The city of Wellington, NZ, is as far from the Equator as which famous US city? Now you can find out. CC-licensed photo by DVincentNZ on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Return to base. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Fire and ‘sheer volume’: how Britain’s 6m-vape problem is putting recycling under strain • The Guardian
Sarah Marsh:
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It is 2pm and Ana, 47, has just started the afternoon shift at the Suez recycling plant near Birmingham city centre, standing beneath a sign reading “Non-ferrous sorting station” with a bucket of vapes in front of her. Sorting and dismantling them is part of her job as a site operative.
Recycling them is not simple. Each bucket holds between 40 and 50 devices, and over the course of a shift, she gets through about half a bucket. Using a hammer, she has to smash each vape open, pry out the batteries and separate each component into a different container.
Single-use vapes were banned in June last year, but more than 6m vapes and vape pods are still being discarded every week in the UK. Waste management companies say the sheer volume is straining recycling systems, while hidden lithium-ion batteries inside the devices are causing fires.
As Ana works, a burst of sugary scent fills the air; she doesn’t worry about the vapes exploding, she says, it’s never happened to her yet. But while vapes may not be hazardous at this stage of the sorting, they can become dangerous when crushed or damaged, such as during waste collection and storage.
In 2025, there were 670 fires at Suez’s UK sites. Of those, 368 were confirmed to be caused by batteries or vapes, with a further 176 suspected to be linked. Those working at the sites say people simply do not understand that vapes cannot be thrown away, or think – wrongly – that they can be recycled alongside household products. Instead, they need to be taken to dedicated electrical recycling points.
“Vapes were suspected as the cause of over 80% of the reported fires across our sites last year, with the numbers and trend continuing so far in 2026,” says Dr Adam Read, the chief sustainability and external affairs officer at Suez.
“This is despite the ban on disposable vapes coming into effect halfway through 2025. With more than 6m vapes still thrown away every week, it is clear that the perception on these items remains that they are a throwaway item. The problem is that people often don’t realise the danger that batteries cause when not disposed of correctly, and think they are doing the right thing by putting them in with their recycling.”
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My guess is that more disposable vapes are thrown away than put into recycling, and that both numbers far outweigh the correctly done set.
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Pancreatic cancer just met its match • Works In Progress
Ruxandra Teslo:
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For most of the last half-century, a diagnosis of metastatic pancreatic cancer was a death sentence. In December 2025, former Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse announced he had been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer that had spread to his lungs, liver and other organs, and was given three to four months to live from the time of diagnosis. With little to lose, he enrolled in a clinical trial for an experimental drug. Four months later, he reported a 76% reduction in tumor volume, describing the drug, daraxonrasib, as a ‘miracle’. His face, ravaged by a severe skin rash from the treatment, told a more complicated story. Yet he was alive and grateful to be able to talk to his family.
A few days after Sasse’s interview, in April 2026, Revolution Medicines announced Phase 3 trial results for daraxonrasib showing the drug had roughly doubled survival in patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer compared to standard chemotherapy. For a disease where median survival has long been measured in months and where little had changed for decades, that result represents a genuine turning point.
But the significance extends beyond pancreatic cancer. Daraxonrasib is among the first drugs in an emerging generation designed to target RAS, a protein implicated in roughly a quarter of all human cancers and long considered beyond reach, in all its mutant forms. And it belongs to a broader class of medicines, molecular glues, that are beginning to show what becomes possible when drugs no longer depend on finding a ready-made pocket in their target. Several compounds in this class are now in clinical development, each probing a different protein that previous generations of drugs could not touch.
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This is enormously encouraging. Quietly, we are making huge strides in treating previously unbeatable diseases. Pancreatic cancer is a fast killer: normally it’s six months from diagnosis to death. (Steve Jobs had a different form from the rapid killer version.)
And this is also very good science writing – of the kind that one used to hope to find in colour supplements and science magazines, but probably wouldn’t nowadays.
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Checkmate in Iran • The Atlantic
Robert Kagan:
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Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character [from those in Vietnam or Afghanistan]. It can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done. The Strait of Hormuz will not be “open,” as it once was. With control of the strait, Iran emerges as the key player in the region and one of the key players in the world. The roles of China and Russia, as Iran’s allies, are strengthened; the role of the United States, substantially diminished. Far from demonstrating American prowess, as supporters of the war have repeatedly claimed, the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started. That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure.
President Trump likes to talk about who has “the cards,” but whether he has any good ones left to play is not clear. The United States and Israel pounded Iran with devastating effectiveness for 37 days, killing much of the country’s leadership and destroying the bulk of its military, yet couldn’t collapse the regime or exact even the smallest concession from it. Now the Trump administration hopes that blockading Iran’s ports will accomplish what massive force could not. It’s possible, of course, but a regime that could not be brought to its knees by five weeks of unrelenting military attack is unlikely to buckle in response to economic pressure alone. Nor does it fear the anger of its populace. As the Iran scholar Suzanne Maloney noted recently, “A regime that slaughtered its own citizens to silence protests in January is fully prepared to impose economic hardships on them now.”
Some supporters of the war are therefore calling for the resumption of military strikes, but they cannot explain how another round of bombing will accomplish what 37 days of bombing did not. More military action will inevitably lead Iran to retaliate against neighboring Gulf states; the war’s advocates have no response to that, either. Trump halted attacks on Iran not because he was bored but because Iran was striking the region’s vital oil and gas facilities. The turning point came on March 18, when Israel bombed Iran’s South Pars gas field and Iran retaliated by attacking Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, the world’s largest natural-gas-export plant, causing damage to production capacity that will take years to repair. Trump responded by declaring a moratorium on further strikes against Iran’s energy facilities and then declaring a cease-fire, despite Iran’s not having made a single concession.
…As the Iran scholars Reuel Gerecht and Ray Takeyh wrote recently, “The Gulf Arab economies were built under the umbrella of American hegemony. Take that away—and the freedom of navigation that goes with it—and the Gulf states will ineluctably go begging to Tehran.”
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Kagan has long been a notorious hawk, which means that this admission by him of all the failures of Trump’s misadventures in Iran carry more weight. And it boils down to: Iran now wields significant power in the Middle East; China is rising fast.
And the strait of Hormuz is still not open. (Gift link.)
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Welcome to the personal software revolution • The Verge
David Pierce:
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The rise of AI coding tools like Claude Code — and OpenAI’s Codex, and GitHub Copilot, and Cursor, and Lovable, and Replit, and a thousand others — is already changing the way software developers work. They’re also giving way to an entirely new kind of software: the software we make just for ourselves. Not to raise venture capital for, not to eventually sell to Google. The era of personal software is upon us, and it is changing our relationship with technology forever. It has certainly already changed mine.
AI lets us make apps the way we used to make lists and spreadsheets. Managing the family budget? Do it in a hand-built app with every feature you need and exactly zero you don’t. Can’t make a to-do list app stick? Roll your own. Rather than triangulate a dozen schedules for the next family trip, whip up a custom meal planner (with built-in grocery assigner). Use it forever, use it once, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t come with a subscription fee or send you marketing emails once a day for the rest of your life. It’s your software. And there’s never been anything like it before.
Robin Sloan, an author and technologist, wrote a blog post in 2020 entitled “An app can be a home-cooked meal.” The post has been shared widely in AI circles over the last couple of years, though Sloan wrote it well before the crop of generative AI tools. In it, he explains why he built a simple messaging app for his family. “There will be no sudden redesign, no flood of ads, no pivot to chase a userbase inscrutable to us,” he wrote. “It might go away at some point, but that will be our decision.” Five years later, in late 2025, Sloan updated his post: “I have changed literally nothing in the app, and it’s glorious.”
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Sloan’s blogpost is worth reading too, because it captures a desire we all feel when we use an app: why does this have so many other things I don’t need? Why can’t I strip this down to just what I want? And the idea that you can just throw together something for a few people’s use is very attractive.
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OpenAI feels “burned” by Apple’s crappy ChatGPT integration, insiders say • Ars Technica
Ashley Belanger:
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OpenAI is reportedly exploring legal options after Apple’s ChatGPT integration into its products didn’t live up to the AI firm’s expectations.
When the deal was announced, Apple likened features linking Siri to ChatGPT to its now-infamous deal embedding Google search in the Safari browser, insiders granted anonymity to discuss the “strained” partnership told Bloomberg. And the promise of that excited OpenAI, which expected the deal “could generate billions of dollars per year in subscriptions,” an OpenAI executive granted anonymity to discuss the partnership told Bloomberg.
Instead, OpenAI suspects Apple intentionally failed to promote the integration and fears that the deal may have damaged the ChatGPT brand, sources said.
Specifically, OpenAI hates how Apple designed the integration, sources said. Particularly bad was the choice forcing Apple users summoning Siri to also “specifically invoke the word ‘ChatGPT’ when speaking or typing a command,” sources said. That makes it harder for users to access the features, OpenAI apparently feels. And Apple’s other choices, like using small windows providing limited information when responding with ChatGPT outputs, seems to ensure that users can easily ignore the features, sources said.
As the OpenAI executive explained, Apple didn’t fully explain how the integration would work when the deal came together, so OpenAI took a “leap of faith” it now appears to regret.
“When we heard about this opportunity, it sounded amazing: being able to acquire a giant number of customers and have distribution in such a big mobile ecosystem,” the executive said, attempting to explain why OpenAI was willing to enter the arrangement blind. Since then, efforts to renegotiate the deal have “stalled,” Reuters reported. And, supposedly due to feeling “burned,” OpenAI has declined to enter other partnerships to work on Apple’s AI models, Bloomberg reported.
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The problem for OpenAI is that shunning Apple is unlikely to give it better access. It’s going to struggle to get ahead of Gemini, and for smartphones, that leaves.. Apple. Suing Apple isn’t likely to make that go any better either.
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Parallel Cities
Admit it: you’ve always wanted to know which cities were on the same parallel (latitude) across the globe, and also which ones were on the exactly opposite distance from the Equator.
And now you can find out! The results for London, both “same as” and “opposite” surprised me. And who would have guessed that New York is the same vertical distance from the Equator as.. Wellington, New Zealand?
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Google denies breaching law by promoting suicide forum linked to 164 UK deaths • The Guardian
Robert Booth:
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Google has denied breaching the Online Safety Act by promoting a “nihilistic” suicide forum associated with 164 deaths in the UK, where it is supposed to be banned.
The UK’s internet regulator fined the forum’s US-based operator £950,000 because the site, which “presents a material risk of significant harm”, can still be accessed in the UK despite British laws criminalising encouraging or assisting suicide.
However, a link to the website still appears in Google’s search results allowing users with basic software to circumvent the block and access screeds of advice on suicide methods.
Google’s promotion of the site, not named by the Guardian, was raised by the Molly Rose Foundation, an online safety campaign. Its chief executive, Andy Burrows, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “If you search for it by name it will still come up in search results – a clear-cut breach of the act, but on that matter Ofcom has so far declined to take action.”
The site listed by Google was the second entry beneath a link to Samaritans. The associated url links to a page where the forum’s operators say access has been “voluntarily restricted to users in the United Kingdom due to legal risks associated with the UK Online Safety Act 2023”.
However, it includes the website’s address, which can then be used to access the full site using VPN software that simulates being a computer based in a different country.
When set to simulate internet access from the US, Germany and France, the full forum was easily accessible, including detailed advice on the efficacy of various methods of suicide.
…Adele Zeynep Walton, whose sister Aimee Walton took her life after accessing the site, said: “Families like mine have been agonisingly waiting for action against the website that took our loved ones and at least 164 UK lives. While we’ve waited, further lives have been lost and we’ve had to fight every step.”
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My son’s math homework is essentially just Pokémon • The Atlantic
Will Oremus:
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One afternoon earlier this year, my 11-year-old son was sitting at his laptop and working quietly on his math homework. At least, that’s what he was supposed to be doing. When I glanced at his screen, equations were nowhere to be seen. He was controlling a monster in the midst of battle, casting magic spells to outduel an opposing player.
“That’s not your math homework!” I told him. But it was. His fifth-grade-math teacher had told her students to spend time on Prodigy, a site that looks and feels like a video game. As my son indignantly showed me, Prodigy surfaces multiple-choice questions in between cartoon-monster attacks. Correctly identify an isosceles triangle or the square root of 49, and your “Aquadile” or “Bonasaur”—barely veiled rip-offs of Pokémon characters—gets a health boost that will help it fend off your opponent’s next salvo.
Prodigy is among a bevy of gamified tools that have gained a foothold in classrooms across the country by promising to make learning fun. (As Prodigy’s website puts it: “Kids no longer have to choose between homework and playtime.”) These platforms—which also include Blooket, Gimkit, and Kahoot—can seem like a win-win. Students’ eyes light up at math-and-vocabulary-review sessions that once induced groans. Teachers, meanwhile, can use the games to track which questions kids get right and wrong, helping them triage trouble spots.
But as I watched my son play Prodigy, it became clear there wasn’t much learning happening. In about 10 minutes of gameplay, he spent less than 30 seconds answering math questions. When he got one wrong, the game didn’t pause to diagnose where he went wrong or guide him to the correct answer. The only time he slowed down, grudgingly, was when Prodigy forced him to watch videos advertising its paid-membership plans. (Prodigy did not respond to a request for comment.)
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Prodigy probably thought there was no positives that could come out of responding to that. And it was right. (Gift link.)
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Software developers say AI is rotting their brains • 404 Media
Emanuel Maiberg:
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Tech company executives are confident that AI will completely transform the economy and point to the changes they see in-house to prove that this change is coming fast. At Meta, Google, Microsoft, and others, leadership says that AI generates a growing share of the overall code, which makes it cheaper and faster to produce. The implication is that if this AI is good enough that tech companies are using it internally to improve efficiency and reduce headcount, it’s only a matter of time until every other industry is similarly transformed.
Developers who are told to use AI whether they like it or not, however, tell a different story. On Reddit, Hacker News and other places where people in software development talk to each other, more and more people are becoming disillusioned with the promise of code generated by large language models. Developers talk not just about how the AI output is often flawed, but that using AI to get the job done is often a more time consuming, harder, and more frustrating experience because they have to go through the output and fix its mistakes. More concerning, developers who use AI at work report that they feel like they are de-skilling themselves and losing their ability to do their jobs as well as they used to.
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There’s a certain irony to this, no? The people cutting away the ladders for all the other professions feel they’re doing exactly that to themselves.
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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 