The Xbox brand is in deep trouble, judging by a message sent to employees within Microsoft which points to OEM hardware in the future. CC-licensed photo by Mike Mozart on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Game on. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

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Are you finally ready to admit it’s the phones? • Noahpinion

Noah Smith:

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The idea of perpetually tying every human into a global hive mind tripped alarm bells. It reminded me too much of the hive minds I had seen depicted in science fiction nightmares — the Borg from Star Trek, the Blight from A Fire Upon the Deep, the Human Instrumentality Project from Neon Genesis Evangelion. Humans were meant to be individuals — unique, independent incubators of ideas and desires, not terminals or the fingers of a world-mind.

We had spent centuries trying to escape the small, localized versions of the hive mind. The printing press, the car and the telephone had offered freedom from the crushing conformity of small-town life. When broadcast television threatened to smother us with a centrally dictated monoculture, it sparked a decades-long resistance. When the internet arrived, we spent two decades using it to revel in our individuality — we made our personal websites, started blogs, joined small online communities centered around our interests.

Sometime around 2014 or 2015 we woke up to the fact that the world of the Old Internet no longer existed. “The internet” no longer meant the Web — it meant a tiny handful of big platforms. Twitter and Reddit for screaming about politics, Facebook and Instagram for being jealous of your friends’ vacation pics. Gone were the days of painting our individuality on the canvas of the Web. The platforms were the hive minds, we were the neurons, and the smartphone was the axon that kept each of us wired tight into the collective.

“‘Social media is bad,’ he typed on social media!!” This is the perpetual and instantaneous response of many of the neurons…er, people…in my timeline. Indeed, if social media is so bad, why don’t you just put down the phone? But this idea displays a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of network effects. Suppose I decide to get off Instagram and go play pickup basketball instead. If everyone else is on Instagram instead of playing pickup basketball, who am I going to play with?

This is an extreme and simplified example, obviously, but the intuition here comes from real research.

…Plenty of evidence has linked smartphones — and the social media apps that take up the single biggest chunk of the time we spend on those phones — to rising unhappiness among the world’s young people.

Since I wrote about this in 2023, the evidence has only grown stronger

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The full post requires a (free) subscription signup, but the evidence only gets stronger every day.
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Three ways to think about AI and jobs • The Atlantic

Rogé Karma:

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Last year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei claimed that AI would soon “wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.” But the radiologist story suggests that whether AI will replace a given profession is not so straightforward to predict. Answering the following three questions can help you determine how endangered a job really is.

Question 1: Is your job a weak bundle or strong bundle?

According to Luis Garicano, an economist and a co-author of the forthcoming book Messy Jobs, most white-collar jobs combine two very different kinds of work. “Clean” tasks involve predictable problems, objective standards of success, lots of written data, and little interpersonal interaction (think: approving an expense report or updating a spreadsheet). These are the easiest for AI systems to handle.

“Messy” tasks, however, involve dealing with unpredictable situations, meeting subjective measures of success, acting on tacit knowledge, and navigating complex webs of human relationships (think: choosing a new corporate logo, assuaging an upset client, or managing a team). AI isn’t so good at these kinds of tasks, at least not yet.

…A trial lawyer has what Garicano and his co-authors call a “strong bundle” job, in which the various responsibilities are so tightly linked that delegating some of them to AI would actually be counterproductive.

…Question 2: If what you produce got cheaper, how much more of it would people want?

…“It’s not hard to imagine this happening with financial services, with legal services, with health care,” Torsten Slok, the chief economist at the asset-management company Apollo, told me. “As AI makes these services cheaper, people are going to want a lot more of them. And that means employment in those sectors will grow.”

…Question 3: Is AI the expert, or are you?

…According to data from ZipRecruiter, the share of senior-level-job postings in the tech industry has risen considerably over the past year while the share of entry-level-job postings has fallen slightly. But Autor believes that this dynamic could easily change, as AI systems get better and better at engaging in the kind of “expert judgment” that only human experts previously possessed. He pointed to an “electrician’s assistant” tool being piloted by Schneider Electric that allows a normal electrician with only vocational training to troubleshoot the kinds of complex problems that had previously required teams of engineers with graduate degrees.

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There’s a lot to this article; the extract barely scratches the surface. (Gift link.)
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Skeptics question whether SpaceX is worth $1.77 trillion • The New York Times

Ryan Mac and Mike Isaac:

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In a pitch to private investors, Elon Musk once predicted that one of his companies would quintuple its revenue to more than $26bn and nearly quintuple its customer base by 2028.

That company was Twitter and those projections were made as Mr. Musk prepared to buy the social media company for $44bn in 2022.

Today, Twitter, which has been renamed X, has fallen far short of what Mr. Musk said would happen. The social media platform’s ad revenue plunged 65% last year. And it was ultimately folded into SpaceX, Mr. Musk’s rocket company, this year.

Now as SpaceX readies for a blockbuster initial public offering, Mr. Musk and his investment bankers are selling even loftier propositions about what the rocket and artificial intelligence company will achieve. But those proclamations, coupled with Mr. Musk’s history of overpromising, have some investors increasingly worried that SpaceX — which priced its offering at a $1.77 trillion valuation and is set to begin trading on Friday — may burn them.

“It really does feel very much a ‘don’t look at the man behind the curtain’ situation,” said Jim Chanos, the founder of the investment firm Chanos and Company, who predicted the 2001 collapse of Enron, the energy company that was found to have engaged in accounting fraud.

…Michael Burry, a hedge fund investor featured in the book “The Big Short” for his predictions on the 2008 financial crisis, said in a Substack discussion last month that any increase in SpaceX’s stock after its I.P.O. would “be on hype and technicals.”

“Nothing in that S-1 suggests it is worth $1 trillion let alone $2 trillion,” Mr. Burry wrote, referring to the company’s IPO filing.

Even some SpaceX shareholders have doubts. Ross Gerber, the chief executive of Gerber Kawasaki, an investment firm that owns SpaceX stock, said the company’s projections reminded him of unverified information that young start-ups used to woo investors. He said he was alarmed by SpaceX’s valuation of $1.77 trillion, which would be more than four times the $400bn that the company was valued at just 13 months ago.

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Although, reminder: the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, and probably will about SpaceX.
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100 days of Iran war have cost diesel drivers £255 more than EV drivers • Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit

Colin Walker:

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The 7th June marked the 100th day of the conflict between the US and Iran, which started on the 28th February. During this time the price of oil has increased as a result of disruptions to supply through the Strait of Hormuz, driving up the cost of petrol and diesel at the pump in the UK. Petrol is now 27p a litre higher than it was on the eve of the conflict, while diesel has jumped by 43p a litre.

New analysis from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) has found that these price rises have added £1.7bn to the cost of running the nation’s petrol and diesel cars in the first 100 days of the US-Iran conflict. And this means that, in this time, the UK’s diesel car drivers have paid £255 more to fuel their cars than if they had been driving an EV. Recent industry data has shown an EV sales surge in the UK (mirroring Europe and other countries) as drivers try to reduce their fuel bills – more than one in four (27%) cars sold in May were electric.

Since the conflict started petrol car drivers have paid £175 more than if they had been driving an EV. Collectively, cars running on petrol and diesel have cost over £6.3bn more to fuel in the last 100 days than if they had been EVs.

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The quarter-end statistics for sales of EVs will certainly make for fun reading. It feels as though almost every car registered after 2024 I see on the roads is an EV.
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Oil tankers increase ‘dark’ transits through Strait of Hormuz • Financial Times

Alice Hancock, Nassos Stylianou, Malcolm Moore and Ryo Namiki:

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US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday on his Truth Social platform that “Last month, I directed our Great U.S. Military to execute a secret mission to support Oil Tankers and other Commercial Ships through the Strait of Hormuz”.

He said the effort had allowed about 200 commercial ships to cross the strait and that 100mn barrels of crude were able to reach global markets as a result of the operation.

Dan Smoot, chief executive of Vantor, which tracks ships by satellite imaging, said at the WSJ CEO Council summit in London on Wednesday that there was a “tremendous amount” of shipping activity through the Strait of Hormuz that was “outside the news right now”.

Still, oil transport companies remained nervous about the risks for such transits. “It is a very narrow waterway and there is not much room for manoeuvre, so we are worried about the navigational implications of ships using it,” said John Stawpert, marine director at the International Chamber of Shipping.

Analysts have suggested most of the ships travelling through the strait are leaving it, but others are still entering to trade non-Iranian crude. They said that the growing number of “dark transits”, in which ships pass through the strait without their GPS signal on to avoid detection by Iranian forces, was helping to cushion oil prices below $100 per barrel.

The closure of Hormuz has cut off about 12mn barrels a day of oil from the market, the equivalent of roughly six supertankers daily.

Energy Aspects, a consultancy, estimated that Iraq, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates were currently shipping about 3mn barrels of crude a day through the strait.

It noted that stocks in Mina al-Ahmadi in Kuwait fell sharply at the end of May, by nearly 8mn barrels, suggesting that more ships were being loaded. Amrita Sen, founder of Energy Aspects, said the dark transits meant the world’s refineries could increase production and avoid “summer tightness, in theory”.

Shipping executives, however, have been quick to underline that even if traffic has picked up, it remains far below the 135 ships per day that travelled through the strait before the conflict.

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Six versus 135 is quite a delta. And yet the oil markets seem confident enough that this is plenty of oil.
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Three Indian sailors killed in US strike on tanker in Gulf of Oman • BBC News

Cherylann Mollan:

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Three Indian sailors have been confirmed killed after the US military struck a tanker in the Gulf of Oman which it accused of violating its blockade on Iranian ports.

The MT Settebello came under attack on Wednesday, with 24 Indian crew on board, of whom 21 were rescued. In a post on X, India’s Shipping Minister Sarbananda Sonowal said the three men’s bodies would be brought home soon.
The US has struck three ships in the Gulf this week, all with Indian crew on board.

On Thursday, Delhi said all 20 crew on the Jalveer were safe after a strike off Oman. Three days earlier the 24 Indian crew on sanctioned oil tanker the Marivex were rescued before it sank. US Centcom confirmed it struck both ships.

…The US military blocked access to Iran’s ports after Tehran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which some 20% of the world’s oil and gas supplies are transported, during the ongoing conflict.

US forces have disabled eight vessels and redirected 134 others since initiating the blockade on 13 April, according to Centcom.

The Indian government has maintained that “targeting of commercial shipping and civilian infrastructure in the region must end”.

…According to India’s shipping ministry, there are at present 562 Indian seafarers, external on Indian-flagged vessels, including 329 in the Gulf region, west of Hormuz, and 233 in the Gulf of Oman, east of Hormuz.

“There are more than 18,000 Indian seafarers in total in the whole Gulf region,” Mangal said on Thursday.

Meanwhile, tensions between Iran and the US show no sign of easing. Both countries have exchanged strikes for a second consecutive day, putting more strain on a fragile ceasefire arrived upon in April.

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I tried Siri AI, and so far it actually works • The Verge

Allison Johnson:

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Parents want one thing, and one thing only, out of AI: to add a list of soccer games or “spirit week” theme days from an email or a poorly formatted flyer onto their calendar in one shot. And I have good news for parents with iPhones — the new Siri can finally do this.

After stumbling through its first launch of an AI-imbued Siri, Apple is trying again. The newly upgraded Siri AI can chat with you about what might be killing the roses in your yard, put together a shopping list for the hardware store, and set a reminder to lay down some compost in that flower bed. It can reference information in your email and calendar to make its recommendations or provide an actually helpful answer to the question: “When should I leave for the airport?” And yes, it can even add a list of events from an email to your calendar. I tried all of these scenarios out for myself and I saw it happen. AI Siri is for real this time.

But it’s also a pretty basic set of features for an AI assistant in 2026, particularly if you compare it to what Gemini has been doing on Android for the past couple of years. Google’s chatbot has been able to add multiple calendar events from a screenshot for at least a year at this point. It’s been diagnosing plant problems and scheduling maintenance reminders for months now, if not longer. New Siri is built on Gemini models, so it makes a lot of sense that the first iteration of Siri AI feels a little bit “Gemini, circa 2025.”

Siri AI has its own flavour, though. Apple has a lot of proprietary stuff going on under the hood and in the cloud. It draws from an on-device pool of data that’s gleaned from things like email and messages. This information is indexed so Siri can tap into the relevant bits when needed. Prompts that can’t be handled fully on device are sent to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute with only the relevant pieces of personal data attached. Gemini handles personal context differently; you opt into sharing your Gmail or calendar, and then it’ll go directly to those sources to get the information when needed.

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Wonder if Google is going to tout how many Gemini users there are on iOS, to contrast it with the default of Siri. Or, conversely, in a year’s time whether at WWDC 2027 Apple will proudly announce how many hundreds of millions are using the new Siri. The challenge for the latter is that many older devices – the majority of all Apple devices – won’t be able to run it.
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“This cannot continue”: Xbox leaders lay out “hard truths” behind sagging brand • Ars Technica

Kyle Orland:

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Just 100 days ago, when new Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma replaced long-serving executive Phil Spencer, she said she’d work to “understand what makes [Xbox] work and protect it.” Now, Sharma and Xbox Studios chief Matt Booty have laid out the many things that are not working for the Xbox brand in a brutal self-assessment the they say necessitates a wholesale “Xbox reset.”

The message sent to Xbox employees and shared publicly via Xbox Wire on Wednesday night paints a grim picture for practically every facet of the Xbox division. That portion of Microsoft is currently only seeing a “3% accountability margin” (read: profit margin), down year over year and well below both the game industry average and the lofty 30% margins that Microsoft is reportedly seeking across the board.

It’s an underperformance, they write, born out of being “overextended” by moves like the $69bn acquisition of Activision. That mega-merger came on top of $20bn in spending on other acquisitions, platform investments, and hardware subsidies over the last five years, the executives write. But despite the spending spree, Microsoft’s overall gaming revenues are down nearly $500m compared to five years ago.

While Microsoft has overinvested in acquisitions and platform spending, Sharma and Booty also admit that Xbox has “not adequately funded” the company’s “industry-defining franchises.”

…While Xbox hardware sales had started cratering long before these cost increases came to pass, Microsoft says it’s now facing the somewhat opposite problem of being “currently unable to make as many consoles as players want to buy.” Taken as a whole, it all likely means that we’ll see a reprise of last year’s multiple Xbox price increases before too long.

…The dire hardware component situation means Microsoft now says it will pursue a new “business model and partnerships for hardware” for Helix, the recently announced project that will play both Xbox and PC games. The mention of “partnerships for hardware” is particularly interesting, given that Microsoft recently lent the Xbox brand to Asus for the Windows-powered ROG Xbox Ally.

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Sounds as though Xbox will become an OS, like Windows, and OEMs will try to profit from the hardware side. The $69bn purchase of Activision increasingly looks like a very bad idea.
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Met police chief calls for law to make stolen phones ‘unusable bricks’ • The Guardian

Helena Horton:

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The Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, has asked the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, to force all phone companies to make stolen devices “unusable bricks” in order to make them harder to sell on and less desirable to steal.

London is widely regarded as the phone-snatching capital of Europe, with between 200 and 300 devices stolen each day. The city accounts for up to three-quarters of all mobile phone thefts in England and Wales.

Apple has already rolled out an update for iPhones, meaning those with the latest operating system have extra safeguards if the devices are stolen. Sensitive actions such as viewing passwords, Apple Card details, or erasing the phone now require Face ID or Touch ID, making it harder to return the devices to factory settings or change the passwords, which criminals need to do to sell them on.

Rowley said the Met had started sharing data with Apple to more closely track whether stolen handsets were reconnected to a phone network after being taken.

This will make it easier to track stolen phones and help police find out what happens to them, and where they are taken.

The Met commissioner told the Press Association after an operation targeting two phone shops on Wednesday: “If we share the data we have on the phone stolen, with the data they have on things like reactivations and future uses of phones, we can get a global picture of phones being stolen, are they being reactivated, are they being broken down for parts, where they’re being exported to in the world.”

He added: “Whereas a few months ago the majority of stolen phones were being reactivated because of security flaws, now with the security improvements it’s the minority being reactivated. That means it’s harder for criminals to profit. That will help bring down the crime further.”

The Met has written to the home secretary asking for legislation to make phone companies publish data on stolen devices and whether they are reconnected, and to enforce measures to make stolen devices unusable.

Phones snatched in London are sold around the world. One recent police operation revealed a gang that had sold 40,000 stolen phones to China.

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Maths: 40,000 stolen phones would be about 20 days of the total thefts. Most are probably broken up for parts.
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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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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified