous “software code deployment”. The outage left customers unable to complete transactions or access functions such as checking account details and product prices.
Treadwell, a former Microsoft engineering executive, told employees that Amazon would focus its weekly “This Week in Stores Tech” (TWiST) meeting on a “deep dive into some of the issues that got us here as well as some short immediate term initiatives” the group hopes will limit future outages.
«
What? AI-written code isn’t the most trustworthy thing in the world? Heaven forfend.
unique link to this extract
UK fights to keep Gatwick drone disaster report redacted • The Register
Connor Jones:
»
The UK’s Department for Transport (DfT) is assembling government lawyers to fight the Information Commissioner’s decision that it must release a document summarizing the lessons from the 2018 Gatwick drone chaos.
Government sources confirmed the development to The Register this week – the latest in a series of attempts made by the DfT to prevent the “Lessons Report” document from being released in full.
This incident review document is likely to provide greater detail about what exactly happened during the 2018 disruption at London Gatwick Airport, which prevented around 800 flights from taking off, affecting around 120,000 passengers. Officials blamed the situation on drone sightings, although experts disagree.
The DfT has also allegedly attempted to conceal the document’s existence, despite requests made under Freedom of Information laws explicitly seeking its release.
Ian Hudson is one of the few drone experts committed to uncovering further details about the Gatwick incident, and he has filed hundreds of these requests since 2018, including those that revealed the document’s existence.
Hudson has fought for the document’s release since May 2024. In responding to one of his requests in July 2024, Hudson believes the DfT tried to conceal the document. The response ignored parts of the request pertaining to the Lessons Report, only answering other questions by saying the information was already in the public domain.
Follow-up requests made later that year revealed that the DfT had five versions of the Lessons Report document. However, the department refused to release it based on national security grounds and upheld this decision following an internal review.
«
The 2018 incident was never properly explained, and perhaps the DfT is hoping that everyone has forgotten it. Clearly some haven’t.
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 