The collective noun for owls is a “parliament” – but how did they, and other animals, get their collective nouns? CC-licensed photo by Heather on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Thinking about it. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Jury rejects Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman • The Washington Post
Gerrit De Vynck:
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A federal judge dismissed all of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s claims against OpenAI on Monday after a jury found that he exceeded the statute of limitations in a lawsuit against the artificial intelligence company.
The decision is an outright win for OpenAI in a trial that pitted Musk against the maker of ChatGPT and two of the men with whom he co-founded the company in 2015: OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, and its president, Greg Brockman. Musk left OpenAI in 2018 after a conflict with Brockman and Altman over who would control the organization. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)
After a three-week trial in Oakland, California, that featured hundreds of pages of documents and hours of testimony from Musk, Altman and a parade of former OpenAI executives and board members, the jury deliberated for just two hours.
…“It is a major pie in the face for the world‘s wealthiest man. He had top legal counsel, and to lose on statute-of-limitations grounds is extremely embarrassing,” said Andrew Stoltmann, a corporate litigation lawyer who was not involved in the case. “Conversely, this is a massive win for Altman, who went toe-to-toe with the world’s wealthiest man and won.”
OpenAI had argued in court that Musk’s lawsuit was motivated in part by a desire to hurt a competitor to his own, for-profit AI venture, xAI, founded in 2023.
Hours after the verdict was read, Musk criticized the judge’s decision in a post on X, his social media platform, and said he would appeal. “This illustrates why the ruling by the terrible activist Oakland judge, who simply used the jury as a fig leaf, creates such a terrible precedent,” he wrote. “She just handed out a free license to loot charities if you can keep the looting quiet for a few years!”
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Except that the jury accepted OpenAI’s argument that Musk had known about the proposed change since 2021, which gave him plenty of time to raise proper objections. Musk’s Trumpian whining is absolutely typical: do it wrong, and complain.
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Tipping point looms for global energy crisis • Financial Times
Malcolm Moore, Sam Fleming and Jonathan Vincent:
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Nearly 80 countries have now introduced emergency measures to protect their economies as the world approaches a new, more dangerous phase in the energy crisis driven by the Iran war.
Governments are stepping up their responses ahead of a looming tipping point, when traders warn that oil prices could jump again sharply unless more fuel trapped in the Gulf can be exported through the blockaded Strait of Hormuz.
Paul Diggle, chief economist at fund manager Aberdeen, said his team was now examining a scenario where Brent crude rockets to $180 a barrel, causing surging inflation and recessions in a host of European and Asian countries.
“We are taking that outcome very seriously,” he told the FT, adding that it was not yet his base case. “We are living on borrowed time.”
Demand for air conditioning and holiday travel at the start of the northern hemisphere’s summer will put further strain on supplies of crude oil, gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, when global stocks are already falling at the fastest rate on record.
Australia has pledged to spend $10bn to boost its fuel and fertiliser stockpiles, while France has said it will “change the scope and scale” of its support to shield its economy from the crisis. India has urged the public not to buy gold or holiday abroad as it tries to shore up its reserves of foreign currency.
The International Energy Agency estimates that the number of countries that have already been forced into emergency measures has reached 76, up from 55 at the end of March.
Economists and traders warn the next phase of the crisis could bring another sharp jump in energy prices, broader fuel rationing, industrial shutdowns and a significant slowdown in global growth.
If the Middle East conflict “does not end in the coming weeks and we don’t have the reopening of the Hormuz strait, I’m afraid a world recession could be on the table”, the EU’s transport commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas told an FT conference in Athens on Thursday.
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The crunch will come with holiday long-haul flights, surely.
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BBC staff strike as new director general warns of ‘tough choices’ on his first day • The Guardian
Michael Savage:
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Matt Brittin, the BBC’s new director general, has warned staff that “tough choices are unavoidable” under his tenure, as his first day coincided with a strike by a group of the corporation’s journalists.
Brittin, formerly Google’s most senior executive in Europe, arrived at the corporation’s New Broadcasting House while a group of journalists from the World Service’s Newshour and Radio 4’s The World Tonight were picketing in response to a plan to increase their workloads.
…Brittin, who will address staff on Tuesday, has been spending the last few weeks visiting various parts of the BBC. Insiders say he has shown particular interest in the costs of production as he begins the task of finding budget cuts of 10%.
In a message to staff, Brittin – who replaces Tim Davie – said his visits had “underlined just what an extraordinary, priceless asset the BBC is for all of us”.
However, he also suggested he would push for the BBC to make some dramatic changes in how it delivers its programming as digital platforms such as YouTube and TikTok become more prominent.
“The BBC has proved throughout its history how quickly it can reinvent itself to serve the needs of audiences – from restructuring for World War II to repurposing during Covid to spinning up services in conflict zones,” he said. “We need, collectively, to call on that sense of urgency now. That means moving with velocity and clarity.
“Excellence at the BBC has always been founded on great, creative storytelling and brilliant, independent journalism. Today it also means making sure we get the right stories in the right formats on the right platforms.”
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That “stories/formats/platforms” quote is going to become a mantra, without doubt, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that means lots more short video posted on social platforms, and AI doing the “writing” of textual content that goes on the website based on the transcript. The atomic unit of journalism is going to become the camera-captured video short.
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Everything’s probably fake now • Garbage Day
Ryan Broderick:
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Using N3on’s video metrics we can do some back of the napkin math and say that it currently costs about $1 million a month to generate around 600 million combined views across 35,000 videos. Roughly, $28 a video or about $1 per 600 views, depending on how you want to look at it.
Which is a much bigger budget than what mainstream media outlets can spend on their own shortform video. Probably why the glut of pearl-clutching clipping features from big outlets sound so panicked.
…Over the weekend, I came across what looked like, to me, a tweetdecking or clip-sharing operation run out of Rwanda. A group of Verified users all sharing random viral videos with one-line captions that, almost always, don’t make any sense. I reached out to a few accounts and one user, going by @whotfisrw, actually got back to me.
@whotfisrw identifies online as a student at the University of Rwanda, but they told Garbage Day that sharing video clips is their job. They said they often get paid to post videos and that the bulk of those offers come from AI companies. “Usually it’s either a fixed payment per post or a short-term promo arrangement depending on reach and engagement,” they said. They declined to share how much they’re making from sharing videos. Their X account is tagged with Ryne AI, a “humanizer” that can “pass” AI detection software like Turnitin and GPTZero. They said it’s more of “affiliation,” rather than “a full corporate thing.”
They said they got Verified “mainly for credibility and branding” because they wanted their account to look more “established and trustworthy.” As for where they get the videos they’re sharing, aside from paid posts, they said they usually just reshare whatever they see on X. “I mainly post directly on X, though sometimes I source clips or inspiration from other platforms and communities,” they said. “I do interact and collaborate with other accounts sometimes — mostly through reposting each other’s content, sharing ideas, or helping boost posts.”
It’s all, ultimately, not that deep. “If you’re underemployed and you’re just spending all your time watching the internet all day anyway, like this is a con. This is like a way you can make money, for sure,” Bernstein said.
But also none of this even new. Shadowy digital marketing firms and scammers and propagandists have been flooding the zone with shit — and been paid to do so — for over a decade now. The only thing thing that is new, I’d argue, is that there are more users now like @whotfisrw than there aren’t and, apparently, a whole bunch of young internet users who seemed to have been believing everything they saw on their video feeds up until like a week ago.
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Big media organisations like the BBC, though, might have a faint chance in this?
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More than 100 UK datacentres plan to burn gas to generate electricity • The Guardian
Aisha Down:
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More than 100 new datacentres in the UK plan to burn gas to generate electricity, some potentially doing so permanently.
British officials say this is an inevitable consequence of a years-long wait to connect to the National Grid, and raises an “interesting question” about the UK’s climate targets.
“There’s 100GW of datacentre projects in the queue,” said Stuart Okin, the director of cyber regulation and AI at Ofgem. “Clearly that’s not all going to be able to connect [to the grid]. If a project isn’t going to get a connection, it is going to have to come up with an alternative method.”
Okin spoke on the sidelines of All-Energy, the UK’s largest renewable and low-carbon energy conference.
Officials, businesspeople and activists attending the event in Glasgow acknowledged a marked shift over the past year in willingness of UK developers – and authorities – to consider using fossil fuels to power the UK’s AI ambitions. Silvia Simon, the head of research at Future Energy Networks, which represents the UK’s natural gas suppliers, said the group had received “more than 100” requests for gas connections from datacentre operators in the past two years.
These requests amounted to more than 15 terawatt hours of energy each year, she said: enough to power London for roughly four and a half months. “Gas networks are seeing a lot of interest from datacentre developers looking to secure a gas connection,” she said. “Not just for resilience, but for primary supply. So this is already an indication that they’re really struggling to get through to the electricity networks.”
Governments and big tech companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars into a frenzied and ambitious AI programme.
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It feels like we just about got past bitcoin and all the other proof-of-work cryptocoins, and saw the threat they posed to our electricity mix ameliorated, and now we have this – far worse, and with the eager approval of governments which think buildings full of computers are a brilliant job creation scheme. How can people be this daft?
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Ontario auditors find doctors’ AI note takers routinely blow basic facts • The Register
Brandon Vigliarolo:
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The AI systems approved for Ontario healthcare providers routinely missed critical details, inserted incorrect information, and hallucinated content that neither patients nor clinicians mentioned, according to a provincial audit of 20 approved vendors’ systems.
The findings come from the Office of the Auditor General of Ontario, Canada, and are included in a larger report about the state of AI usage by public services in the province. They specifically address the AI Scribe program, the Ontario Ministry of Health initiated for physicians, nurse practitioners, and other healthcare professionals across the broader health sector.
As part of the procurement process, officials conducted evaluations using simulated doctor-patient recordings. Medical professionals then reviewed the original recordings alongside the AI-generated notes to evaluate their accuracy.
What they found was, frankly, shocking for anyone concerned about the accuracy of AI in critical situations.
Nine out of 20 AI systems reportedly “fabricated information and made suggestions to patients’ treatment plans” that weren’t discussed in the recordings. According to the report, evaluators spotted potentially devastating incorrect information in the sample reports, such as no masses being found, or patients being anxious, even though these things were never discussed in the recordings.Twelve of the 20 systems evaluated inserted incorrect drug information into patient notes, while 17 of the systems “missed key details about the patients’ mental health issues” that were discussed in the recordings. Six of the systems “missed the patients’ mental health issues fully or partially or were missing key details,” per the report.
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And of course this is inherent in the systems. This isn’t what they’re intended to do. So they don’t do it.
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A parliament of owls and a murder of crows: how groups of birds got their names, with wondrous vintage illustrations by Brian Wildsmith • The Marginalian
Maria Popova:
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I remember my unabashed delight when a naturalist friend first introduced me to the various terms for groups of birds — from “a deceit of lapwings” to “a pitying of turtledoves,” and could there be a notion more charming than “an ostentation of peacocks”?
Some of these collective nouns, often called company terms, are based on observable characteristics of the species — “a fall of woodcock” references the bewildering air dance of the courting birds, “a watch of nightingales” pays homage to the nocturnal wakefulness of Earth’s most musical bird, and “a gaggle of geese” turns their migratory cries into delicious onomatopoeia. Some stem from myths and folk beliefs about birds dating back centuries, to a time when Satan was realer than gravity in the human mind, Kepler’s mother could be tried for witchcraft, and superstition was the primary sensemaking tool for causality — an organizing principle for life, reflected in language: “a murder of crows” alludes to various superstitions about crows as emissaries of death, believed capable of killing their own kind in punishment for transgression; “a parliament of owls” draws on ancient Greek mythology, in which an owl accompanies Athena — the goddess of wisdom and reason, representing freedom and democracy across the Western world.
A great many of these company terms originate in one of the first books printed in English after the invention of the Gutenberg Press: the Boke of Seynt Albans [Book of Saint Albans], also known as The Book of Hawking, Hunting, and Blasing of Arms. Anonymously published in 1486 and written largely in verse, it was lauded as the work of “a gentleman of excellent gifts” — until it was discovered that the author was a woman named Juliana Barnes.
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Barnes basically made many of these up, as far as anyone can tell; there’s no obvious etymology that connects them. For flamingos, you can choose between “a stand” or “a flamboyance”.
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The case against quantum computing • IEEE Spectrum
Mikhail Dyakonov:
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We’ve been told that quantum computers could “provide breakthroughs in many disciplines, including materials and drug discovery, the optimization of complex systems, and artificial intelligence.” We’ve been assured that quantum computers will “forever alter our economic, industrial, academic, and societal landscape.” We’ve even been told that “the encryption that protects the world’s most sensitive data may soon be broken” by quantum computers. It has gotten to the point where many researchers in various fields of physics feel obliged to justify whatever work they are doing by claiming that it has some relevance to quantum computing.
Meanwhile, government research agencies, academic departments (many of them funded by government agencies), and corporate laboratories are spending billions of dollars a year developing quantum computers. On Wall Street, Morgan Stanley and other financial giants expect quantum computing to mature soon and are keen to figure out how this technology can help them.
It’s become something of a self-perpetuating arms race, with many organizations seemingly staying in the race if only to avoid being left behind. Some of the world’s top technical talent, at places like Google, IBM, and Microsoft, are working hard, and with lavish resources in state-of-the-art laboratories, to realize their vision of a quantum-computing future.
In light of all this, it’s natural to wonder: When will useful quantum computers be constructed? The most optimistic experts estimate it will take five to ten years. More cautious ones predict 20 to 30 years. (Similar predictions have been voiced, by the way, for the last 20 years.) I belong to a tiny minority that answers, “Not in the foreseeable future.” Having spent decades conducting research in quantum and condensed-matter physics, I’ve developed my very pessimistic view. It’s based on an understanding of the gargantuan technical challenges that would have to be overcome to ever make quantum computing work.
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I was writing articles about quantum computing about 25 years ago, when we were assured it was definitely just five or ten years away. Maybe 15. And it still is. I’m with Dyakonov here. Quantum computing is like fusion: all that promise, kept out of reach by damnable physics. Perhaps it’s one of those “40 to 45 years” things, as in this fabulous Harry Enfield/Paul Whitehouse sketch.
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Who will maintain the web when PHP’s veterans retire? • The New Stack
Darryl K. Taft:
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A new report on the state of the PHP programming language shows that there is an emerging skills gap as fewer early-stage developers have PHP knowledge.
Although PHP continues to be a popular open-source language for web application development, the recently released Perforce 2026 PHP Landscape Report indicates that there is increasingly a struggle for organizations to find and retain skilled PHP talent.
The survey of over 700 developers worldwide indicated that over half of the PHP users surveyed reported having more than 15 years of experience with the language, while only 15% had five years of experience or less. This points to a maturing workforce with fewer new developers entering the ecosystem, Perforce officials said.
In fact, hiring rose to one of the top challenges facing PHP teams in 2026, and for managers and directors, it was the number one concern. Moreover, 24% of respondents cited a lack of personnel with the right skills and experience as a leading operational challenge.
One industry analyst agrees. “We’re also seeing a skills gap as a serious risk for companies that are increasingly leaning on agentic processes to generate and maintain operational code,” Brad Shimmin, an analyst at the Futurum Group, tells The New Stack.
“This isn’t just a PHP problem. It’s an open source problem,” said Matthew Weier O’Phinney, principal product manager at Perforce Zend and OpenLogic, in a statement. “Organizations depend on PHP for mission-critical applications, but as experienced developers retire or move on, replacing that expertise is becoming increasingly difficult.”
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Once upon a time it was COBOL. Now it’s PHP, which has taken over that role as the underpinnings of daily life. I’m sure AI coding will be able to fix all the bugs though! 🤞
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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