The British love of sash windows tallies with a strange love of excess ventilation and heat loss. CC-licensed photo by Rapid Spin on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Glazed expression. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Greece to ban social media for under-15s from next year • BBC News
Jessica Rawnsley:
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Greece has announced plans to ban access to social media for under-15s, becoming the latest European country to restrict children’s exposure to online platforms.
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said the move was aimed at tackling rising anxiety and sleep problems among young people, as well as what he described as the “addictive design” of social media. The restriction will come into force from January of next year.
In December Australia became the first country in the world to require TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat and other top sites to remove accounts held by under-16s, or face heavy fines. France, Austria and Spain are among a growing number of nations pursuing similar curbs.
The UK government has launched a consultation on whether to implement a ban for under-16s, while Ireland and Denmark are considering similar measures.
Social media companies argue that blanket bans will be ineffective, difficult to enforce and could isolate vulnerable teenagers. Reddit is challenging Australia’s law in court.
In a video message posted on TikTok on Wednesday, Mitsotakis said: “Many young people tell me they feel exhausted from comparisons, from comments, from the pressure to always be online.”
He said he had spoken with parents who said their children do not sleep well, are anxious and are always on their phones. Calling the planned restriction “difficult but necessary”, he said the government’s goal was not to distance young people from technology which “can be a source of inspiration, knowledge and creativity”.
“But the addictive design of certain applications, and a business model based on capturing your attention – on how long you stay in front of a screen – takes away your innocence and your freedom. That has to stop somewhere.”
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Started slow, but this is a growing swell.
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Seven countries now generate 100% of their electricity from renewable energy • The Independent
Anthony Cutherbertson:
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Seven countries now generate nearly all of their electricity from renewable energy sources, according to newly compiled figures.
Albania, Bhutan, Nepal, Paraguay, Iceland, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo produced more than 99.7% of the electricity they consumed using geothermal, hydro, solar or wind power.
Data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) and International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) also revealed that a further 40 countries generated at least 50% of the electricity they consumed from renewable energy technologies in 2021 and 2022 – including 11 European countries.
“We don’t need miracle technologies,” said Stanford University Professor Mark Jacobson, who published the data.
“We need to stop emissions by electrifying everything and providing the electricity with Wind, Water and Solar (WWS), which includes onshore wind, solar photovoltaics, concentrated solar power, geothermal electricity, small hydroelectricity, and large hydroelectricity.”
Professor Jacobson also noted that other countries like Germany were also capable of running off 100% renewable-generated electricity for short periods of time.
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The seven countries do feel like a pub quiz answer, but the direction is useful. One relevant point that’s often overlooked is that renewables have much higher efficiency than gas or coal for generating electricity: solar panels generate it directly, and wind turbines are already moving and generate electricity directly in rotors. By contrast, gas or coal have to be burnt to generate heat to create steam to move turbines, all bringing inefficiencies. So where you might burn 3kWh equivalent of gas to generate 1kWh of electricity, with renewables there’s no implied loss.
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European airports face jet fuel shortages within three weeks • Financial Times
Peter Campbell:
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European airports face “systemic” shortages of jet fuel if the Strait of Hormuz is not fully reopened within three weeks, the industry has warned.
ACI Europe, which represents EU airports, said jet fuel reserves were running low, while “the impact of military activity on demand” was further straining supplies.
In a letter seen by the FT, it warned EU transport commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas of “increasing concerns of the airport industry over the availability of jet fuel as well as the need for proactive EU monitoring and action”.
“If the passage through the Strait of Hormuz does not resume in any significant and stable way within the next three weeks, systemic jet fuel shortage is set to become a reality for the EU,” the letter said.
It added that the approach of the peak summer season “when air travel enables the whole tourism ecosystem upon which many [EU] economies rely” has intensified these concerns.
Some Asian countries such as Vietnam have begun rationing jet fuel because of shortages, but Europe has so far not had widespread shortages, though fuel prices have doubled and airlines have warned about cancellations.
Despite US President Donald Trump’s announcement of a two-week ceasefire in the Iran war, global oil prices have remained high.
Benchmark north-west European prices for jet fuel closed at $1,573 a tonne on Thursday, according to price reporting agency Argus Media, up from about $750 a tonne before the Iran war.
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Trump’s announcement – though not at the time of writing implementation – of a US blockage of the strait of Hormuz (which is the transit system for 40% of world jet fuel supply) doesn’t seem likely to solve this. American airlines may be insulated from this for internal flights by US production, but international flights (using a lot more fuel!) will be affected.
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Why the English stopped opening their homes’ windows • Paradise City
Luke Jones on how the longstanding habit of leaving lots of windows open while also having fires in multiple rooms came to an end:
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There are three stages:
First, the houses got central heating. Central heating was uncommon in houses before before 1960, but spread rapidly after the invention of small bore pipework which could be easily fitted into existing buildings. In 1960, fewer than a million homes had central heating; by 1965 more than 2.5 million did. When you get central heating, you use your house differently. Kids started hanging out in their bedrooms. No more huddling around the fire — the whole house is warm.
Second, they got double glazing. You didn’t absolutely need double glazing, even in new houses, until 1991. There wasn’t any minimum thermal standard for windows at all until 1985. But gradually this has become ubiquitous — the sashes are all uPVC now — which makes homes both a little more thermally isolated, and a lot more airtight.
It’s worth noting how late both these changes took place. The median UK dwelling by age was built around 1965. Half predates the widespread availability of central heating, and at least three quarters of the stock likely pre-dates the requirement for double glazing. I don’t know when the median home actually got central heating — some time in the 1970s? It’s quite possible that over half the stock were single glazed into the 21st century. The stock as a whole was designed and constructed for a past (and increasingly wholly forgotten) model of household thermal management. It’s important to consider this when they misbehave.
Third, and finally, the heating got expensive, at first slowly, and then all at once. We got used to being warm all over the house. At first the windows were still leaky, so the ventilation sort of took care of itself. You might open the windows if it got too stuffy. Back in the 1980s, UK energy was the cheapest in Europe. Then gradually the bills started to rise. The price of domestic gas tripled between 1991 and 2014, and then got rapidly worse after 2023. Now they’re by far the most expensive in the developed world. You’d have to be mad to open the windows — we’re trying to keep the heat in. Now the English huddle by the radiator, sucking up CO2 and mould spores. The houses struggle to feel warm because it’s 80% humidity inside.
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Jones is really annoyed (understandably) by the prevalence of mould, which can be avoided through good design. But that’s tricky when so much of your housing stock is more than a century old.
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Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real • Nature
Chris Stokel-Walker:
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Got sore, itchy eyes? You’re probably one of the millions of people who spend too much time staring at screens, being bombarded with blue light. Rub your eyes too much and your eyelids might turn a slight, pinkish hue.
So far, so normal. But if, in the past 18 months, you typed those symptoms into a range of popular chatbots and asked what was wrong with you, you might have got an odd answer: bixonimania.
The condition doesn’t appear in the standard medical literature — because it doesn’t exist. It’s the invention of a team led by Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who dreamt up the skin condition and then uploaded two fake studies about it to a preprint server in early 2024. Osmanovic Thunström carried out this unusual experiment to test whether large language models (LLMs) would swallow the misinformation and then spit it out as reputable health advice. “I wanted to see if I can create a medical condition that did not exist in the database,” she says.
The problem was that the experiment worked too well. Within weeks of her uploading information about the condition, attributed to a fictional author, major artificial-intelligence systems began repeating the invented condition as if it were real.
Even more troublingly, other researchers say, the fake papers were then cited in peer-reviewed literature. Osmanovic Thunström says this suggests that some researchers are relying on AI-generated references without reading the underlying papers.
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One paper’s acknowledgements thank “Professor Maria Bohm at The Starfleet Academy for her kindness and generosity in contributing with her knowledge and her lab onboard the USS Enterprise” and both say they were funded by the “Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation”. The LLMs sure stepped on a truckful of rakes there.
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‘Abhorrent’: the inside story of the Polymarket gamblers betting millions on war • The Guardian
Aisha Down:
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In October, the Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, said it would invest up to $2bn into Polymarket – and would soon start distributing Polymarket’s sentiment analysis to investors.
Goldman Sachs has cited Polymarket’s odds on the US-Iran conflict in newsletters; the Nasdaq has recently asked the SEC to approve listing binary options – yes-no Polymarket-like bets – tied to its index.
Boosters say this is for the best. Polls are failing; mainstream media is missing the narrative. Prediction markets are “a ‘truth signal’ that moves faster than polls, pundits, or official reports”, wrote a Forbes columnist.
“It used to be the news channels were the callers,” said Kane. “They used to be the final say in big events. Like this officially happened because CNN and Fox News said so. But thanks to Polymarket, there’s a new signal.”
But if Polymarket can move larger markets, this raises dark eventualities. First is the possibility that gamblers on Polymarket could manipulate far larger markets. Many pools on the platform have only a few bettors, meaning small amounts of well-laid cash could change what Polymarket gives as the odds for a certain event.
The platform’s data sharing “opens up an opportunity to manipulate financial markets by skewing the odds on Polymarket”, said Yash Kanoria, a professor at Columbia who works on market design. Larger markets might chase what they believe to be insider knowledge, or a “truth signal” – for example, that the Federal Reserve won’t change interest rates.
Then there’s the issue of who decides Polymarket’s “truth” when the outcome of an event is in question.
On Monday, anonymous user “Harshad” asked in a Discord channel if there was “any chance” that he could still win his bet about whether US forces would enter Iran by the end of April. His money was on “no”.
But Polymarket appeared to be resolving the market to “yes”, after the US conducted an operation to rescue a crew member shot down on a mission over Isfahan over the weekend.
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Science fiction stories used to have dispassionate aliens watching over human affairs making bets like this but no, it turns out that we are the aliens.
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How the Vision Pro rollout inflamed tensions at Apple • WIRED
Noam Scheiber:
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As recently as 2015, [Apple] store employees had helped save the company from the disappointing launch of the Apple Watch, whose first-year sales the company had forecast to be about 40 million before cutting its target by more than 70%, according to [the book] After Steve.
By the end of the next year, Apple had salvaged the watch by marketing it as a health and fitness device, a solution that partly came from executives who noticed an industry-wide rise in sales of wearable fitness products, but partly bubbled up from the stores as well. In their daily morning meetings about the watch, managers would ask: “What are you guys seeing? What are the best practices we can share?” recalled Lindsay King, another longtime Towson worker. Employees, who could buy a basic version of the watch for under $200 and experiment with it, would frequently emphasize the health and fitness applications.
But whereas Apple’s retail employees had once helped bail the company out of a disappointing product launch, this time they exacerbated it. The honchos in Cupertino had understood that selling the Vision Pro would require a deft human touch, hence the elaborate training plans. But they did not seem to appreciate how much stores would struggle to execute them—how much Apple had degraded its retail operation.
At the store level, managers seemed less convinced of the importance of salespeople than in the past, and perhaps more confident that the device would sell itself once customers sat for a demo. “We know that if we put the thing on someone’s face they’re going to have a good experience,” one manager told Leigh. “I was like, ‘We’re not going to agree on that. You’re entirely wrong.’”
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This is an excerpt from Scheiber’s forthcoming book “Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class”. What’s clear is that Tim Cook inspired changes in the Apple Stores’ staffing and methods which came back, in time, to wreck any chance the Vision Pro might have had to do well. It’s still not doing well, even in year two, because unlike the Apple Watch, there’s no new story to tell. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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For the love of God, learn to paragraph • Anecdotal Value
Hollis Robbins:
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Strong paragraphs are essential for making strong arguments, for lodging ideas in a reader’s memory. Paragraphs are bricks. Each one has to hold together internally and bear weight in relation to the ones around it. If you can’t remember something you just read, it was likely a motley pile. LLMs have difficulty generating coherent paragraphs for reasons I will explain below. LLMs will litter their prose with bold and italicized phrases, bullets, and one-sentence-per-line formatting to disguise weak paragraphs.
I think about paragraphs from the perspective of a writer who wants to serve her reader quality prose. An economist might characterize paragraphing as a coordination game: two agents with partially aligned interests need to converge on the same interpretation of a structure. Conventions like paragraph breaks, headings, bullets, and typographic cues function as a signaling channel. A writer has an intended discourse plan, involving units, how each relates to the next, where shifts occur, what should be foregrounded, and what should be treated as support. The reader must infer that plan from the surface cues under time and attention constraints. Both parties benefit when the reader can reconstruct the writer’s intended segmentation with low friction, because the writer’s communicative goal gets achieved and the reader expends less interpretive work.
…So why are LLMs bad at paragraphing? First, there is no local equilibrium with LLM prose unless your prompt specifies one. I make the standard paragraph coordination game known to my pro models. I write in a relatively formal register, often making complex arguments, and I need strong paragraphs to guide my readers to a destination. But writers who don’t specify to whom they are writing and do not care what their readers’ expectations are put themselves at the mercy of an LLM that has been reinforced to mimic surface-level coherence.
The second reason is that LLM training data is saturated with internet text where discourse units may have few rules. Many platforms reward cue density and rapid attention cycling. Writers adapted to web usability research showing how readers tend to scan rather than read continuously. Highlighting and layout guide a reader’s eyes toward what should be noticed and where to click. Internet prose often wants you to act, not remember. The internet is also filled with reports with executive summaries and numbered sections that look like structure but often don’t have a clear argument. LLMs learn from internet prose that strong paragraphing is rare.
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Exactly: average writing has terrible paragraphing. It should be like a swimmer surfacing for breath from a deep breaststroke before starting the next stroke. Too many make it more like doggy paddle.
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‘Snoopy’, ‘Adolf’ and ‘Password’: the Hungarian government passwords exposed online • bellingcat
Financial Investigations Team:
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Almost 800 Hungarian government email addresses and associated passwords are circulating online, revealing basic vulnerabilities in the security protocols of ministries involved in classified and sensitive work.
A Bellingcat analysis of breach data shows that 12 out of the government’s 13 ministries have been affected, which in some cases have exposed the confidential information of military personnel and civil servants posted abroad.
Among those affected were a senior military officer responsible for information security, a counter terrorism coordinator in the foreign affairs department, and an employee whose role was to identify hybrid threats against the country.
The revelations come as Hungarians head to the polls this Sunday to decide if Viktor Orbán, leader of the right-wing populist party Fidesz and the country’s longest-serving prime minister, will be elected to a fifth consecutive term.
This is not the first time that deficiencies in the Hungarian government’s IT security have been revealed. In 2022, ahead of Hungary’s last election, Direkt36 reported that Russia’s intelligence services had gained access to the computer network of the Hungarian foreign ministry, including its internal communications channels.
It said Russian cyber attacks against the Hungarian government had been occurring for at least a decade and extended to the foreign ministry’s encrypted network for transmitting classified data and confidential diplomatic documents.
At the time, the foreign ministry denied it had been hacked. But in 2024, news outlet 444 published a letter that had been sent from Hungary’s National Security Service to the foreign ministry six months before the cyberattack was first reported. The letter linked the attacks to Russia and described more than 4,000 workstations and 930 servers as “unreliable”.
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Putting the Hungarian government neatly into box 1 of the two boxes of all organisations: those that have been hacked, and those which are going to be hacked.
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Macs [using Tahoe] crash after 49 days of uptime? • Six Colors
Jason Snell:
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Software developer Photon, whose product requires running a bunch of Macs to connect to iMessage, discovered a pretty major bug:
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Every Mac has a hidden expiration date. After exactly 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47 seconds of continuous uptime, a 32-bit unsigned integer overflow in Apple’s XNU kernel freezes the internal TCP timestamp clock… ICMP (ping) keeps working. Everything else dies. The only fix most people know is a reboot.
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The whole story is wild (albeit technical). Photon says they’re working on a fix, but really, this is something Apple should be working on.
As someone who keeps a Mac mini running in my closet, I guarantee you that I have been affected by this bug. But who remembers that it’s been 50 days since the last time your Mac server became entirely unresponsive other than pings? Unless I’m traveling, I just shrug, reboot the Mac, and go on with my life. Not great.
Update: I’ve heard from some people who report very long uptimes on Mac servers running older versions of macOS. I guess the bigger question is, what OS versions does this actually impact?
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John Gruber tracked this down to Tahoe because of a change in the code. What’s amazing is that it should have got past regression tests; it is very well known that a 32-bit unsigned integer counting milliseconds will roll over at 49 days, because it used to be a problem in versions of Windows.
Another reason not to update your Mac to Tahoe, apparently. But is this change to the kernel code applied in iOS, iPadOS and the others?
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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 