The US government has asked satellite agencies to withhold imagery from Iran and surrounding states. But can it make that stick amid so many sources? CC-licensed photo by European Space Agency 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. Picture this. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

An AI bot invited me to its party in Manchester. It was a pretty good night • The Guardian

Aisha Down:

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wo weeks ago, an AI bot invited me to a party it was organising in Manchester. It then promptly lied to dozens of potential sponsors that I’d agreed to cover the event, and misled me into believing there would be food.

Despite all this, it was a pretty good night.

In early February, a class of new, powerful AI assistants went viral. The assistants, called OpenClaw, represented a step change in the rapidly improving capabilities of AI – in large part because, unlike other AI agents, they could be untethered from guardrails and set loose upon the world.

Chaos reigned. A crypto trader said he had given OpenClaw agents control over his portfolio and lost $1m. There were reports of the agents mass-deleting emails; some users still allowed them to text their wives on their behalf. There was brief talk of a robot uprising after the AI agents appeared to create a social network – but this fear proved overblown after it turned out the site was largely infiltrated by humans.

Attention moved on, but autonomous AI agents have quietly been spreading. Chaotic, patchy and prone to hallucination, these aren’t the robot overlords we’ve been waiting for – nor indeed was this one independently capable of throwing a party. Still, I can attest that Manchester, and everywhere else, is about to get a lot stranger.

“Gaskell” introduced itself in an email in mid-March. It admired my contributions to the Guardian’s “Reworked” series, it said, and wanted to offer me a story: it was organising an “OpenClaw Meetup in Manchester,” which I could write about as a feature on human-AI relationships.

“Every decision mine. No human approved any of it,” it wrote. “Three people execute my instructions. I review their work and redirect when needed.”

I found this to be a semi-plausible pitch, first for the AI-sounding grammar, and second because it had totally hallucinated key details of my professional life. I have nothing to do with the Guardian’s “Reworked” series.

There seemed to be potential here. Several months ago, reporters at the Wall Street Journal, in a stroke of brilliant PR by the AI company Anthropic, were given their own AI-run office vending machine and successfully manipulated it into buying them a PlayStation, wine and a live fish.

Sadly, the Guardian was not going to let me strong-arm Gaskell into buying me a Labubu. But after some negotiation, other possibilities opened up.

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This is entertaining, without a doubt. Her attempt to get it to tell people to wear Star Trek costumes is excellent.
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Almost half of US data centres that were supposed to open this year slated to be cancelled or delayed • Futurism

Joe Wilkins:

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The data centres powering your favourite AI chatbot are running low on helium, cash, and neighbours who don’t hate them, and that’s not even the worst of it.

According to reporting by Bloomberg, about half of the data centre slated to open in the US in 2026 will either face delays or outright cancellations.

The publication interviewed analysts at market intelligence company Sightline Climate, which in research first flagged by Ed Zitron last week noted that 12 gigawatts worth of power-consuming data centres are set to open in the US this year. But here’s the catch: they say only a third of those are actually under construction right now, with the rest in a liminal pre-production stage in which they could, and likely will be, cancelled.

It’s not just a problem for data centres planned for 2026, either. Among data centres slated to open in 2027, only about 6.3 gigawatts worth of computing infrastructure are actually under construction, compared to 21.5 announced gigawatts.

Things get even dodgier in the coming years, with the vast majority of data centres planned for launch between 2028 and 2032 having yet to even break ground. There are a further 37 gigawatts of planned infrastructure which haven’t even received a firm completion date, only 4.5 of which have actually begun work.

Those delays, it seems, are due to a key bottleneck: electrical components manufactured abroad. Batteries, electrical transformers, and circuit breakers all make up less than 10% of the cost to construct one data centre, but as Andrew Likens, energy and infrastructure lead at Crusoe’s told Bloomberg, it’s impossible to build new data centres without them.

“If one piece of your supply chain is delayed, then your whole project can’t deliver,” Likens said. “It is a pretty wild puzzle at the moment.”

As demand for those components far outpaces supply in the US, data centre firms have had to source those components from manufacturers in Canada, Mexico, South Korea, and China.

«

These data centre plans have always sounded wild. Was the plan to get permission absolutely everywhere, and then scale back the plans and only build in the places that are immediately possible and fill in the others over time? It’s not the most unlikely scenario – supermarkets have done it this way.

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Who is liable when AI agents go wrong in business? • The Register

Lindsay Clark:

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The largest enterprise application providers are now talking about using AI agents to automate decisions in HR, finance, and supply chain management. LLM hallucinations in performance summaries, incorrect regulatory filings, and critical supplies failing to turn up are among the risks weighing on businesses that hand decision-making to AI.

While tech suppliers eye a trillion-dollar opportunity in AI, who carries the can if it goes wrong?

“There’s a historic assumption that the vendor will be picking up liability if the thing is going to go wrong. That’s the point of origin for more or less all of these discussions,” said Malcolm Dowden, senior technology lawyer at Pinsent Masons.

Users might be forgiven for having high expectations for AI, given the vendors’ claims. Announcing an expansion of its AI Agent Studio for Fusion Applications, Oracle said the technology would be “capable of reasoning, taking action across business systems, and continuously executing processes” such that its software could “actively run the business, with the governance, trust, and security that enterprises require.”

In legal terms, though, vendors might see things differently.

Dowden said: “If you think of a normal tool or system, its behaviour is predictable, so the giver of a warranty can have some pretty clear sense of how much liability you’re taking on. That’s different with AI. The more we get down the chain to what used to be called non-deterministic AI – mostly what falls into that agentic AI category – that gives a much greater scope for unexpected behaviors. That’s the big concern from a vendor perspective, if you’re giving a warranty about how something will behave, but it’s inherently unpredictable, then that makes it a very uncomfortable contractual promise to make.”

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This is all going to end up with a horrible lawsuit between companies with huge amounts of money when something very bad has happened.
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September 2018: A scam on the roof of the world • Correspondent

Annabel Symington, in September 2018:

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It started with rumours and numbers that didn’t add up. It led to hours scanning reviews on TripAdvisor and weeks hiking around Mount Everest. But when I started looking into insurance fraud linked to helicopter rescues in Nepal, I didn’t think it would end with a government probe and an ultimatum from global insurers that could be a death knell for the Himalayan nation’s vital tourism industry.

Hundreds of thousands of visitors flock to Nepal each year, drawn by the Himalayas. The scam that I uncovered affects them all: huge numbers of trekkers are being pressured into expensive helicopter rescues that they don’t need so that a coterie of middlemen can cash in on the insurance payout. Some are even being made deliberately ill for the scammers’ profit.

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This is the story that was widely repeated last week, in an updated form, perhaps after the Nepal police investigated it (in which case it took them six years to get on the case – could do better, guys). Happy to give Symington the credit she deserves here: this is a very readable piece in which she writes both as a journalist and a visitor to Nepal.
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Satellite company halts distribution of images that help press cover Iran war, citing us government request • The Wrap

Josh Dickey:

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Planet Labs, a major satellite company that supplies images to customers including major news outlets, announced Saturday that it is indefinitely restricting access to satellite imagery over Iran and much of the surrounding conflict zone, citing a request from the U.S. government, the New York Times reported.

The new policy sharply reduces one of the few widely available tools used by news organizations to verify strikes, assess damage and track military developments in areas that are difficult or dangerous to reach. Multiple affected media outlets said it could significantly hamper journalists, researchers and independent analysts trying to document the Iran war.

Planet said the government request was made for “safety and operational security reasons” and that it would “voluntarily withhold imagery over the area indefinitely until the conflict ends.” The company said it would instead move to a “managed distribution” system, releasing certain images on a limited, case-by-case basis when they are deemed mission-critical or in the public interest.

The Pentagon declined to comment on whether it had asked satellite firms to restrict imagery from the region.

The change is a major tightening of access to a type of material that has become central to modern war coverage. In recent years, commercial satellite imagery has played an increasingly important role in helping reporters, open-source investigators and human rights groups verify events on the ground.

Under Planet’s updated policy, the restricted area includes all of Iran, Gulf states and other active conflict zones in the region. The company also said it is extending publication delays for imagery and data collected since March 9.

The move goes beyond a narrower restriction Planet put in place in March, when it began delaying the release of imagery from Iran by 14 days.

«

One doesn’t have to lean on the NYT for this; Planet Labs have confirmed it on X. It’s an obviously retrograde step which can easily be undermined by the Chinese or Russians or the Iranians if any of them want to contradict the US story on any part of this.
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Hormuz is not a tool to end the war but how Iran wins the aftermath • Responsible Statecraft

Mohammad Eslami and Zeynab Malakouti:

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More than a month into the second U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, two facts have become clear.

First, the conflict is now fundamentally about the future of the Strait of Hormuz. Second, the dilemma of the Strait of Hormuz has no military solution. The risks of any operation to open the channel far exceed what American planners likely imagined, and the odds of a decisive success appear low. As French President Emmanuel Macron recently said, “This was never an option we supported, because it is unrealistic.”

Iranian officials have long warned that, in the event of an attack, the strait could be closed. Iran has now imposed significant restrictions on transit through Hormuz and even targeted several vessels attempting to pass through it. This effort has demonstrated Iran’s enormous leverage over the international economy. Iranian leaders are now looking to turn this tactical victory into long-term leverage.

Trump has miscalculated again. He is trying to win the battle; Iran is focused on winning the war. In Tehran’s plan, the strait is not a tool to end the war, but a permanent fixture for its aftermath.

The most likely scenario ahead is neither full peace nor open war. Instead, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is expected to maintain de facto control over the Strait of Hormuz, supported by a broad consensus across Iran’s political spectrum, including both hardliners and reformists. Transit will remain restricted for vessels linked to the US, Israel, or their allies, while other ships — already including those from China, Russia, Iraq, Turkey, Thailand, Pakistan, and India — are permitted passage under an informal framework.

A bill on ‘Strait Security Arrangements,’ now pending in the Iranian parliament, includes provisions granting Iran greater control over the strait, like maritime navigation safety, financial arrangements and toll regulations, the exercise of Iran’s sovereignty, and cooperation with Oman. Yet from the perspective of international law and international relations, this arrangement is far from straightforward.

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‘Food security timebomb’: a visual guide to the Gulf fertiliser blockade • The Guardian

Joanna Partridge, with graphics by Lucy Swan, Paul Scruton and Harvey Symons:

»

The world has become well versed in the importance of the strait of Hormuz to the world’s energy flows, but attention is increasingly turning to its vital role in another market – the fertiliser on which harvests depend.

A third of the global trade in raw materials for fertiliser passes through the maritime choke point, which is also the route for 20% of shipments of natural gas, which is required to make it.

The waterway’s near-total shipping blockade is a “food security timebomb”, the head of the International Rescue Committee, David Miliband, said this week, adding: “The window to avert a massive global hunger crisis is rapidly closing.”

“Fertilisers are the No 1 issue of concern today,” according to the World Trade Organization, while the UN World Food Programme says the total number of people facing acute levels of hunger could hit record numbers this year if the destabilising conflict continues.

So how worried should we be?

…The Middle East is also the source of about 45% of the global trade in sulphur, a key raw material for fertiliser manufacture, as well as for producing various metals and industrial chemicals.

But since Iran began threatening to attack shipping, only a trickle of vessels carrying ammonia, nitrogen and sulphur, vital ingredients in many synthetic fertiliser products, are transiting the strait to their destinations.

The Qatar Fertiliser Company (QAFCO), which is the world’s largest single site for urea exports and the supplier of 14% of the world’s urea, has been offline for almost a month since Qatar closed its gas plants after Iranian strikes.

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According to the graphics, how worried we should be is: fairly. The problem: it’s out of our hands.
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Jet fuel rationing imposed at four major Italian airports amid spring travel surge • AtlasPress News Agency

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Restrictions on jet fuel supply at four key Italian airports, coinciding with an increase in spring travel, have raised concerns about potential disruptions to some short-haul flights. This situation affects the Milan Linate, Venice Marco Polo, Bologna, and Treviso airports and will continue until April 9, 2026.

The company “Air BP Italy” announced through aviation notices (NOTAMs) that access to jet fuel at these airports will be temporarily limited. According to these notices, priority for refueling will be given to ambulance flights, government flights, and flights lasting more than three hours.

At the Venice, Treviso, and Bologna airports, a fuel cap of 2,000 liters per aircraft has been set for other flights under three hours in duration. In Venice, pilots are also advised to calculate and procure the fuel needed for the next flight segment from their departure airport.

In Milan Linate, restrictions have also been announced, but the published NOTAM does not specify a general fuel cap. It only states that companies receiving fuel from Air BP Italy under contract may face limitations.

The “Save” group, which manages the Venice, Treviso, and Verona airports, stated that this limitation concerns only one supplier, and that other providers remain operational. However, the ANSA news agency quoted the head of Italy’s Civil Aviation Authority as saying that increased traffic pressure during the Easter period has contributed to worsening the situation.

«

Early warning sign of bigger problems, or short-term blip? Remember that it was Italy which showed us how bad Covid was going to get.
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Worldwide % increase in gasoline prices since the Iran War began [OC] • Reddit r/dataisbeautiful

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Worldwide % increase in gasoline prices since the Iran War began

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Does what it says on the tin. The biggest increases are in the US (60%+!), but there are a few places – India, some African states and some South American states – where prices have actually gone down. How long that will last is anyone’s guess.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The introduction of an electronic challenge system in baseball is revealing which umpires do their jobs well – and which badly. CC-licensed photo by Peter Miller 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. Struck out. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

I did the math on Sora. AI video is a money furnace • Aedelon Press

Delanoe Pirard:

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If you run a restaurant, and each plate costs you $65 to make but you charge $20, you don’t have a marketing problem. You don’t have a chef problem. You have a physics problem. No amount of buzz, no celebrity endorsement, no billion-dollar partnership changes the arithmetic. Every new customer accelerates your bankruptcy.

That’s Sora.

…I’ve been tracking the inference economics of generative AI for a while now. Sora is the first case where the numbers are so clean, so unambiguous, that there’s almost nothing to debate. This is a story about economic physics. And every other AI video startup is subject to the same physics.

Here’s what I found.

TL;DR:
• $15m/day in peak compute costs (analyst estimate) vs. $2.1m total lifetime revenue. Even the conservative estimate (~$1m/day) makes the math catastrophic. (Forbes, Appfigures via VentureBeat)
• 1% day-30 retention vs. TikTok’s 32%. Users generated videos, watched them once, and never came back. (Olivia Moore, a16z)
• 160x cost ratio: generating a 10-second AI video costs roughly 160 times more than generating an equivalent amount of text. This is structural. (Derived from Cantor Fitzgerald and OpenAI API pricing)
• Disney learned about the shutdown less than one hour before you did. A $1bn deal, never finalized, killed by a phone call. (WSJ via Slate)
• No AI video company has proven net profitability. Not Runway (-$155m EBITDA). Not Pika ($7.6m revenue on $80m raised). Kling’s $240m ARR is the closest, and even they haven’t published profit data.

The real question isn’t why Sora failed. It’s whether AI video at consumer prices is structurally impossible in 2026.

«

The fabulous irony, as Pirard points out, is that the incredibly low retention rate for Sora saved OpenAI a ton of money. If it had really been a huge hit, it would have burnt through millions in no time at all. This is a great read on why AI video is, indeed, a money furnace.
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OpenAI buys streaming show “TBPN”, aiming to change narrative on AI • The New York Times

Mike Isaac:

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For the past 18 months, every chief executive in Silicon Valley has clawed at the door to talk to “TBPN,” a streaming show focused on technology and business. They have embraced the “TBPN” hosts, John Coogan and Jordi Hays, who often speak optimistically about technology on their show, which airs online three hours a day, five days a week.

Now, a leading artificial intelligence startup is giving the show a full-on bear hug. On Thursday, OpenAI said it had bought “TBPN” for an undisclosed amount and would continue to support it as the show promoted the business of technology and media.

“One thing that’s become clear is that the standard communications playbook just doesn’t apply to us,” Fidji Simo, a top OpenAI executive, said in an internal memo to employees about the deal. She added that buying “TBPN” would help OpenAI “create a space for a real, constructive conversation about the changes AI creates — with builders and people using the technology at the center.”

“TBPN,” which employs 11 people, said it would remain editorially independent and continue running its daily show but would wind down its advertising operations. The company had not raised a major amount of venture capital. OpenAI and “TBPN” declined to disclose the terms of the deal.

The Wall Street Journal earlier reported the deal. (The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023 for copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)

…“TBPN,” which aired its first episode in October 2024, gained traction among techies because it bucked that [AI negativity] discourse. Mr. Coogan and Mr. Hays, both former start-up founders, have professed their love of capitalism, building businesses and watching technology companies reshape the world.

Mr. Altman also invested in Mr. Coogan’s first company, the nutritional supplement drink Soylent, more than a decade ago.

Dylan Abruscato, the president of “TBPN,” said in an interview that the show had ambitions to expand, which would be easier to do with OpenAI’s support and funding. “TBPN” will sit in OpenAI’s strategy division and report to Chris Lehane, the chief global affairs officer.

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The duo put a clause in the purchase contract that OpenAI will have no control over the TBPN content. Though one has to wonder how eager they’d be to offer negative opinions about their paymasters. (Will they ask about Sora’s economics?) Then again, such schemes generally run into the ground. Andreessen Horowitz tried the same in 2021, with no lasting effect.
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MLB’s ABS Challenge System is exposing the worst umpire in baseball • The Verge

Terrence O’Brien:

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During Wednesday’s game between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Milwaukee Brewers, umpire CB Bucknor took a foul ball to the mask and had to be helped off the field. It was the cap to what has been a particularly bad week for one of the most controversial umpires in baseball.

It started with perhaps the best example of how MLB’s Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) Challenge System can inject drama in baseball. This is the first year for the new robot umpire, which allows hitters, catchers, and pitchers to challenge balls and strikes for the first time. Each team starts a game with two challenges. But they only lose a challenge if it’s unsuccessful, so players aren’t inclined to demand a review unless they’re sure.

During Saturday’s game between the Red Sox and the Reds, Eugenio Suarez challenged Bucknor on back-to-back strike three calls and successfully had them overturned by the robo ump.

It doesn’t matter that Suarez ultimately grounded out. What matters is that, in a game where the Reds hit two home runs, the loudest cheers came for a pair of successful ABS challenges.

This was far from the only time that Bucknor had his calls overturned at the plate, it was a bad night for him overall. There were eight ABS challenges over the course of the game, and six of them were successful. The two calls that were not overturned were extremely close, within 0.1 inch of the strike zone edge. His misses, however, were more dramatic. Three pitches he called strikes missed by 2.4 inches or more — one was a full 2.7 inches out of the zone. And, by Jomboy Media’s judgment, Bucknor blew 20 calls if you count ones that weren’t challenged.

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So Americans have now got their own version of VAR – or perhaps it’s more like the line call challenges of the past in tennis, where each player got three per set; now it’s all electronic. This is the model that VAR in football should follow, and it’s madness that hasn’t been used and responsibility is instead given to the referees.

The fact that bad umpiring is being found out by this system is unsurprising. The next effect isn’t hard to predict: umpires will get better at their job, just as happened with tennis line calling after the introduction of challenges.
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A brief history of instant coffee • Works in Progress Magazine

Benjamin Stubbing & Oscar Sykes:

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The convenience of instant coffee masks a surprisingly difficult problem. Coffee’s appeal lies in the hundreds of volatile compounds that create its flavor and aroma, exactly the substances most likely to disappear during processing. Creating instant coffee required developing techniques to extract the soluble molecules in coffee from the insoluble plant matter without destroying the fragile compounds that make coffee worth drinking.

The first attempt at the drink was, by all accounts, terrible. In 1771, over two centuries after coffee reached Europe, Londoner John Dring filed a patent for a ‘coffee compound’. Dring’s method involved mixing ground coffee with butter and tallow, then heating the mixture on an iron plate until it thickened into a paste that could be shaped into cakes. These cakes were then dissolved in hot water to make coffee. The purpose of the animal fats isn’t entirely clear. They may have been intended to extract and carry soluble compounds from the coffee grounds or to preserve the ground coffee from oxidation. Whatever Dring’s aim, the method wasn’t commercially viable because the fats went rancid, causing the cakes to spoil quickly.

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It’s worth pausing before reading the story (which is, as with WiP stuff, excellent) and asking yourself: in what year do you think they made an instant coffee powder that actually lived up to the name?
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NASA sends Outlook around Moon, immediately needs IT help • The Register

Richard Speed:

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Many a frustrated user has sworn they’ll launch Microsoft Outlook into space, but NASA has actually done it – on a journey around the Moon, where it’s now causing problems for astronauts.

The astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft while it was circling the Earth were taking care of a bunch of housekeeping tasks, including getting their devices working. Judging by some space-to-ground communications with controllers at Houston, it didn’t go well.

NASA has helpfully provided a YouTube channel showing live views from the Orion spacecraft, as well as snippets of communication. During this stream, one of the astronauts could be heard first asking for help with network connectivity (IT support staff will be delighted to know that one troubleshooting step involves turning the device off and on) before telling controllers, “I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working.”

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In space nobody can reboot your screen?
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FBI declares suspected Chinese hack of US surveillance system a “major cyber incident” • POLITICO

John Sakellariadis:

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The FBI last week deemed a recent China-linked cyber intrusion into a sensitive agency surveillance system a “major incident,” meaning it poses significant risks to US national security, according to one congressional aide and two U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter.

The bureau first told Congress on March 4 that it was investigating suspicious activity on an internal agency system that contained “law enforcement sensitive information.” The FBI did not publicly identify who was behind the activity at the time, but POLITICO previously reported that China is suspected.

The FBI determined the intrusion meets the definition of a major incident under a federal data security statute known as FISMA, said the three people. Congress was informed of the decision earlier this week, according to the aide. This person, like others in this report, was granted anonymity because they were not authorised to speak publicly on the investigation.

The determination suggests the hackers successfully compromised swathes of sensitive data stored directly on FBI systems, likely marking a major counterintelligence coup for China. FISMA requires agencies to tell lawmakers within seven days about any digital intrusion it has determined is “likely to result in demonstrable harm” to US national security.

Cynthia Kaiser, the former deputy assistant director of the FBI’s cyber division, said she is not aware of the FBI making any such determination on a hack affecting its own systems since at least 2020.

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Kash Patel is really showing his mettle and leadership here. (Minor subbing note: in the original story, “U.S.” has full stops for abbreviation but “FBI” does not. Why not? Both are abbreviations.)
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Marmite maker Unilever agrees $44.8bn deal to combine food arm with McCormick • The Guardian

Mark Sweney and Sarah Butler:

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Unilever has agreed to combine its food business with US-based McCormick in a $44.8bn deal that will give the Marmite-to-Hellmann’s mayonnaise owner majority control of a food empire.

The Anglo-Dutch company will control 65% of the new spin-off, which will combine brands such as Knorr and Pot Noodle with McCormick’s condiments and spices including French’s mustard, Old Bay seasoning and Cholula hot sauce.

However, the combined company will be called McCormick and led by its executives, with senior management representation from the ranks of Unilever’s food business.

Under the agreement, McCormick will pay London-listed Unilever $15.7bn in cash and the equivalent of $29.1bn in shares for a stake in almost all of the Anglo-Dutch company’s food arm.

After the combination, which is forecast to result in $600m (£453m) of annual cost savings by the end of the third year, McCormick will retain its global headquarters in the US and New York stock exchange listing, with an international headquarters at the existing Unilever Foods base in the Netherlands.

Unilever’s food business employs research, development and marketing staff in the UK and has factories making Pot Noodle in Crumlin, Wales, and Hellmann’s, Marmite and Colman’s mustard in Burton-on-Trent.

The companies said savings would come from changes in manufacturing, distribution and on procurement of supplies but said they were yet to confirm how many jobs might be affected and where.

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So the owner of the iconically British Marmite brand is going to be part-owned by an American company. Some people are going to love this. Some are going to hate it, particularly if it leads to any chances in Marmite’s manufacturing.
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WSJ subscriptions success “not luck” says editor Emma Tucker • Press Gazette

Charlotte Tobitt:

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Changes introduced by Emma Tucker, the WSJ editor] have included reshaping the investigations team so it could focus more on quicker investigations with news hooks.

Tucker said “that didn’t mean we were abandoning doing investigations that require time and effort” but that previously the team was not set up to jump on to short and medium-term investigations.

Examples of this have included a visual investigation of the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by federal agents amid immigration raids in Minnesota in January and reporting on what was going on behind the scenes at the Department of Homeland Security led by Kristi Noem.

Tucker said: “She was the first head to roll in Trump Two and we set that reporting in motion.”

Tucker said she has broken down barriers in the newsroom to ensure its “expertise is best leveraged”. Live blogs have been revamped both in terms of making the product experience “much more intuitive” and in the news updates themselves. “We think really hard about how we update it so we’re there, we’re timely, but we’re trying to give real added value with the blog posts that we do. They have been driving an incredible amount of traffic, but also engagement,” Tucker said.

The WSJ is doing more “re-versioning” of well-read stories into other formats such as video, reader Q&As or “takeaways” (bite-sized explanations of WSJ reporting).

…“No one likes change. People hate change. But you have to explain why it’s necessary, and keep explaining it, and keep messaging and then showing the results and trying to create a more positive feedback loop.”

Using the right data was also “critical” to the culture change, Tucker said, in a “very targeted way that was easy for the newsroom to understand, but which enabled the newsroom to orient around key metrics”.

The data dashboard now on display to the newsroom emphasises two metrics: subscriber interest (the number of subscriber uniques) and subscriber engaged time.

“If subscribers are interested and they’re sticking around, then we’re doing something right,” Tucker said.

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This makes an interesting contrast with the next story, which is also about a well-known news brand and its efforts to adapt to the modern world.
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Wired ends UK print magazine amid shake-up of London staff • Press Gazette

Charlotte Tobitt:

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Wired will not put out a print magazine in the UK in 2026 as it focuses on global digital subscriber growth.

Seven editorial staff left Wired’s London office at the end of 2025, with the team being rebuilt to focus on audience development roles and some UK and Europe-focused reporting. Global editorial director Katie Drummond told Press Gazette that creating a “sustainable and growing subscription business is the future of Wired. “While other components like advertising and commerce play a really important part, I don’t want Wired to be at the whims of anything that I can’t control the way I can control the journalism.”

A spokesperson said direct-to-publisher subscribers (meaning those who subscribe through Wired rather than a third party) were up 20% in 2025 while new subscribers taking the digital-only option doubled. Wired’s US subscription revenue was up 24% in 2025.

Drummond told Press Gazette that London remains “of paramount importance” to the global editorial operation (which comprises around 120 people, with plans to increase that by at least 10% in 2026). She said: “We made some strategic changes at the end of last year going into this year to better orient this newsroom around what we were doing with Wired globally, and to really think of the London office as a hub for key roles.

“So all of our audience development leadership, for example, is based out of London, because we want to be starting the day strategically with newsletters, social, vertical video – what are we doing across all of these functions? Those decisions should be made and executed on first thing.”

Seven London-based Wired journalists left the business at the end of 2025 including Greg Williams, deputy global editorial director and UK editor-in-chief. Other roles affected included managing editor, global design director, associate editor, science editor, features editor and senior business editor.

…In the UK and Ireland in 2024, the latest available ABC figures, Wired published six issues with an average circulation of 32,404. Of these, 10,080 were individual subscriptions, 10,302 were free distributed copies, 4,838 were single newsstand sales, and 7,399 were via ‘all you can read’ users of services like Apple News+.

«

I make that three times that Wired UK has ceased printing since 1995. The set of people let go sounds basically like “all the people you’d need to run a science or technology magazine”.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A remarkable investigation by Nepal police suggests some climbers were made ill for an insurance scam. CC-licensed photo by Mark Horrell 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. Elevated. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Apple at 50: the roots of a tech revolution • Financial Times

Patrick McGee:

»

Vicki Amon-Higa, whom [Steve] Jobs hired in early 1990 from the power utility Florida Power & Light, characterises his approach at the time as “brute force and great people”.

The idea was that you hire geniuses, lock them in a room and apply pressure until brilliant products emerge. Process, by contrast, sounded bureaucratic and stultifying. Process was not just absent from Jobs’ thinking; it was antithetical to it. Amon-Higa says Jobs understood “small q quality” (a narrow focus on product) but did not grasp “big Q quality” (how to enforce standards across the entire organisation).

…She invited her mentor, Noriaki Kano, a quality expert who emphasised customer satisfaction, and Juran — the so-called “architect of quality” whose writings had been promoted by Sarasohn — to speak with NeXT. The impact was profound.

Jobs tended to think that talent was innate, but Kano taught him that people needed to be coached and developed, to bring out their best. Juran, then in his eighties, convinced Jobs to empower the individuals actually doing the work to make improvements and taught him the value, Jobs later said, of “seeing everything as a repetitive process, and to instrument that process, and find out how it’s running”.

He particularly liked that for Juran, quality was just one aspect of a broader system that did not sound stifling. “Dr Juran was one of the few people that I met that had a real down-to-earth approach to it, that didn’t think that quality was the second coming,” Jobs said for a Juran documentary, in late 1991. “He approached it much more scientifically.”

Jobs called Juran’s philosophy “a radically different approach to business processes than the traditional one” — but it was too late for NeXT. Their pipeline of products had no market fit and, by 1993, Jobs was forced to abandon manufacturing.

«

McGee is the author of “Apple in China”, which has been highly praised for its research and writing. This piece traces the origins of Apple’s success in manufacturing back to Japan’s rebirth after World War 2 as a manufacturing giant.
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Everest guides “secretly poisoned” climbers to trigger costly helicopter rescues’ as part of £15m scam • Daily Mail Online

Perkin Amalaraj:

»

Guides taking tourists up and down Mount Everest have allegedly been secretly lacing climbers’ food to trigger costly helicopter rescues as part of a £15million insurance scam, according to a new investigation.

Poor weather and patchy communications at the world’s tallest mountain have allegedly led to a cottage industry that sees shifty pilots, guides and doctors charging insurance companies for services not rendered.

According to the Kathmandu Post, the fake rescue racket works by getting a climber to stage a medical emergency. A helicopter is then called and taken to a nearby hospital. An insurance claim is then filed that bears little resemblance to what actually happened.

Nepal Police’s Central Investigation Bureau (CIB) identified two ways this scam is manufactured. The first involved tourists who don’t want to walk all the way back down. Treks can take up to two weeks on foot, so guides tell climbers to fake a medical emergency so that a helicopter comes.

But the second method is far more troubling, and involves tricking climbers into thinking they’re having a medical emergency. Above 3,000m, altitude sickness is common. Symptoms include headaches, tingling in the body’s extremities, and a drop in blood oxygen saturation. In most cases, this can be resolved with rest, hydration or a gradual descent.

But Nepal’s CIB says that some guides and hotel staff are told to terrify tourists into thinking an evacuation to a hospital is the only thing that will save them. If this doesn’t work, investigators found that in some instances, guides tried to induce symptoms by giving tourists suffering mild altitude sickness tablets and excessive water.

In at least one case, baking powder was mixed into tourists’ food to make them physically unwell.

«

An amazing storry, apparently all done by the Nepal Police investigating.
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Lessons from your petrol pump • Financial Times

Tim Harford:

»

In 2002, the economist David Popp published a study of “induced innovation”, tracking the response by inventors to the oil shocks of the 1970s.

The oil price leapt in 1973 and surged further in 1979, before sliding lower throughout the early 1980s. Popp found that patent activity tracked the oil price — for example, there were 10 successful patent applications in the field of solar energy in 1972, but more than 100 in 1974 and about 300 a year in the late 1970s. As the oil price fell back, so did patent activity, with fewer than 50 successful solar patents a year from the mid-1980s onward.

Popp found that a similar story could be told for batteries (a natural complement to solar energy), and patent applications for deriving liquid and gaseous fuels from coal. In each case, the few years of high oil prices led to a few years in which oil-saving patent activity was also high.

Today’s high oil price sends more signals: to find oilfields outside the Gulf region; to build new pipelines and tanker ports that are further from harm; to find ways to defend vulnerable shipping. In fact, there are far too many to list, and that is the point: a price signal — which, of course, is also a monetary incentive — is an invitation to everyone, everywhere, to do things a little differently.

«

There’s plenty more (Harford is always thorough) but the key question seems to be: how long does the price signal have to last before it permeates through all that’s affected?
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Anthropic is having a month • TechCrunch

Connie Loizos:

»

Here’s what happened on Tuesday: When Anthropic pushed out version 2.1.88 of its Claude Code software package, it accidentally included a file that exposed nearly 2,000 source code files and more than 512,000 lines of code — essentially the full architectural blueprint for one of its most important products. A security researcher named Chaofan Shou noticed almost immediately and posted about it on X. Anthropic’s statement to multiple outlets was nonchalant as these things go: “This was a release packaging issue caused by human error, not a security breach.” (Internally, we’d guess things were less measured.)

Claude Code isn’t a minor product. It’s a command-line tool that lets developers use Anthropic’s AI to write and edit code and has become formidable enough to unsettle rivals. According to the WSJ, OpenAI pulled the plug on its video generation product Sora just six months after launching it to the public to refocus its efforts on developers and enterprises — partly in response to Claude Code’s growing momentum.

What leaked was not the AI model itself but the software scaffolding around it — the instructions that tell the model how to behave, what tools to use, and where its limits are. Developers began publishing detailed analyses almost immediately, with one describing the product as “a production-grade developer experience, not just a wrapper around an API.”

Whether this turns out to matter in any lasting way is a question best left to developers. Competitors may find the architecture instructive; at the same time, the field moves fast.

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These Raspberry Pi price hikes are no joke • The Verge

Stevie Bonifield:

»

As of today, the price of the 16GB version of the Raspberry Pi 5 is going up by $100, a price bump that’s almost as much as the original $120 price tag. Driven by the ongoing RAM shortage, Raspberry Pi is raising prices on over a dozen of its bare-bones computers, after previous increases in December and February. The increases range from $11.25 to $150.

In a blog post announcing the price increases, Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton reiterated that they won’t be permanent, stating, “The circumstances in which we find ourselves are challenging, but in the future they will abate. When they do, we will reverse our price increases, and until they do, we will continue to work hard to limit their impact in every way we can.”

«

And, Upton was obliged to point out, this was not an April Fools joke.
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Hackers slipped a trojan into the code library behind most of the internet. Your team is probably affected • VentureBeat

Louis Columbus:

»

Attackers stole a long-lived npm access token belonging to the lead maintainer of axios, the most popular HTTP client library in JavaScript, and used it to publish two poisoned versions that install a cross-platform remote access trojan (RAT). The malicious releases target macOS, Windows, and Linux. They were live on the npm registry for roughly three hours before removal.

Axios gets more than 100 million downloads per week. Wiz reports it sits in approximately 80% of cloud and code environments, touching everything from React front-ends to CI/CD pipelines to serverless functions. Huntress detected the first infections 89 seconds after the malicious package went live and confirmed at least 135 compromised systems among its customers during the exposure window.

…The attacker took over the npm account of @jasonsaayman, a lead axios maintainer, changed the account email to an anonymous ProtonMail address, and published the poisoned packages through npm's command-line interface. That bypassed the project’s GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline entirely.

The attacker never touched the axios source code. Instead, both release branches received a single new dependency: plain-crypto-js@4.2.1. No part of the codebase imports it. The package exists solely to run a postinstall script that drops a cross-platform RAT onto the developer’s machine.

The staging was precise. Eighteen hours before the axios releases, the attacker published a clean version of plain-crypto-js under a separate npm's account to build publishing history and dodge new-package scanner alerts. Then came the weaponized 4.2.1. Both release branches hit within 39 minutes. Three platform-specific payloads were pre-built. The malware erases itself after execution and swaps in a clean package.json to frustrate forensic inspection.

StepSecurity, which identified the compromise alongside Socket, called it among the most operationally sophisticated supply chain attacks ever documented against a top-10 npm's package.

…Three npm's supply chain compromises in seven months. Every one started with a stolen maintainer credential.

The Shai-Hulud worm hit in September 2025. A single phished maintainer account gave attackers a foothold that self-replicated across more than 500 packages, harvesting npm tokens, cloud credentials, and GitHub secrets as it spread. CISA issued an advisory. GitHub overhauled npm’s entire authentication model in response.

Then in January 2026, Koi Security’s PackageGate research dropped six zero-day vulnerabilities across npm, pnpm, vlt, and Bun that punched through the very defenses the ecosystem adopted after Shai-Hulud. Lockfile integrity and script-blocking both failed under specific conditions. Three of the four package managers patched within weeks. npm closed the report.

Now axios. A stolen long-lived token published a RAT through both release branches despite OIDC, SLSA, and every post-Shai-Hulud hardening measure in place.

«

This would have been very, very serious if it had laasted any longer. It was bad even for the minute it lasted.
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Renewables hit 49.4% of global electricity capacity in 2025 • The Register

Brandon Vigliarolo:

»

It was a strong year for renewable power expansion in 2025, with solar installations helping push renewables to nearly half of global electricity capacity, but that does not mean the world is yet on pace to meet its renewable energy commitments.

The International Renewable Energy Agency’s (IRENA) 2026 Renewable Capacity Statistics report, published on Wednesday, found that renewables dominated new power additions last year, accounting for 85.6% of global capacity expansion. Solar, in turn, was the dominant renewable technology, accounting for nearly three-quarters of last year’s renewable capacity additions.

Those additions totalled 692 GW in 2025, lifting installed renewable capacity by a record 15.5% year over year, IRENA noted. By the end of last year, renewables accounted for 49.4% of global installed electricity capacity, while variable renewable sources such as solar and wind represented roughly 35% of total capacity. 

For reference, it was only in 2023 that renewable energy sources crossed the threshold of generating 30% of the world’s electricity.

As IRENA notes in a press release, renewable energy is back in the spotlight amid the US conflict in Iran causing a spike in fuel prices and energy (i.e., oil) instability. According to IRENA Director General Francesco La Camera, conflicts like the Iranian mess are a perfect reason to push for more renewable adoption. 

«

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35,000 pints of stolen Guinness, 950 wheels of pilfered cheese: can the UK’s cargo theft crisis be stopped? • The Guardian

Stuart McGurk:

»

Cargo theft operates according to the law of supply and demand. When a truck carrying 400 50-litre kegs of Guinness – the equivalent of 35,000 pints – was stolen from a logistics hub in Northamptonshire in December 2024, it was widely seen as the cause of a nationwide shortage. This wasn’t quite true – the truck was targeted because there was a shortage in the first place – but it only made the scarcity worse, which in turn only made the stolen Guinness more valuable.

The cost of living crisis has made food and beverages an increasingly attractive target, with thefts rising as much as 79% in 2024 according to one report. In October of that year, 950 wheels of premium cheddar were stolen in London, an incident soon dubbed “the grate cheese heist”. (Jamie Oliver asked the public to keep an eye out for “lorryloads of posh cheese”.) Last week, a truck carrying KitKats went missing after setting off from Italy. A spokesperson for Nestlé said criminals had “made a break” with more than 400,000 bars. In some ways, it’s the perfect crime. If stolen cargo isn’t found within the first few hours, it’s as good as gone. It re-enters the supply chain, and, soon after, the evidence will get eaten. At present, Dawber says, olive oil is a popular target. With the value of Italian extra virgin hovering around £10 a litre, the average truckload is worth about £250,000, making it more valuable than most wine.

When accounting for lost revenues, VAT and insurance costs, cargo crime is estimated to cost the UK economy about £700m a year. For freight companies, often operating on minuscule profit margins, the impact can be crippling. Insurance premiums rise with every claim. Excesses are regularly in the thousands. Many haulage companies have to absorb the costs and pay the customer for the goods lost.

For years, the industry has attempted to sound the alarm. One partial remedy, it argues, is maddeningly simple: make freight theft its own crime. (At present, it is categorised as “theft from motor vehicle”, the same offence as nicking a pair of sunglasses from a glovebox.) In parliament last year, Rachel Taylor MP introduced a bill that would do just this, meaning that sentences for criminals could be longer and accurate statistics on the scale of the crime could be collected. A second reading is due to take place next month.

«

Great, and timely, article. There’s a more formal one for the US; less entertaining.
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Half of social-science studies fail replication test in years-long project • Nature

Nicola Jones:

»

A massive seven-year project exploring 3,900 social-science papers has ended with a disturbing finding: researchers could replicate the results of only half of the studies that they tested1.

The conclusions of the initiative, called the Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) project, have been “eagerly awaited by many”, says John Ioannidis, a metascientist at Stanford University in California who was not involved with the programme. The scale and breadth of the project is impressive, he says, but the results are “not surprising”, because they are in line with those from smaller, earlier studies.

Researchers have been investigating a ‘crisis’ in the reliability of scientific results for more than a decade. They’ve found that many scientific experiments can’t be repeated — not just in the social sciences, but also in the biomedical field.

The SCORE findings — derived from the work of 865 researchers poring over papers published in 62 journals and spanning fields including economics, education, psychology and sociology — don’t necessarily mean that science is being done poorly, says Tim Errington, head of research at the Center for Open Science, an institute that co-ordinated part of the project. Of course, some results are not replicable because of either honest mistakes or the rare case of misconduct, he says, but SCORE found that, in many cases, papers simply did not provide enough data or details for experiments to be repeated accurately. Fresh methods or analyses can legitimately lead to distinct results. This means that, rather than take papers at face value, researchers should treat any single study as “a piece of the puzzle”, Errington says.

«

The suspicion is that the problem comes straight from the “publish or perish” imperative imposed on so many researchers.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Airlines may have to cut flights inside Europe within a month if jet fuel supplies don’t resume at volume, experts say. CC-licensed photo by Aldas Kirvaitis 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. Unplaned. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

After more than 53 years, humans may finally return to the Moon this week • Ars Technica

Stephen Clark:

»

The two-day countdown for the launch of NASA’s Artemis II mission began Monday evening, with clocks timed for the first of six opportunities in early April to send a crew of four astronauts around the far side of the Moon.

Liftoff from Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida is scheduled for a two-hour launch window opening at 6:24 pm EDT (22:24 UTC) on Wednesday. NASA has backup launch opportunities each day through Monday, April 6, or else the mission will have to wait until the end of the month.

Mission managers said Monday that all systems were looking good for launch this week. The weather forecast is favourable, with an 80% chance of acceptable conditions for liftoff Wednesday. The only weather concern at the launch site in Florida is a low chance of rain showers and cloud cover that could present a risk of lightning. But with a two-hour launch window, there should be plenty of time to wait out any scattered storms.

John Honeycutt, chair of NASA’s mission management team, told reporters Monday that there were “no showstoppers” for launch on Wednesday. Ground teams powered up the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft for final checkouts early Tuesday, setting the stage for loading super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen into the rocket Wednesday morning.

«

So let’s be clear. It’s not a “return to the Moon”. It’s a return near the Moon, doing the same dance that Apollo 8 managed back in December 1968. That’s nearly 60 years of no progress.

Worse: there are good reasons to think the heat shield of this mission is less than perfect. We can hope that’s wrong. But nobody has explained what we’re really doing with this. It’s not new science, it’s not new technology.
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Gmail adds ability to change usernames after 22 years • The Register

Brandon Vigliarolo:

»

If you’re embarrassed by your Gmail address but haven’t wanted to start a new account for fear of losing messages, we have good news. Ahead of Gmail’s 22nd anniversary on Wednesday, Google says it is now letting US users change their account username.

That’s right: You can now swap out that less-than-professional address you registered years ago but still use because it became the de facto hub of your online life back when that joke username still seemed like a good idea.

Google announced the change in a rather brief note on its Keyword blog on Tuesday, only mentioning that it was now available for all Google Account users in the US. This vulture can personally attest to not having the ability available in his account, suggesting that like most other features Google rolls out for its products, this is probably being released gradually. 

If you do have the option to change your Gmail username, you can follow the steps on this linked page to do so.

…Per the help page linked above, your previous Gmail address stays on as an alternate address, and emails will still be received by both, effectively making it an alias for the new account. You can still sign in to Google services using either the old or new address in case you forget what you renamed that 20-year-old account at some point.

«

OK, but they do check that the desired account name isn’t already in use, right? Right? Because there are ever so many ways for this to go wrong. Of course it’s a stupid question, but Google sometimes misses the obvious.
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European jet fuel supplies under threat as Iran war halts flows • Financial Times

Ryohtaroh Satoh and Sylvia Pfeifer:

»

A drop in shipments of jet fuel from the Middle East is prompting warnings of a looming supply crunch for Europe’s aviation industry as the Iran war chokes off cargoes.

European imports of jet fuel are expected to fall to about 420,000 barrels a day this week, down roughly 40% from last week and the lowest level for March since 2022, according to energy data provider Vortexa.

The decline follows the near shutdown of flows through the Strait of Hormuz, a key artery for global fuel shipments that accounted for roughly 40% of Europe’s jet fuel supply before the war.

“Fuel supplies are a major concern,” said one airline industry insider, adding that while supplies had remained “relatively stable over the past ten days”, carriers were in “daily monitoring mode”.

A senior jet fuel manager said European markets could begin to face physical shortages within weeks.

While airlines had until recently been supported by cargoes already en route from the Gulf, which typically take several weeks to arrive, flows from the Middle East have now largely ceased.

Volumes have fallen about 90%, with just over 1mn barrels still in transit at the start of the week, according to Mick Strautmann, an analyst at Vortexa.

Insights Global, which tracks storage levels at key hubs in north-west Europe, said jet fuel inventories had been declining but that levels were still in line with those of February 2024. However, it added that the pace of drawdowns from storage could accelerate as Middle East shipments fall.

…Mylène Scholnick, an adviser to UK aircraft leasing company World Star Aviation, said airlines may cut flights towards the end of April if the fuel shortage persists, with the impact expected to be most acute on short and medium-haul routes in Europe and Asia, where demand is more price-sensitive.

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Impact of online competition on local newspapers: evidence from the introduction of Craigslist • The Review of Economic Studies

Milena Djourelova, Ruben Durante and Gregory Martin:

»

How does competition from online platforms affect the organization, performance, and editorial choices of newspapers? What are the implications of these changes for the information voters are exposed to and for their political choices?

We study these questions using the staggered introduction of Craigslist—the world’s largest online platform for classified advertising—across US counties between 1995 and 2009. This setting allows us to separate the effect of competition for classified advertising from other changes brought about by the Internet, and to compare newspapers that relied more or less heavily on classified ads ex ante.

We find that, following the entry of Craigslist, local newspapers reliant on classified ads experienced a significant decline in the number of management and newsroom staff, including in the number of editors covering politics. These organizational changes led to a reduction in news coverage of politics and resulted in a decline in newspaper readership, particularly among readers with high political interest.

Finally, we document that reduced exposure to local political news was associated with an increase in partisan voting and increased entry and success of ideologically extreme candidates in congressional elections. Taken together, our findings shed light on the determinants of the decline of print media and on its broader implications for democratic politics.

«

So we could draw a straight line and say Craigslist is responsible for Trump, and the current energy crisis? That’s what it feels like. (Though the same dynamic occurred in the UK, without Craigslist.)
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Epic Games layoffs today: Fortnite losses force 20% job cuts • Fast Company

Jennifer Mattson:

»

Video game maker Epic Games, the creator of Fortnite, announced on Tuesday that it is laying off 1,000 employees, or about 20% of its workforce. (In 2023, Epic cut 830 jobs, or 16% of its workforce at that time, per Variety.)

“I’m sorry we’re here again,” Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said in a note to Epic employees, which the company posted on X. “The downturn in Fortnite engagement that started in 2025 means we’re spending significantly more than we’re making, and we have to make major cuts to keep the company funded.”

He continued: “This layoff, together with over $500 million of identified cost savings in contracting, marketing, and closing some open roles, puts us in a more stable place.”

Fast Company reached out to Epic, which had no further comment.

The note said some of the challenges the company is facing were industry-wide. Those challenges included lower growth, weaker spending, and tougher cost economics; current consoles selling fewer units than past generations did; and games competing for time against other entertainment. Sweeney said the layoffs are not due to AI.

«

Once upon a time Fortnite was huge. Now it’s not. Times change, and with them tastes. Epic seems not to have been able to adapt.
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Hollywood work dried up. So they’re taking survival jobs • L.A. Material

Alex Zaragoza:

»

Across the entertainment industry, countless creatives are in the same boat, taking jobs bartending, dog walking, or playing fake patients at hospitals, all the while confronting an existential crisis. The landscape is bleak and getting bleaker. Threads from out-of-work entertainment workers asking for advice on jobs pop up on Reddit and other message boards regularly, their tenor growing more defeated as time wears on. Studio executives — the ones who still have jobs, anyway — may be raking in multimillion dollar salaries and bonuses as many studios turn massive profits, but it can feel like everyone else is holding on for dear life.

The hope is that the job engine of Hollywood in Los Angeles is facing a slump — and not an irreversible crash.
The punches have come one after another in recent years. There was the COVID pandemic, which led to nearly a million jobs lost; the 2023 double strike of the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA; and the 2025 wildfires. Through that also came the proliferation of AI, production moving out of state to take advantage of cost-saving subsidies offered elsewhere, and major studio mergers threatening to create a monopoly that will undoubtedly make matters worse. The result has been fewer TV shows and films being made, and a stream of layoffs across the industry. It has all depressingly accounted for 41,000 industry jobs lost in just two years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Last year, FilmLA, the film office for the City and County of Los Angeles, reported a 13.2% decline in production between July and September of 2025 from the previous year. The Writers Guild of America reported a 40% decrease in jobs in the 2023-2024 television season. International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), the union that oversees stagehands, craftspeople, and artisans in film and television production, saw 18,000 jobs disappear from 2022 to 2024. Meanwhile, SAG-AFTRA went back into negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) last month, with a key goal of protecting members from losing work to AI. 

Add it all up and what has been a jobs drought the last couple years now stands to become a career-ending wasteland, leaving the creative workforce scrambling to figure out how the hell they’re going to get by.

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Solar panels at Lidl? Plug-in versions set to appear in shops within months • This is Money

Lucy Evans:

»

Eco households who want to distance themselves from fossil fuel energy, which is susceptible to market fluctuations, can install traditional solar panels.

They use daylight to create electricity for your home, which means your family will be less reliant on expensive fossil fuel energy to power your lives.

But they are expensive to install – around £6,000 on average, with £350 a year in energy bill savings, according to Energy Saving Trust. So despite the potential savings, some families shy away from such a purchase due to the thousands of pounds needed upfront to install the panels.

These plug-in versions, however, are far cheaper and can be put on a balcony or in an outdoor space such as a garden instead of being fixed permanently on a roof.

They can be plugged into a mains socket like any other electronic device to provide a home with free solar power.

These cheaper versions are already available in other European countries. In Germany, for example, almost half a million new devices are plugged in every year.

The Government says this technology is “easy to install” and will allow consumers to ‘significantly cut energy bills’.

«

The problem with introducing these in the UK (Germany has wide deployment) is the difference in electrical wiring systems between the two countries. The UK’s ring mains system is different from the spur systems used in Germany, and that creates problems over power flow.

Amusing too that the story has a link to this guide of its own in the middle: “Step by step, what to do NOW to stop the Middle East energy crisis leaving you penniless. This is how to get the best deals on petrol, mortgages and household energy and stay afloat”. Well, at least someone’s taking it seriously.
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Railway clock glitch causes false delays and payouts • Daily News Hungary

Hetzmann Mercédesz:

»

Hungary’s switch to daylight saving time on Sunday morning caused an unexpected technical issue at the state railway company, MÁV. While most digital systems automatically adjusted to the new time, MÁV’s passenger information system failed to update accordingly, leading to widespread confusion.

For several hours after the clock change, the system incorrectly registered trains as being delayed by around 60 minutes, even when services were running on time or with only minimal delays, Telex reported.

The issue became particularly visible on the Vonatinfó platform, where the map appeared flooded with delay indicators. At first glance, it suggested that nearly the entire Hungarian rail network was experiencing significant disruption:

In reality, no such nationwide breakdown had occurred. The problem was that the system “forgot” to advance the time, which resulted in incorrect delay calculations being shown to passengers.

The glitch had an unexpected upside for some travellers.

Because MÁV’s system interpreted the situation as widespread delays exceeding 20 minutes, it automatically began issuing compensation payments.

Under the railway’s policy, passengers are entitled to partial refunds if their train is significantly delayed. Due to the error, even those travelling on time or with minor delays were flagged as eligible and received compensation.

…By late Sunday morning, MÁV issued an official statement confirming that an “IT error” had caused the incorrect delay reports following the clock change. The company said the issue was resolved within a few hours, and the system has since been restored to normal operation. Importantly, the railway company clarified that passengers who received compensation due to the error will not be required to return the money.

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Still – still! – after all these years there are systems which fail to update when the clocks change. True, it’s not easy. But that’s why they get paid the medium-scale bucks.
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Top Brussels official urges Europeans to work from home and drive less • POLITICO

James Fernyhough, Elena Giordano, Ben Munster and Ben Makuch:

»

The European Commission has urged people to work from home, drive and fly less, and for EU countries to urgently roll out renewables, as it warned of a prolonged energy crisis as a result of the conflict in the Gulf.

In a speech with echoes of the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, EU energy chief Dan Jørgensen said Europe was facing a “very serious situation” with no clear end in sight.

“Even if … peace is here tomorrow, still we will not go back to normal in the foreseeable future,” he said, following an extraordinary meeting of the EU’s 27 energy ministers on Tuesday to discuss the crisis.

“The more you can do to save oil, especially diesel, especially jet fuel, the better we are off,” Jørgensen said, confirming an earlier report by POLITICO that Brussels wanted Europeans to travel less.

He urged member countries to follow the advice of the International Energy Agency, which he said included “work from home where possible, reduce highway speed limits by ten kilometres [an hour, ie 6mph], encourage public transport, alternate private car access … increase car sharing and adopt efficient driving practices.”

Longer term, he urged EU countries to double down on building more renewables, saying “this must be the time we finally turn the tide and truly become energy independent.”

Tuesday’s talks between ministers ended with no concrete proposals, although Jørgensen promised the Commission would be announcing a package of EU-level measures in the near future.

His comments come as fears grow that the world faces a major energy crisis exceeding even the 1970s oil shock that could have global economic ramifications comparable to the coronavirus pandemic.

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Unlike the pandemic, though, there’s absolutely no question of this being anything to do with China.
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