Do you find two-dimensional chess too challenging? Don’t worry – the one-dimensional version is waiting for you. CC-licensed photo by Brian Cantoni on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Check, mate. 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 internet’s most powerful archiving tool is in peril • WIRED
Kate Knibbs:
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This month, USA Today published an excellent report that revealed how US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement delayed disclosing key information about the impacts of its detainment policies. The authors used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to compile and analyze detention statistics from ICE and track how the agency had changed under the Trump administration. The story is one of countless examples of how the Wayback Machine, which crawls and preserves web pages, has helped preserve information for the public good. It was also, Wayback Machine director Mark Graham says, “a little ironic.”
USA Today Co., the publishing conglomerate formerly known as Gannet that runs both its namesake paper and over 200 additional media outlets, bars the Wayback Machine from archiving its work. “They’re able to pull together their story research because the Wayback Machine exists. At the same time, they’re blocking access,” Graham says.
A number of other major journalism organizations have also recently moved to restrict the Wayback Machine from archiving their stories, including The New York Times. According to analysis by the artificial-intelligence-detection startup Originality AI, 23 major news sites are currently blocking ia_archiverbot, the web crawler commonly used by the Internet Archive for the Wayback project. The social platform Reddit is too. Other outlets are limiting the project in different ways: The Guardian does not block the crawler, but it excludes its content from the Internet Archive API and filters out articles from the Wayback Machine interface, which makes it harder for regular people to access archived versions of its articles.
USA Today Co. spokesperson Lark-Marie Anton emphasized that “this effort is not about specifically blocking the Internet Archive” but instead part of the company’s broader efforts to block all scraping bots.
…Reddit has previously said that concerns about AI also led it to block the Wayback Machine crawler. There’s an ongoing war between publishers and AI companies over the legality of AI tools training on their content without permission; many of the over 100 AI copyright lawsuits in the United States focus on this issue. Tech companies use content from all over the internet, and because the Wayback Machine offers such an extensive trove of material, it is considered a particularly appealing data source.
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So the “peril” that the Internet Archive is (not actually) in could be summed up as: if the IA blocked AI, everything would be tickety-boo. That doesn’t seem to be an option they’re considering, though, which seems odd to me. Instead they’re hoping that the publishers will change position. I don’t think so. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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How Beyond Meat sank from a $14bn plant-based protein powerhouse to a penny stock • Morningstar
Bill Peters and Tomi Kilgore:
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Investors hoped the company [which offers a vegan but meat-tasting product] would appeal to environmentally-conscious and vegetarian-curious consumers – or with anyone concerned about the meat industry and animal welfare – and take off in a fashion similar to plant-based milk.
None of that has gone as planned.
One of the four Cs that sank Beyond Meat is cash. BTIG analyst Peter Saleh said the company ended 2025 with $206.5m in available cash, after burning through $160m of it last year. He estimated that the company’s current cash position will last about six more quarters.
On March 31, Beyond Meat actually reported a rare quarterly net profit, but that was only because it booked a one-time $548.7m non-cash gain for a debt restructuring. Just from its business operations, losses more than tripled to $132.7m, while net revenue dropped 20% to $61.6m, which was the lowest total since the first quarter of 2019.
Next is competition. Rival food companies quickly rolled out their own plant-based fares to try to ride Beyond Meat’s coattails. But the real competition was with “real” meat. As Zak Stambor, a retail analyst at eMarketer, noted, the share of people who don’t eat meat in the U.S. remains small, pointing to a Gallup poll from 2023 that found 4% of people in the US identify as vegetarian, while 1% identified as vegan.
“If you can’t also capture pescetarians or just regular old omnivores, that limits the total addressable market,” he said. “It just isn’t as large as investors had initially thought.”
Next is the consumer – Stambor also noted that the stock hit fresh lows in 2022, as inflation spiked and shoppers scrutinized their food budgets more closely. Circana said the price gap between more-expensive meat alternatives and the real thing kept widening since 2022, to $4.20 per pound in 2024. Sales of US meat-alternative products overall have fallen every year since 2022, with the most pronounced year-over-year drop of 7.4% arriving in the 52-week period ending on March 28 this year, according to Nielsen data.
“Some people who had been purchasing Beyond Meat because they had thought it was healthier, or because of novelty, decided maybe I’ll just stick with the old tried-and-true and save a little money,” Stambor said.
Investors had something else to chew on. The company disclosed Friday that while the stock plunged 78.2% in 2025 – it’s worst-ever performance – founder and CEO Ethan Brown’s total compensation for the year was about six times what it was the year before.
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It seems like such an open goal, and yet life (and especially consumers) won’t cooperate.
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1-dimensional chess • Rowan Monk
Rowan Monk:
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1D chess is a new variant where you can play the beautiful game without all those unnecessary and complicated extra dimensions. Play as White against the AI. You might initally find it more difficult than expected, but assuming optimal play, is there a forced win for White?
Rules: there are three pieces in 1D chess:
King: can move one square in any direction.
Knight: can move 2 squares forward or backward. (jumping over any pieces in the way)
Rook: can move in a straight line in any direction.
Win by checkmating the enemy king. This occurs when the enemy king is in check (under attack by one of your pieces) and there are no legal moves for the opponent to get their king out of check.
Careful! A draw can occur if:
• A player is not in check and there are no legal moves for them to play (stalemate)
• The same board position is repeated 3 times in a game (three-fold repetition)
• There are only kings left on the board, thus it is impossible to checkmate the opponent (insufficient material).«
Based on the idea first described by Martin Gardner in Scientific American 46 years ago. It’s fun!
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Bitcoin miners are losing $19,000 on every BTC produced as difficulty drops 7.8% • Coindesk
Shaurya Malwa:
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The math has turned against bitcoin miners, and the war is making it worse every week.
Checkonchain’s difficulty regression model, which estimates average production costs based on network difficulty and energy inputs, pegged the figure at $88,000 per bitcoin as of March 13.
Bitcoin is trading at $69,200 as of Sunday, creating a gap of nearly $19,000 per coin and meaning the average miner is operating at a 21% loss on every block mined.
The cost squeeze has been building since October’s crash took bitcoin from $126,000 to below $70,000, but the Iran war accelerated it. Oil above $100 feeds directly into electricity costs for mining operations, particularly the estimated 8-10% of global hashrate operating in energy markets sensitive to Middle Eastern supply.
The Strait of Hormuz, which handles roughly 20% of the world’s oil and gas flows, remains effectively closed to most commercial traffic. And Trump’s 48-hour ultimatum on Saturday, threatening to attack Iran’s power plants, added a new layer of risk for miners.
The network is already showing stress.
Difficulty dropped 7.76% on Saturday to 133.79 trillion, the second-largest negative adjustment of 2026 after February’s 11.16% plunge during Winter Storm Fern. Difficulty is now nearly 10% below where it started the year and far below November 2025’s all-time high of nearly 155 trillion.
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The network difficulty will adjust downwards, of course, but this creates an advantage – doesn’t everything right now? – for those whose electricity comes from clean, non-fossil sources.
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CEO of America’s largest public hospital system says he’s ready to replace radiologists with AI • Radiology Business
Marty Stempniak:
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The chief executive of America’s largest public hospital system says he is prepared to start replacing radiologists with artificial intelligence in some circumstances, once the regulatory landscape catches up.
Mitchell H. Katz, MD, president and CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals, recently spoke during a panel discussion held by Crain’s New York Business. The trained internal medicine specialist noted how AI is increasingly being used to interpret mammograms and X-rays.
This presents an opportunity to save on how much hospitals spend on radiologists, who have become more costly amid rising demand for imaging, Crain’s reported Thursday.
“We could replace a great deal of radiologists with AI at this moment, if we are ready to do the regulatory challenge,” Katz said at the forum, held on March 25.
Katz—who has led the 11-hospital organization since 2018—said he sees great potential for AI to increase access to breast cancer screening. Hospitals could potentially produce “major savings” by letting the technology handle first reads, with radiologists then double-checking any abnormal screenings.
Fellow panelist David Lubarsky, MD, MBA, president and CEO of the Westchester Medical Center Health Network, said his system is already seeing great success in deploying such technology. The AI Westchester uses misses very few breast cancers and is “actually better than human beings,” he told the audience.“For women who aren’t considered high risk, if the test comes back negative, it’s wrong only about 3 times out of 10,000,” Lubarsky said.
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Would love to know where he got those statistics. He’s now going to push for AI to read scans, and professionals could offer second opinions.
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The secrets of the shinkansen • Works In Progress
Works in Progress and Benedict Springbett:
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Japan is the land of the train. 28% of passenger kilometers in Japan are travelled by rail, more than anywhere else in the developed world. France achieves 10 percent, Germany 6.4 percent, and the United States just 0.25 percent. Travel in Japan is over a hundred times more likely to be by rail than travel in the United States.
Japan’s vast railway network is divided between dozens of companies, nearly all of them private. The largest of these, JR East, carries more passengers than the entire railway system of every country other than China and India. Each year, JR East carries four times as many passengers as the whole British railway system, even though it has fewer kilometers of track, serves about ten million fewer people, and competes with eight other companies. Japan’s railway system turns a large operating profit and receives far less public subsidy than European and American railways.
In most developed countries, the railways have struggled since the rise of the automobile in the 1950s. From this point on, North America saw the near-total replacement of passenger trains with cars and planes. In Europe, it meant vast government financial support to keep the lines open.
Japan’s different trajectory is often attributed to culture: the Japanese are conformists who are content to take public transport, unlike freedom-loving Americans who prefer to drive everywhere. Europeans are somewhere in between. Culture is also used to explain the incredible punctuality of Japanese railways.
These cultural explanations are wrong.
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Clearly they never had a Beeching-san. But also how is it that competing private companies can get it right, when they absolutely didn’t in the UK? Read on..
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China’s AI drama boom is already reducing the costs of industrial-scale entertainment • Hello China Tech
Poe Zhao:
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In January 2026, Chinese platforms launched more than 14,600 AI-generated short dramas. That works out to roughly 470 new titles each day. By February, 127,800 were in active circulation across the country’s streaming and social media ecosystem.
These figures require a moment of calibration for readers who have not encountered the format. Short dramas are serialised, mobile-first shows with episodes of two to five minutes, distributed through algorithm-driven platforms and monetised through advertising and micropayments. Think of them as soap operas rebuilt for smartphone attention spans: melodramatic, formulaic, and staggeringly popular. The audience for AI short dramas alone is projected to reach 280 million in 2026, up from 120 million the year before.
Before AI entered the picture, this market was already producing content at a volume no other national entertainment industry could match. Generative video models compressed the production cycle further and collapsed costs so sharply that the industry’s economics, its labour structure, and its relationship with the real human faces on screen have all been remade in under 18 months.
What followed is worth examining closely. The forces at work, collapsing production costs, displacement of human performers, industrial-scale identity appropriation, and belated regulatory response, are not unique to China.
…A live-action short drama that cost upward of RMB 1 million ($137,000) to produce in 2024 can now be generated for RMB 50,000 to 100,000 ($7,000 to $14,000) using AI tools. At the cheapest tier, outsourced workshops quote RMB 30,000 to 40,000 per complete series. Per-minute costs have fallen from RMB 3,000 to 5,000 in early 2024 to a typical range of RMB 500 to 1,000 today, with some outsourced teams quoting as little as RMB 200 ($27).
…The industry’s expansion has come with a human cost that is visible, immediate, and concentrated among the people who least expected it.
Li Wenhao, a short drama actor based in Chongqing, was busy enough after entering the industry in 2023 to shoot for 50 consecutive days. In March 2026, he worked six. Casting calls that once arrived at a rate of more than 20 per day now come once every two or three days. Of roughly ten short drama companies he knew in his city, only two or three still hire human performers.
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But is the content any good? Although this isn’t often a question people ask. (Thanks Peter R for the link.)
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In the Gulf, GPS jamming leaves delivery drivers navigating blind • Rest of World
Divsha Bhat:
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As war raged across the Persian Gulf in the first week of March, delivery driver Saeed Ahmed continued making deliveries in Dubai. Navigating down Al Asayel street, the 32-year-old driver for Lulu Hypermarket followed the blue navigation line on his phone as it guided him to a customer. Then, without warning, the route on his map shifted. The street he was on became invisible.
Ahmed pulled over and called the customer. The address was correct. The map was not.
As the conflict between the U.S., Israel, and Iran rages on for the second month, gig workers say these kinds of GPS-related disruptions have become routine. Military forces across the region are increasingly deploying electronic systems that interfere with Global Navigation Satellite System signals, including GPS, to defend against drones and missile attacks. These systems can jam signals entirely or spoof them by feeding false location data to receivers. The interference often spills into civilian life, disrupting the lives of millions of people who rely on tools like maps. For delivery drivers, the breakdown is both immediate and disorienting.
The impact of GPS jamming extends beyond consumer-oriented mapping tools. Recent data by maritime intelligence firm Windward indicates that GPS jamming affected more than 1,650 ships in the Middle East on March 7, up 55% from the previous week. Vessels were incorrectly placed on land and at sea in Kuwait, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. Nearly 1,100 ships were impacted within 24 hours following US strikes on Iran on February 28.
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We’re using so much AI that computing firepower is running out • WSJ
Angel Au-Yeung and Robbie Whelan:
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The artificial intelligence gold rush is rapidly drying up the supply of the one resource that AI developers can’t do without: computing power.
The sharp capacity crunch has caused consternation among power users, forced companies to scuttle products and led to reliability problems. The issues are a warning sign for the AI boom, as they may limit the utility of powerful new AI tools just as massive amounts of users have begun to rely on them to boost productivity.
Over the past few months, demand has exploded for “agentic” AI, autonomous tools that use the technology to independently perform tasks, from writing software code to scheduling house tours for real-estate brokers. Companies have been scrambling to secure the availability of computing capacity needed to serve a growing base of customers who are also significantly increasing their AI use.
“Everyone’s talking about oil, but I think what the world is mainly short of is tokens,” said Ben Pouladian, an engineer and tech investor based in Los Angeles. A token is a unit of measurement in AI to track how much computing resources are being used for a task. “AI is at this point no longer just some chatbot that we ask for a recipe while we stand in front of the fridge. It’s orchestrating tasks, it’s getting smarter,” Pouladian said.
All of it points to a classic problem that has popped up in technology booms throughout history, from the 19th-century railroad expansion to the telecom and internet explosion of the early 2000s. Demand is growing far faster than companies are able to access resources and build out infrastructure. Historically, price increases have been among the only ways to address a supply crunch, but such a move could be perilous for frontier AI companies, which are in a ferocious competition to gain users.
…Token use in OpenAI’s API—a platform where mostly enterprise users access its software—rose from six billion a minute in October to 15 billion a minute in late March.
“I do spend a lot of time trying to find any last-minute compute available,” Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s chief financial officer, said in a recent public video interview with an investor.
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Can’t recall a technology boom in the past which was simultaneously resource-constrained.
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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. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 