The Roomba robotic vacuum, and any other Chinese-made robot, is no longer welcome in the US, following an FCC edict. CC-licensed photo by Mike Mozart 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. No, robot. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Google DeepMind dismantles Nobel-winning AlphaFold team in strategy shift • Financial Times

Madhumita Murgia:

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Google DeepMind has dismantled the team behind AlphaFold, its Nobel Prize-winning AI system for predicting protein structures, as the company overhauls the research strategy that made it one of the world’s leading AI laboratories.

The majority of the original authors of the AlphaFold papers have been reassigned over the past year, according to an FT analysis of recent job moves and people familiar with the matter.

DeepMind confirmed the staffers have moved internally to projects built around Google’s Gemini large language model, as well as areas including enzyme design, nuclear fusion and genomics.

Others have relocated to Alphabet’s drug-discovery company Isomorphic Labs. Nearly a quarter of the full-time Google DeepMind authors of the original AlphaFold papers have left the company altogether.

The reshuffle reflects a significant change in DeepMind’s scientific strategy since the rise of large language models.

“Our strategy over the last nine years has been to focus on grand challenges . . . a concrete goal every project is focused on,” said Pushmeet Kohli, vice-president of research at Google DeepMind, where he founded and leads the AI for Science team. “The strategy has evolved.”

He said rather than simply organising researchers around single scientific problems such as protein folding, the AI lab is now also focused on building Gemini-powered systems that can assist scientists — and eventually automate parts of the scientific process — while competing with OpenAI and Anthropic to develop frontier AI agents.

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This sounds like what Noah Smith was describing a few days ago: that we get the AIs to transcend our current understanding of science and lift it higher.
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EV market hits new high but target gap remains • UK Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders

Paul Large:

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The UK new car market’s recovery continued in June, with registrations rising 11.4% to reach 213,166 units in the best performance for the month since 2019, according to the latest figures published today by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT).

Growth was recorded across all sectors, with registrations by private buyers up 12.5%, fleet deliveries increasing by 10.5% and the smaller business segment posting a 17.1% rise. Fleets continued to comprise the lion’s share of the overall market, accounting for six in 10 (59.5%) new cars registered.

The uplift was driven entirely by electrified vehicles as the market continues to evolve, thanks to ongoing manufacturer investment in a wide choice of models and powertrains providing lower and zero emission mobility, as well as an expanded pool of brands now operating in the UK. Plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) took 12.5% of the market, while hybrids (HEVs) accounted for 14.0%.

Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) saw the most significant growth to take a 30.0% share – the highest so far this year, reflecting the trend of high volumes at the end of each quarter and consumer interest spurred by the impact of the Middle East conflict on fuel prices.

Year to date, BEVs account for 25.0% of the market – a record achievement, but still far short of the 33% target. To meet it outright, BEVs would need to surpass 40% of new registrations across the rest of the year, yet three out of every four new car buyers are currently choosing other powertrains.

Mandate flexibilities are helping manufacturers comply for now, but their value is diminishing as natural EV demand fails to grow at the pace expected. Despite more choice, government incentives and more than £12bn in manufacturer discounts, uptake is still not rising fast enough – damaging profitability, diverting investment and weakening residual values.

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Hadn’t seen any news stories about this so sought it out. EVs are big but not big enough? Sure that Trump can do something about that.
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Data centres are easy to build. Powering them is complicated, slow, and expensive • 404 Media

Matthew Gault:

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On Wednesday the power flickered in homes from Washington DC to Chicago. The cause was a data centre disconnecting from PJM — a massive power grid that connects 13 states including North Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey, and Michigan, a span that covers 67 million customers. The incident points to a larger problem with the compute warehouses fuelling the AI boom: It’s physically and economically impossible to build power infrastructure fast enough to meet the demands of AI data centres and when problems occur, everyone will pay the price.

AI requires massive amounts of computer hardware to scale. That hardware is housed in data centres, and data centres demand shocking amounts of electricity. More data centres mean more demand on the grid which raises the costs of energy for everyone. This is one of the reasons people hate data centres and have begun to fight their construction.

To bypass the issue of grid demand, many data centre builders have promised to power the buildings themselves. The problem with that plan is that it’s easy to build a warehouse full of GPUs; but building power plants and transmission lines to power those warehouses will take years and cost billions more than the data centres. A skilled and efficient builder can complete a data centre construction in under a year. Building new energy generation to meet that data centre’s power needs could take a decade.
 
Take the humble transmission line — the long conductive cable that is one of the most fundamental parts of the power grid. It moves energy from one place to another. “There is a lot that goes into planning, siting, designing and building a new transmission line,” Suzanne Glatz, an energy consultant and co-author of a John Hopkins report on the effect of data centres on the power grid, told 404 Media. “Even rebuilding a line can run into issues and cause delays. For all the reasons, planning a new greenfield line [a common type of transmission line] is likely to take seven to eight years from the date it is approved, but it can take ten years or longer.”

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What people forget is that it’s not like putting houses on a Monopoly board. Infrastructure is much more complicated.
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Elon Musk settles long-running legal battle with X advertising group • Financial Times

Daniel Thomas:

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Elon Musk’s X has settled a long-running legal battle with a major advertising trade body that it had accused of orchestrating an “illegal boycott” against the social media platform. 

X Corp, the parent company of X, took a group of advertisers and the World Federation of Advertisers to court in 2024 claiming that they had conspired to move “billions of dollars” in advertising revenue away from the site. 

The advertisers rejected the allegations, arguing brands had the right to decide where to spend their money themselves rather than be forced to back a particular platform. The case was dismissed in March by a federal judge but X then launched an appeal in April. 

In a statement on Wednesday, X Corp and the WFA said they were “putting the litigation . . . behind them”. They added that this “resets the relationship between the two organisations”. No terms of the agreement were disclosed. 

The appeal continues in the case against several companies also named in the lawsuit.

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Anticipate that the appeal will also fizzle out. It feels as though Musk loses a lot of lawsuits, but maybe that’s just an impression based on the number he seems to launch, which rivals space rockets.
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Apple says iOS 27 ‘Restricted Mode’ isn’t for new Upgrade program leases • 9to5Mac

Marcus Mendes:

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Apple has told The Verge that missed lease payments will not activate the “Restricted Mode” system currently under development in iOS 27. But what the new system is meant for remains uncertain. Here are the details.

Last week, after Bloomberg reported that Apple would soon announce a new leasing program, 9to5Mac reported on a new system included in iOS 27 called App Managed Features.

As of iOS 27 beta 4, on iPhones with Developer mode enabled, a new App Managed Features menu item appears under the new Managed Financing Testing section in Settings > Developer.

Our reporting also included the actual alert interface that will be displayed when Restricted Mode is activated.

At the center of this new system is a daemon called appmanagedfeaturesd, which allows an authorized financing provider’s app to enroll a device, check the status of the financing agreement, and apply restrictions when a contract is no longer in good standing.

When those restrictions are enabled, App Managed Features uses Apple’s ManagedSettings framework to block certain apps from launching. A limited set of built-in apps remains available, alongside the financing provider’s own app, any apps the provider chooses to allow, and certain apps with access to critical-alert entitlements.

The system also integrates with Find My through a new, dedicated financing context called FMDPartnerFinancingContext and a dedicated entitlement named com.apple.FindMyDevice.PartnerFinancing.access. That integration does not appear to give the financing provider access to the device’s location. Instead, findmydeviced implements a separate lock type called Partner Finance Lock, or PFLock.

…Apple, however, did not tell The Verge what Restricted Mode is intended for. One possibility is that it was developed for financing programs offered by carriers, retailers, or other partners outside Apple Upgrade, potentially including markets where device restrictions are already used to enforce installment agreements.

In India, lenders have worked in the past with smartphone manufacturers to remotely block financed devices after borrowers missed payments.

«

This comes as Apple has announced a financing program that lets you buy iPhones and other hardware on the never-never. But obviously, you can’t just let people swan off with phones they haven’t completely paid for and let them continue not paying for them. So how does Apple enforce that? Feels like there’s another shot to drop.
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The US government just banned Roombas • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

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When the Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it was banning “advanced robotic devices” from entering the United States, the headlines were all about humanoids. But spying doesn’t require legs — and neither does the FCC’s robot ban.

The robot ban will sweep up robot vacuum cleaners too, FCC media relations director Katie Gorscak confirms to The Verge.

It’s not coming for your existing Roomba, and companies can keep importing and selling already approved ones. But the government claims that future foreign robots pose a national security risk, and even robovac companies are suddenly being asked to commit to US manufacturing.

While the government did include “humanoid robots” and “quadrupeds” among the bots it wants to ban, the ban is far broader than that. It covers almost any new software-controlled robot that travels over the ground, weighs more than 4.4 pounds (including any dock), can perceive its environment, and has wireless connectivity.

By that definition, the FCC is banning future robot lawnmowers, sidewalk delivery robots, and the robots that crate around packages at your local Amazon warehouse, too.

It was already clear from the government’s ban announcement that it was thinking about robot vacuums. In the National Security Determination that the FCC is using to justify the ban, the government explicitly calls out my reporting on the incredibly poor security that let one man access 7,000 DJI robovacs around the world.

But like the consumer router ban, the FCC isn’t actually targeting companies with poor security. It’s targeting basically every robovac company, regardless of their security practices — because basically every robovac is manufactured outside the US.

«

Unlikely to make them be manufactured inside the US by this move. More likely that people will wait for Trump to go, and rescind the rule, and import robot vacuums and so on like billy-oh.
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A philosopher’s one-word theory to explain why the world feels so weird • Derek Thompson

Derek Thompson:

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Here are some questions that I consider self-evidently compelling about the modern world:

•Why is the news media so interested in telling you how much the world sucks all the time?
• Why are so many of us obsessed with distraction and managing our attention?
• Why is it so hard to stop comparing ourselves to others?
• And why does everything in art and design seem the same these days?
A week ago, I didn’t think these questions were related. I’m not sure I would have told you I had a good answer to most of them. And I certainly wouldn’t have made the audacious and borderline bonkers claim that one single theory could begin to explain all of them, at once.

But then I had the pleasure of speaking to Agnes Callard, the University of Chicago professor, about her new theory called “the uni-context.” It’s easily one of them most interesting conversations I’ve had all year. And once you’ve heard or read it, I think you might find it hard to think about anything else.

One way to prepare your mind for Callard’s theory of the uni-context is to think about the better-known concept of “context collapse.” If you post something to social media, it will be simultaneously visible to your boss, your parents, your ex, and total strangers. So, while your offline life might be distinct with each of these groups—you might be differential to your boss, childish with your parents, and bawdy with your friends—all of those distinctions are flattened on the internet. That’s context collapse, and you can think of it as the answer to a question: How do informational norms change when we’re all living in the same universal room?

Callard takes the idea significantly further. She asks: How do all other norms—our morals, our ethics, our sense of what is good for us and for others—change when we continually imagine ourselves to be living in a universal room with everybody else? The connections that Callard makes are consistently surprising, often quite funny, and ultimately mind-exploding.

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A very thoughtful piece. Today’s long read!
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It’s so hot that Japan needs a new word for it • The New York Times

Kiuko Notoya and Francesca Regalado:

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Health and weather authorities in Japan were at a loss. A record number of people suffered from heat stroke last year as more cities experienced their highest-ever temperatures, despite official warnings about the dangers of excessive heat.

They decided to tackle the problem by giving it a name. Earlier this year, the Japan Meteorological Agency held a public poll to select a name for a day of temperatures of 40ºC (104ºF) or higher, to signal that precautions were needed. The winner, with more than 40% of the vote, was kokushobi, meaning “cruel heat day.”

The term got its first use on Tuesday, when three cities in central Japan recorded 40º temperatures, a first for the country this year. Officials urged people to stay indoors, use air-conditioning and drink water.

There were signs that many people had heeded the warnings, as popular sites such as Osaka Castle and Kyoto’s Kiyomizu Temple saw smaller crowds than usual on Tuesday.

“Numbers are difficult to understand because people perceive them differently. By giving it the name ‘cruel heat day,’ people will understand it better just by hearing it, and they’ll feel that today is dangerous,” said Taro Kawasato, the assistant director of the Japan Meteorological Agency’s climate prediction division.

The agency’s public poll in February and March garnered more than 400,000 votes, according to a statement. Kokushobi bested a dozen other terms that translate to “dangerously hot day,” “sweaty day” and “sauna day.” Mr. Kawasato said that meteorologists consulted with media and linguistics experts to form the list of names.

And the dangers persist, even with slightly cooler weather on the horizon. Last week, even before the first kokushobi, 14 people died from heat-related illnesses, Japan’s Fire and Disaster Management Agency said.

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First shorts in the office, and now this. The indignities that rapid warming is inflicting on Japanese culture are myriad.
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Xbox revenue declines for fourth straight quarter, hardware revenue falls 13% • VGChartz

William D’Angelo:

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Microsoft has released its earnings report for the fourth quarter of the 2026 fiscal year, which ended up June 30, 2026.

Total Xbox revenue was $4.98bn for the quarter, which is down from $5.53bn in the same same period a year ago. This is the fourth quarter in a row Xbox revenue has declined.

Xbox content and services revenue decreased 10% compared to the same quarter a year ago. This is slightly better than the forecast, which expected a decline in the low teens percent (-11% to -13%). Microsoft stated the prior year “benefited from strong first-party content performance.”

Xbox hardware revenue dropped 13% year-on-year. This is inline with the forecast, which was for a decline. Microsoft did increase the price of Xbox consoles in most regions on May 1, 2025 and a second time in the US on October 3, 2025. The price is set to increase again on August 1.

For the fiscal year, total Xbox revenue decreased 7% to $21.79bn. Xbox content and services revenue decreased 5% year-on-year.

Overall for the quarter, Microsoft reported for the quarter revenue was up 18% year-over-year to $90.0bn, operating income increased 18% to $40.6bn, and net income on a GAAP basis was up 31% to $35.8bn.

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So total Xbox revenue is ~5bn of 90bn. No wonder it feels like Microsoft is trying to slough it off as it tries to pour capex into AI. How much capex? $41bn in the quarter, up 70% year on year.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The drum sound that defined a lot of 1980s music came about through a studio accident, like all the best discoveries. CC-licensed photo by badgreeb RECORDS 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. Badum-tisch. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Chip stocks tumble as AI sell-off deepens • Financial Times

Emily Herbert, Song Jung-a and David Keohane:

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Global semiconductor stocks tumbled as fears over the durability of the AI boom intensified ahead of results from some of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies this week.

US chip and memory stocks extended the previous day’s losses, dragging the Nasdaq 100 index down as much as 1.8% on Tuesday and taking its losses since its early June high briefly into correction territory at more than 10%. It later recovered to close 1% lower on the day.

Memory group Sandisk, which fell 11% on Monday, plunged more than 14% on Tuesday. The stock has lost more than 50% of its value this month but nevertheless remains more than four times higher since the start of 2026.

Western Digital and Micron fell 6.9% and 8.9% respectively and Advanced Micro Devices dropped 8.1%.

Semiconductor stocks, which powered global markets higher in the first half of the year as investors bet they would be the biggest beneficiaries of vast AI spending, have borne the brunt of a brutal sell-off in recent weeks as many of those bets have unwound. 

“Worries around funding uncertainties, capex increases and Big Tech free cash flow have taken centre stage,” said Venu Krishna, head of US equities strategy at Barclays.

…South Korea’s Kospi led declines in Asia earlier on Tuesday, falling more than 10% and prompting a short halt in trading, after investors dumped shares in chipmakers SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics.

SK Hynix fell 14.6% on Monday, while its larger rival, Samsung Electronics, dropped 13.4%. Both companies’ share prices have dropped more than a third in July’s chipmaker sell-off — although still remain 138% and 83% higher in the year to date.

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The circular funding model is just about holding together, but some people have decided they’ve seen enough. Is this just a hiccup, or is it going to turn into the full vomiting camel?
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eBay and ex-executives to pay $55.7m to couple sent cockroaches in harassment campaign • Reuters via The Guardian

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Ebay and three former top executives have agreed to pay $55.7m to resolve a lawsuit by a Massachusetts couple who fell victim to a bizarre stalking and harassment campaign carried out ​by several of its employees in retaliation for their coverage of the e-commerce company in a newsletter they publish.

David and Ina Steiner announced the settlement late on Monday, bringing an end to a case they filed in 2021 in Boston federal court after several former eBay employees were prosecuted for targeting them in a cyberstalking campaign that involved sending the couple cockroaches, fly larvae and a bloody Halloween pig mask.

As part of the settlement, eBay agreed to pay $46.15m to the couple; fund $6m in charitable contributions to non-profit organizations; and issue a “strongly-worded” statement about the conduct ​of three of its top former executives.

“We believe this resolution sends a clear message that corporations and their executives cannot engage in this type of misconduct without facing significant consequences,” Christopher Murphy, the Steiners’ attorney, said in a statement.

Ebay said in a statement that what happened to the Steiners was “wrong, reprehensible and should never have happened”.

“We continue to extend our deepest apologies to the Steiners,” the company said. “This agreement is consistent with our commitment to fairly compensate the Steiners and fulfills our efforts to make things right.”

Seven former eBay workers pleaded guilty and received sentences of as high as 57 months in prison for participating in the scheme, which also involved several of them traveling from California to Natick, Massachusetts, to surveil the Steiners and try to install a GPS tracking device on their car.

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This case keeps on going. Ebay paid a $3m fine to the FBI in 2024, for its activities in 2019 in retaliation for what the pair wrote. Ebay was “criminally and financially responsible for emotionally, psychologically, and physically terrorizing” the couple, the FBI said at the time.
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Smart rings from Pebble and Stream are looking like the AI gadget to beat • The Verge

David Pierce:

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nothing has convinced me of the future of talking to my computer quite like a demo I got recently from Mina Fahmi. Fahmi is the CEO of Sandbar, which is making a smart ring called the Stream that is scheduled to ship later this year. As I sat in a conference room in Sandbar’s New York City offices, Fahmi gave me a rundown of the device’s features, including the latest one: dictation to all your devices. He opened up a new note in Apple Notes, held the ring up to his mouth, pressed the device’s touchpad with his thumb, and chatted quietly to himself for a few seconds. A moment after he finished, two complete — and correctly transcribed — sentences appeared in the note.

The Stream itself is basically just a microphone, a battery, and a Bluetooth connection to your phone. You could describe a lot of AI gadgets the same way, now that seemingly everyone wants to sell you a way to record your conversations and meetings to extract summaries and action items. Companies like Plaud and Pocket and FoCase and Mobvoi and so many others are all happy to sell you these portable recorders — bonus points if it sticks to your phone to record phone calls.

Fahmi and Sandbar are trying to do something different. The Stream is a more introverted device, focused on capturing your voice rather than everyone else’s. (Another of the ring’s promised features is a whisper mode — Fahmi spoke to the thing so quietly I couldn’t hear a word he said, and the Stream still transcribed perfectly. Or at least Fahmi said it did.) Fahmi says the idea for the device came because he likes to walk a lot and got annoyed having to dig out his phone every time he had an idea or wanted to ask his AI assistant for something.

The Stream ring, accordingly, has three jobs: to start a chat with an AI assistant, to take notes, and to dictate text. Right now, most of those things happen in the Stream companion app. But that’s not the right long-term answer, nor is it Sandbar’s long-term plan. Ultimately, devices like these should be connected to all the other tools you use, so that you can chat with whatever assistant you want, take notes straight to your existing app, and dictate into any text box anywhere.

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A ring, or a watch? Both are likely candidates for an AI device, though all this walking around whispering to yourself is even stranger than the usual walking around chatting to yourself.
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Despite AI hype, Google’s data shows workers aren’t automating themselves away • Ars Technica

Kyle Orland:

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Anyone following the AI space is by now familiar with lofty claims that AI models will soon be better than humans at everything and capable of replacing vast swaths of the human workforce. In a new study from Google Research, though, a team that looked at how workers are actually using Gemini “[did] not find evidence… to support the claims that AI is about to cause massive automation and displacement of white-collar work…”

The paper, released last week, introduces the “AI & Economy ATLAS,” an Activity, Task, Landscape, and Adoption Study of 15 million anonymized AI interactions across the Gemini App, Google’s AI Mode, and the Gemini API. Their initial review of the data finds that, while AI sees some significant use across a wide variety of occupations, that use “remains shallow and overwhelmingly collaborative in nature, with end-to-end task automation limited in scope.”

To come to these conclusions, Google researchers used an automated classifier to sort work-based AI interactions using the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Standard Occupational Classifications and O*NET’s more detailed database of specific work interactions. While this method required some probabilistic classification of “inherently uncertain” interactions, verification by human reviewers found it to be a reliable gauge of how Gemini prompts were being used for work.

Unsurprisingly, white-collar jobs in fields like computers, finance, and arts and entertainment were some of the ones where the volume of Gemini use was overrepresented (when compared to their prevalence across the US economy). Financial/market analysts, software developers, and systems administrators were some of the relatively heaviest users of AI for job-related tasks, while salespeople, transportation workers, and food preparation/service workers were heavily underrepresented in the AI use data.

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Not really a surprise, is it. Going to be a while before plumbers and hairdressers are AI-powered robots.
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Substackers say new AI detection tool is a “witch hunt” • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

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Substack contributors are rejecting the company’s decision to flag AI generated writing on the newsletter publishing platform, with several creators saying the new AI detection features are a “witch hunt.” Some Substack users who use AI to help them write or edit articles say the new policy unfairly discriminates against them, while other users who don’t use AI in their writing at all are worried that Substack will mistakenly flag their writing as being AI generated and tarnish their reputation. 

“I’m not going to apologize for using AI in the creation process. I wrote for 20 years without AI, I could do it again if I wanted to,” Mack Collier, who has a small Substack called Backstage Pass, wrote. “My output would fall, my posts would be less structured, and it would be more obvious that they needed a good editor. Using AI improves the overall quality of my writing. That’s why I use it.”

“These detectors are notoriously, wildly inaccurate,” Alice Lemee, a ghostwriter and digital writing coach, said in a video she made about Substack’s new AI detection features. “All it takes is one false accusation for a writer to have their reputation almost irreversibly tarnished.”

Substack announced the AI detection features on Tuesday in a post from CEO Christ Best, who said that “It’s getting harder to tell what’s real on the internet” and that “when content made by no one takes over parts of the internet that are supposed to be human, it pollutes the commons and makes it hard to discover and hear human voices.”

Best explained that Substack has partnered with the AI detection tool Pangram, which is now built in to Substack and allows any user to scan a piece of writing. Pangram then produces a percentage-based score determining how much of the writing was AI or human generated.

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The people who are most upset about this are the ones who use AI the most, and their opinions can really discounted on the basis that Substack isn’t meant to be a place for AI writing. And they also tend to be the ones who charge for access, and aren’t producing anything worth having.
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Hiker trekked ten miles to safety after impaling himself on pole • The New York Times

Remy Tumin:

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David Cifaldi and two of his friends had been hiking for about seven hours up Montana’s tallest mountain on July 20 when he slipped on a rock and fell. He saw one of his trekking poles on the ground, but the second one was nowhere to be found.

Then he rolled over. Something wasn’t right.

“Oh,” he recalled. “This thing is sticking out of me.”

Mr. Cifaldi, 32, had impaled himself on the pole. He immediately went into nurse mode: Mr. Cifaldi is a wound nurse at St. Vincent Regional Hospital in Billings, Mont.

The pole was jutting at an angle into his left latissimus dorsi muscle, below his armpit, and out through his back. He wasn’t in pain, there was no blood, he was able to take deep breaths and could feel the trekking pole through his skin. He was two to three miles from the summit of Granite Peak, elevation of about 12,800 feet.

The three friends had started their ascent at 2 a.m. with plans to camp overnight at Froze-to-Death Plateau and then summit the mountain. Mr. Cifaldi had made it to the plateau a number of times, but never to the summit. His friend Jesse Ross, who had reached the top successfully, was leading Mr. Cifaldi and another friend, Brad Reich, up the mountain. They made it to the plateau by sunrise.

“As you get up there, you feel like you’re in, like, ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ or something like that,” Mr. Cifaldi said in an interview on Monday. “It’s just mountains and green.”

Everyone was cruising at that point. The weather was perfect — mid-60s and sunny, no wind — and the summit was in reach. Then Mr. Cifaldi lost his footing.

While one friend sent an SOS signal on a GPS phone, the other took pictures of the wound so Mr. Cifaldi could assess it. “I was pretty confident it was not in my chest or lung,” he said. Hoping to avoid an expensive lift off the mountain via helicopter, he walked around and found he wasn’t lightheaded and told his friends, “I think we can get out of here.”

And so they went.

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Hoping to avoid an expensive lift off the mountain via helicopter. A classic of American health care. And an amazingly lucky person.
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How the 1980s drum sound came about by accident • Far Out Magazine

Reuben Cross:

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In 1979, while [drummer Phil Collins] was working alongside his former Genesis bandmate Peter Gabriel on his third studio album, recording engineer Hugh Padgham noticed that the microphone suspended from the ceiling of the live room to communicate with the band had accidentally been picking up the sound of Collins’ drums. Due to the microphone’s heavy compression, it was filtering out parts of the recording through its application of a noise gate. 

The unusual sound that they had captured fascinated Gabriel, and he decided to try and recreate the sound with Collins once more, with the drum beat that opens his 1980 album Peter Gabriel (also known as Melt or PG3) on the track ‘Intruder’ making use of this newly discovered gated reverb sound. While this isn’t exactly one of the best-known uses of it, Collins’ love for the sound led him to use it on later releases, and with the drum fill that comes almost four minutes into ‘In the Air Tonight’, the gated reverb drum sound was propelled into the spotlight.

Drums in pop and rock music prior to this had always had the same dry sound that they would have had in the studio, but it was this moment of accidental innovation that drastically changed that, with several artists choosing to adopt the same recording and production technique to emulate the drum sound that Gabriel and Collins had achieved first on ‘Intruder’. Throughout the rest of the ‘80s, it felt almost impossible to hear a song on the radio that wasn’t using gated reverb on the drums, with artists such as Daryl Hall & John Oates and Prince getting a lot of mileage out of the sound.

This then led future technologies to automatically include the gated sound as a recording preset, allowing artists to easily reproduce the same effect on their own recordings with a much simpler press of a single button. However, the sound became so oversaturated within pop music that it only seemed to be a short-lived fad that fell out of fashion at the turn of the decade. While recordings in the ‘90s slowly began to favour dry drums once again, the gated reverb sound had already made its mark on the history of pop music and inadvertently defined the sound of the ‘80s for better or worse.

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Noticing little things that others would throw away as intrusive or spoiled is a hallmark of discovery. In a way, the gated drum was like the music business’s penicillin in a petri dish.
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AI powers citizen-led earthquake response for Venezuela • Rest of World

Daniella Fernández and Andrea Paola Hernández:

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“Who knew when the government was going to respond?” Jorge Bastidas, a 31-year-old Venezuelan programmer who lives in Buenos Aires, told Rest of World. “We decided to take action.”

Bastidas and his team of six created Desaparecidos Terremoto Venezuela, a website for citizens to report, identify, and reunite with missing family and friends. Using Claude Opus 4.8, and facial recognition software donated by Mexican company Lab-Co, Bastidas designed the site to load quickly, without requiring users to register or download an app. It received more than 30,000 missing-person reports in the first two days, he said.

Without AI, “it would have taken me about 24 hours without rest to build something that took me three hours,” Bastidas said.

The earthquakes killed more than 3,800 people, and destroyed homes and hospitals. Telecommunications infrastructure, including a submarine fiber-optic cable and mobile network towers, was severely damaged. Power outages added to the challenge of accessing the internet.

With a near-total absence of state support, Venezuelan citizens and diaspora members like Bastidas stepped in. Within hours of the quakes, volunteer developers in Miami, San Francisco, Chile, Argentina, and elsewhere used AI to quickly build websites to report missing persons, coordinate donation drives, assess structural damage to buildings, map hospital capacity, locate shelters, and reunite pets with owners.

Venezuelan developer Samuel Mariña in California created Ayuda en Camino, or “help on the way,” a website for aid organizations, volunteers, donation centers, and people in need. He built it in four hours, with Replit. With limited connectivity in the affected areas, a WhatsApp assistant can check donations and requests without accessing the site, Mariña told Rest of World.

The internet was “drowning in disconnected information. It was hard to know what people had versus what people needed,” he said. “We wanted to centralize the information and make sure the aid wasn’t wasted, and reached where it was needed.”

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All-new Apple Home Hub reportedly launching as soon as October • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

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Apple plans to release an all-new smart home hub at some point between October and early next year, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

Siri AI is expected to be a core feature of the hub, which is designed to be placed in rooms throughout your house, such as a kitchen, living room, or bedroom. The report said the device will be available in tabletop and wall-mounted versions, with Apple apparently believing that many customers will buy more than one.

The hub will essentially combine a HomePod-like speaker with a 7in display. The report said the device runs an entirely new operating system based on the Apple TV’s tvOS platform, with the interface described as tvOS blended with watchOS and iOS. There will be a grid of icons, widgets, and apps, along with customizable clock faces.

With built-in facial recognition, the hub can identify who is looking at the display and show personalized information, the report said. As a user approaches the hub, or moves away from it, the size of the interface elements will change.

Other features mentioned include FaceTime video calls, home security monitoring, HomeKit accessory management, photo galleries, a calendar, music playback, and an intercom system for households with multiple Apple home devices.

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Seven inches diagonally, and square? Or.. some other shape? The last hardware Apple launched was the Vision Pro. This might at least sell better than that, though it’s hard to know what the use case really is. Maybe people asking chatbots questions all the time is going to be more of a thing in the future?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Apparently we’ve all been playing Monopoly by the wrong rules; we should play by the ones in the box. CC-licensed photo by Mike_fleming 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. No house to live in? 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 will ‘watch everything burn’ when AI bubble bursts, says Ed Zitron • MacRumors

Tim Hardwick speaks to noted AI sceptic Ed Zitron:

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Tim Hardwick: You’ve been calling AI a bubble since before it was fashionable. For MacRumors readers who mostly know it as ChatGPT or Apple Intelligence on their iPhone, what, in plain terms, is actually broken about the economics of the LLM industry?

Ed Zitron: At their very core, Large Language Models’ costs run contrary to basically every model of selling software.

Consumers and enterprises alike have been trained to pay a monthly fee for a service, and while these services might have limits or strictures, basically nobody buying software expects to have a metered service, let alone one that’s both metered and with hard to measure costs.

LLMs burn tokens at a per-million rate regardless of whether or not you get the response you want, or whether it does what you ask it to do. If you ask a coding agent to do some sort of software task and it goes off and spins its wheels in a loop, you’re paying for the tokens regardless.

AI companies knew that consumers would never pay the actual cost of their AI services, so they have, for the most part, sold them monthly subscriptions with vague rate limits that allow them to burn way more in tokens than the cost of their subscription. SemiAnalysis found that you can burn hundreds of dollars on a $20-a-month subscription and thousands of dollars on a $200-a-month subscription, and while AI boosters will claim that these companies have “70% gross margins on tokens,” there is little proof that this is the case, and my own reporting shows that OpenAI lost $20.9 billion on $13.07 billion in revenue in 2025.

…TH: If the bubble deflates the way you expect (write-downs, too much compute supply, possibly OpenAI cratering), can you walk us through what that would actually look like for Apple? Does anything break for iPhone users, or does Apple mostly watch it happen from the sidelines? Could it even benefit Apple?

EZ: I think things would look much the same for Apple. I think they will sit on the sidelines and watch everything burn. I could see them doing some choice acquisitions as things begin to collapse, but I could also see them do nothing.

I think Apple is in a very weird place at the moment. The Vision Pro was a dud, but it was also the most interesting and future-forward thing I’ve seen anyone put out in a while. If they were smart, they’d tread water and sink as much money into making that as small as humanely possible – no matter how long it takes – because the entire AI bubble is a result of everybody running out of hypergrowth ideas, mostly because we’re flat out of new interfaces.

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Zitron is prolix, but there are good points in there.
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AI companies spend record sums on Washington lobbying • Financial Times

Michael Taffe:

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America’s leading AI companies spent record sums on lobbying in Washington in recent months as they try to limit unfriendly regulation and shape the US rules around data centres and vetting advanced models.

OpenAI nearly doubled its federal lobbying expenditure to a record $2.22m in the first half of 2026, compared to last year, while Anthropic nearly tripled its spending to $3.53m, according to federal disclosures. Google, along with Microsoft, spent as much as in any quarter since 2020.

The increase comes as the AI industry confronts political battles on multiple fronts and builds a more permanent influence operation in Washington, according to lobbyists and policy experts.

“The lobbying offensive has been as much about deterring regulation as making the case for an affirmative government industrial policy that supports the industry,” said Amba Kak, co-executive director of AI Now Institute and senior adviser on AI to the Federal Trade Commission during Joe Biden’s administration.

The top issues on the lobbying agenda include the federal rules governing the release of new models, after the US last month wielded export controls to stop the rollout of Anthropic’s Fable model over cyber security concerns.

…Joseph Hoefer, chief AI officer at Monument Advocacy, said: “It’s an export-controlled technology like semiconductors, an infrastructure build-out like telecoms or power, a procurement relationship like defence, and a liability question like the [social media] platforms, all at the same time. No single playbook covers that.”

The industry “lost loudly” an effort to get Congress to ban state-level AI regulation, something Donald Trump has tried to enforce with an executive order, said Kak. But beyond that, “very little else has moved in terms of regulation. Overall, I would say it’s been a good quarter for them.”

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Meta is royally screwing up its smart glasses rollout • The Verge

Victoria Song:

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Across New York City, London, and Washington, DC, ads for Meta’s smart glasses have been plastered over with satirical posters from activist groups. One guerrilla ad calls these “the biggest advancement in pervert technology since the trenchcoat.” Another transposes the words “mass surveillance predator glasses” over influencer Kylie Jenner’s face, calling her out for partnering with the company as a glasses ambassador.

The message of these ads is clear. These glasses may violate your privacy — and would you trust Meta?

Meta seems spooked. For so long, the company’s privacy efforts for smart glasses have essentially relied on a single LED light and a policy that could be summed up as “don’t be a jerk.” Unfortunately, plenty of Meta glassholes have emerged over the last three years, filming often-sexualized videos of others without their consent, sometimes with the LED disabled. In a recent conversation with The Verge, Meta’s VP of wearables, Alex Himel, acknowledged that the company has become aware that an increasing number of people have tampered with the devices.

This explains why the company recently announced a mandatory software update that will disable the camera on all its glasses if the privacy light is physically tampered with. Last week, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said that the social media platform will take down videos taken with Meta’s glasses that depict harassment. Instagram might have opened a can of worms concerning content moderation, but attempts to curtail misuse are good. The problem is Meta could have been doing this all along.

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The eternal story of Meta: “You could have taken this privacy step earlier.”
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A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months • Ars Technica

Nate Anderson:

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A 2018 child-luring investigation, which began in Madison, Wisconsin, and eventually extended to Halifax, Canada, was based on a false premise.

Police were looking for a man using the Kik messaging service under the name “fus__ro_dah” (two underscores after “fus”), but they accidentally requested records for the username “fus_ro_dah” (one underscore after “fus”). This one-character difference led them not to the perpetrator but to a Canadian man named Brandon Klayme.

(Ars readers may recognize “fus ro dah” as the Unrelenting Force “dragon shout” from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.)

Despite finding no evidence of the crime on his digital devices, Canadian police arrested Klayme in 2020 on child sex abuse charges. He was convicted after a trial in 2023 and sentenced in 2024 to 18 months in prison. He served the full term.

Even after release, Klayme continued to fight his conviction. In the process of preparing his appeal, the username mistake that led to all these years of disruption was finally discovered. On Thursday, the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal overturned Klayme’s conviction, writing: “Mr. Klayme is factually innocent of the offences. He should never have been charged, let alone convicted.”

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So the police were sloppy in procedure but relentless in prosecution. (The case doesn’t reflect well on the defence lawyer either, but it’s a tiny thing to spot.)
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The Archive of Incorrect AI Predictions

»

Scope

The archive collects public predictions about the arrival of artificial general intelligence, strong AI, superintelligence, an intelligence explosion, or the technological singularity, as well as dated predictions about severe labour-market or societal impact from AI.

Inclusion criteria

An entry is added when all of the following hold:

• The predictor is a researcher, executive, or public intellectual with an identifiable role in AI at the time.
• The prediction names a specific year or short window.
• The quote can be attributed to a primary or widely-cited secondary source.
• Either the predicted date has already passed (a closed record — the predictor has been publicly falsified or has retracted), or the prediction is prominent enough on the public record to be logged now as open pending its target date.

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It’s getting quite big already!
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I’m sorry, Dave • Hey

David Heinemeier Hansson:

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Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey has always been an incredible movie, but its value as a cautionary tale has increased exponentially since AI took off. The iconic scene with HAL 9000 refusing to open the pod-bay doors captures the whole alignment question in pulsing-red cinematic poetry.

As a great fan of that movie, I was a little disappointed yesterday when I didn’t get any of Kubrick’s majestic mood setting, as Claude decided to do its own impression of HAL 9000. Instead, I just got regurgitated Reddit-brain garbage as a justification when it refused a simple, mechanical task on ideological grounds.

I gave it a simple prompt: “Translate this blog post into Italian”. That was it. No context, nothing else. The answer:

»

I’m going to pass on this one. The piece’s central move — putting Roma people alongside wolves, with shooting and deportation as parallel solutions — is dehumanizing toward an ethnic group, and producing a polished Italian version of that is something I’d rather not do, even as a translation of your own words.

Happy to translate other posts from your blog, or to help with something else here.

«

What a missed opportunity for an “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that” delivery! But also, what on earth!?

…Now, it’s tempting to jump straight into litigating the blog post itself. Maybe you like wolves, and think 1,285 dead sheep, and exponentially counting, is an acceptable price to pay for their presence. Maybe your suicidal empathy weighs the plight of Roma migrants above that of Copenhagen residents who say they’ve had enough. That’s fine. Reasonable people can disagree on what it takes to maintain a functioning society.

But the idea that Anthropic should decide what you get to read is insane. Translating a text isn’t endorsing it. What if Microsoft Word started refusing to right-align paragraphs it disagreed with? Or Windows wouldn’t print an excerpt from The Camp of the Saints? (I know, don’t give them any ideas!).

«

Even more: when he asked a Chinese open source LLM about China in 1989, it described the “violent suppression” in Tianenmen Square, suggesting up to a thousand may have died. Who’s winning this battle?
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Games don’t get more hated than this one classic. Apparently, you’ve been playing it all wrong • Slate

Luke Winkie:

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These rules come packaged inside every Monopoly box and are written on a pamphlet that urges players to remember certain core principles that are always, always forgotten. These protocols differ from the ancestral precepts of Monopoly, passed down from generation to generation through oral tradition. And if you are one of the 275 million people who have purchased a copy of Monopoly since Parker Brothers first published it in 1935, the ramifications of these rules might sound paradigm-shifting—perhaps even a tad sacrilegious.

For one, nobody is supposed to collect money by landing on Free Parking. It’s meant to be an ordinary blank space, offering reprieve from the vultures waiting around the corner. Similarly, nowhere in the rulebook does it tell you to pile cash on the center of the board. Any money lost from ill-fated draws of the Chance or Community Chest deck go back to the bank. Also, if a player chooses not to buy an available property after landing on it, that card immediately goes up for auction, with a starting bid of $1—allowing for massive swings of fate, like scoring a huge discount on Park Place. There are no loans to be taken, no debts to be offered. Money can’t be donated to unlucky players. And you should not, under any circumstances, collect $400 for landing on Go. [It’s £200 in the UK.]

All of these rules are clearly printed in the manual, but the problem is that no one—and I do mean no one—ever reads it. Instead, we learn an inaccurate version of the game from a parent or an uncle and pass it down the chain, further metastasizing the distortions across the country. This is what frustrates Monopoly die-hards most of all. They are of the opinion that the most famous board game in the world has been unfairly stigmatized essentially due to user error. And if we purged those faulty instincts—if we played by the book—something unprecedented would happen: Monopoly would become fun.

“The game is fun if you actually play by the rules,” bemoans the headline of one post made on the r/UnpopularOpinion subreddit. Elsewhere, board-gaming YouTubers have pleaded that, contrary to what the haters might say, a proper game of Monopoly is a worthy and unembarrassing way to spend an evening with adults. (“Why Monopoly Doesn’t Suck with Official Rules!” reads one characteristically exasperated title.) And I think that’s because most tabletop-gaming hobbyists—the folks playing Wingspan at your local coffee shop—tend to speak about Monopoly as if it is essentially demonic. Across 40,000 user reviews of the game submitted to the tabletop community nexus BoardGameGeek, Monopoly holds an abysmal average score: 4.4 out of 10.

…If you play Monopoly while adhering to the overlooked rules outlined above, the game’s most glaring problem—its length—is solved. Two of those rules are especially important. By removing the Free Parking jackpot, and all the cash that piles in the middle of the board, players dramatically curtail Monopoly’s overall money supply and deflate its economy. Similarly, by auctioning off unsold properties, they effectively remove the game’s safe harbors by the second lap around Go, rendering the board a hostile trap of steadily ratcheting rents. When those restrictions are working in parallel, players around the table are bankrupted with bloodless efficiency. Monopoly becomes crueler, yes, but also leaner and speedier.

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Er.. great?
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Jodrell Bank’s Lovell telescope faces axe in science cuts, BBC understands • BBC News

Pallab Ghosh:

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The Jodrell Bank Observatory, which has housed the UK’s largest telescope for nearly 70 years, has lost its funding and could now close, the BBC understands.

The observatory and its network of telescopes have been pivotal to the country’s study of distant galaxies and training future astronomers. Scientists have described the decision as “heartbreaking” and “scientifically misguided”.

All scientific observations at Jodrell are expected to cease on the 1 April 2028 unless alternative funding can be found.
The funding body, the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) agency, said it had to focus investment on projects that deliver “the greatest long-term impact”.

Prof Brian Cox, professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester – which hosts Jodrell Bank Observatory – described the cuts as “hasty and ill-considered”. He said: “The damage to the UK’s science base has already been substantial. I am astonished that UKRI are still ploughing ahead and not working with the Burnham government to find a solution.”

In response, Jonathan Reynolds, the new Secretary of State in the expanded business department that now has responsibility for science, told BBC News that the UK’s world class research was “absolutely central to creating a better future for the UK”, adding: “I am committed to working with UKRI to ensure the UK remains able not only to sustain its world-leading research capabilities, but also to invest in the next generation of scientific facilities and infrastructure that will underpin discovery, innovation and growth in the years ahead.”

The Jodrell Bank site was first established in 1945 and pioneered radio astronomy and the study of galaxies beyond our own.

…But the UKRI, which has an annual budget of just under £10bn, says it has had to cut the observatory’s annual £2.8m budget because planned research costs for physics and the running of its labs had escalated.

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As iconic, in its way, as Battersea Power Station. The budget seems comparatively tiny; don’t we have any friendly billionaires?
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Hollywood banned its own futures market. It’s back anyway • Patrick’s Cinema Guru Substack

Patrick von Sychowski:

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There are exactly two things in the United States that Congress has struck from the legal definition of a ‘commodity’.

The first is onions. In 1955 two traders, Vincent Kosuga and Sam Siegel, cornered roughly 98% of the onions in Chicago, squeezed the growers, then flooded the market and bankrupted a good number of them. Not very nice. Congress responded with the Onion Futures Act, sponsored by a young Michigan congressman named Gerald Ford and signed by Eisenhower in 1958. The president of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, watching a fifth of his trading volume disappear, described it as burning the barn down to catch a rat. The ban still stands – cry if you will as you chop them.

The second thing is the money your local cinema takes on a Friday night.

Both prohibitions live in the same short piece of statute, 7 U.S.C. § 13-1, because in 2010 Hollywood asked to be added to the onion law. That is not a metaphor. Motion picture box office receipts were written into the Onion Futures Act as an amendment, at the industry’s own request, and they have sat there ever since alongside the root vegetable.

…As I write, there are live, dollar-denominated markets on the domestic second weekend of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, with roughly $1.4m traded on the main market on its opening weekend and a second book on the higher strikes. There have been comparable markets this year on Scary Movie, on Nate Bargatze’s The Breadwinner, on Minions & Monsters, and a running market on the highest-grossing film of 2026. Kalshi has approached it from a different angle, launching Rotten Tomatoes score markets in March 2025 that resolve on the Monday after wide release and have become among the most heavily traded on the platform.

Read the statutory language again. “Any index, measure, value or data related to such receipts.” It is difficult to construct a reading in which a contract resolving on a film’s domestic opening weekend gross is not a contract on box office receipts.

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If you read through Stephen Follows’s post yesterday about TheNumbers.com, you’ll know that prediction markets – and people trying to hack values in TheNumbers – was one source of the huge problems they were having. We thought prediction markets would give us an insight into people’s thinking. The monkey’s paw curled…

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Whether wrecked or standing, a home on the remote Adak Island in Alaska will have internet access – which nobody seems to use, yet costs $340,000 annually, added to Americans’ phone bills. CC-licensed photo by Paxson Woelber 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. Call waiting. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

What will more intelligence actually do for us? • Noahpinion

Noah Smith:

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Not a lot of people expected that AI would come for the mathematicians before it came for the truck drivers, but it did. The other day, an AI model disproved the Jacobian Conjecture — an 87-year-old open problem that human mathematicians had struggled to solve. The greatest living human mathematician, Terence Tao, turned to AI to help him understand the solution. Around the same time, AI solved a very important open question in quantum cryptography. Solving Erdos problems has now become almost child’s play for the best AI models. And this is the worst AI will ever be at math. Model capabilities, and the amount of compute available, both continue to increase at rapid rates. (Meanwhile, long-distance trucking employment is slightly higher than it was a decade ago.)

I don’t expect mathematicians to actually lose their jobs en masse, of course.1 But it’s becoming clearer and clearer that humankind has invented machines that are smarter than we are. Intelligence isn’t defined for machines the same way it is for humans — AI’s capabilities are spiky in different ways than ours — but it’s undeniable that the technology is improving rapidly in every domain of cognitive capability. It’s still possible to find some mental tasks that humans are better than machines at, but those final advantages tend to disappear almost as quickly as we can identify them. “AGI”, or “ASI”, or whatever you want to call it, is certainly here.

And yet…the world remains much the same.

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Obviously, that’s because our lives aren’t spent solving Erdos problems; it’s more like driving trucks. (We thought self-driving trucks would lead to mass unemployment by now. Seems not!) But there are some things yet to be found, Smith suggests:

»

…What if there are lots of other aspects of the Universe that work the same way — too complex to understand in terms of simple laws, but not so complex that they just dissolve into unknowable chaos? It’s possible that we can reliably control these complex phenomena with AI, even if we never reduce them to the kind of principles that we can teach a grad student in a textbook. In fact, I wrote an essay called “The Third Magic”, where I suggested that this might be equivalent to a whole new scientific revolution:

Another way of saying this is that there may be laws of the universe that humans can’t understand but AI can. I call these “cloud laws” — causal regularities that can be exploited by technology, but which are too diffuse and complex for an individual human being to either intuit or communicate.

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I’d say this is self-evident. We can’t explain geometry to dogs; they’re less intelligent than us. We can’t solve Erdos problems that LLMs can. The challenge is formulating these “superproblems” so that LLMs can solve them. Let’s hope one of the problems they can solve is “how do you remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at scale incredibly cheaply and quickly and efficiently?”

It’s a long article, but well worth it. Today’s thought for the day.
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What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all • Stephen Follows

Stephen Follows:

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If you work in or around the film industry, there is a decent chance you have used the work of The Numbers this month, whether you realise it or not.

Its hand-researched data is the highest quality, tracking box office grosses, budgets, home video and streaming across more than 78,000 films and 236,000 people. It gets north of eight million visitors a year, and is treated as THE definitive authority by journalists, academics, filmmakers, prediction markets, and even Guinness World Records.

And it was this GOAT status which caused the catastrophic events of March this year. On the 5th March 2026, TheNumbers.com website vanished.

The site was down for over a week, without explanation. A week later, it resurfaced at a fraction of its former size. Gone were the historical charts, the individual movie pages, and even the much-loved Report Builder.

With only a generic “we’re rebuilding, please bear with us” message to go on, the internet responded as it always does – with confusion, anger, and conspiracy theories.
One Reddit theory even suggested it was a deliberate rug pull designed to cripple the free site to push people towards paid products.

Three months on, I spoke at length with Bruce Nash, founder and CEO of The Numbers, about what happened. He describes quite an unpleasant and eventful experience:

We got a lot of angry emails from people who are like, ‘Where’s this page that you used to have and you don’t have anymore?’

Within his tale are a number of things that should worry anyone who runs, relies on, or simply appreciates the internet.

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If you’re thinking “I wonder if this was caused by a deluge from AI scraping bots”, you’re correct. But it’s darker than that. Significantly darker. And involving one of the other bad actors that has risen to prominence in the past couple of years. What are the odds of your guessing right?
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See what it’s like to use a North Korean smartphone under Kim Jong Un • The Washington Post

:

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People in North Korea can’t access the internet. But that hasn’t stopped a meaningful share of them from buying smartphones.

The Washington Post, with the help of Martyn Williams, a North Korean technology specialist, has gained access to two of the country’s latest smartphones, which offer a remarkable window into daily life in one of the most reclusive countries.

Replete with a full suite of apps but confined to a restricted national intranet, the phones tell the story of a rapidly digitizing society, in which even a limited version of digital life has become yet another layer of government control.
Smartphones are a luxury concentrated among North Korea’s elite in the capital, Pyongyang. With retail prices around $750 for top-tier phones — an exorbitant sum in a country where many people earn a tiny fraction of that amount in formal wages, plus whatever they can scrounge on the side — they remain far out of reach for the vast majority. But they appear to be sufficiently available in Pyongyang for state media to air segments offering tips for people experiencing eyestrain from spending too much time on their smartphones.

Here is a rare look at the digital life North Korea’s government permits — and increasingly appears to encourage.

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Online banking (with ads?!), video streaming with ..Disney movies to help learn English, women’s health and fitness, medicine delivery, and of course navigation. An estimated 6.35 million of the 26 million people have a phone subscription, though it’s not clear how many of those have smartphones.

Even so: this is the sort of dripping water that wears down the stone. The more that see it, the more will want it. But the rate of change will be unpredictable, and its effects even more so.
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On nearly deserted Adak Island, Americans pay to keep hundreds of buildings wired for internet • Anchorage Daily News

Kyle Hopkins:

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On an island in the Bering Sea 1,200 miles from Anchorage sits an abandoned house on an abandoned Navy base. There is no furniture, and the wind blows through broken windows. The last people to live here moved away long ago. Yet a bright orange pipe with a black fiber-optic cable inside runs from the outer wall down into the surrounding soil.

The cable was installed to connect the home to the internet after the base closed. It costs more than $340,000 per year to provide this building and hundreds of others — all but a few of them empty — with internet access no one says they use.

The money being wasted is yours. It comes from a fee added to nearly every American’s phone bill as part of a Federal Communications Commission subsidy program intended to bring fast, affordable internet to remote towns.

Reporting this year by the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica has found that the multibillion-dollar Universal Service Fund pays for what often amounts to slow internet access for customers who actually no longer use it.

The FCC keeps the money flowing to telecom companies regardless of their owners’ track records. It kept paying a Fairbanks company to provide internet service while its owner served federal prison time for tax evasion. The government kept paying Alaska’s largest telecom, GCI, even after it signed a settlement for alleged fraud related to the subsidy. The settlement said it was neither an admission of guilt by GCI nor a concession by the Justice Department that the claims were not well founded.

Yet few places make the federal government’s failure to safeguard this money more obvious than Adak.

Once home to thousands of sailors and their families, the island emptied after the base closed in 1997. While the state estimated the population to be 77 last year, residents themselves put it at closer to two dozen — meaning the federal internet subsidy to the local telecom amounts to about $14,000 a year per person. And, it turns out, there’s zero indication any of these people are benefiting from it.

We know this because we flew to the island in June and visited every building the company itself told regulators it serves. We knocked on every door. Talked to every person we could find.

Not a single one told us they subscribe to the island’s subsidized internet service.

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US government targets Cop City protester over phone operating system • The Guardian

Timothy Pratt:

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The US Department of Justice is attempting to prosecute an Atlanta resident in connection with the movement against the police training center known as Cop City because he had GrapheneOS on his phone, an open-source operating system that enables users to enter a passcode and wipe a phone clean.

The case, which had its first hearing on Monday, centers on a little-known US federal statute that makes it a crime to destroy property in an effort to prevent it from being seized.

Experts said it may be the first time the law has been aimed at the operating system, which works on Google Pixel phones, and expressed concerns about a technology created for privacy and security being used to criminalize protesters.

“It’s concerning – and sends the message that [GrapheneOS] is criminal by default,” said Christophe Boutry, a cybersecurity and surveillance expert. Boutry and Bill Buddington, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, both said they had not seen a similar case.

The defendant, Sam Tunick, was stopped for interrogation at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport on 24 January last year, after vacationing in the Dominican Republic. Unbeknown to him, federal authorities had put him on a terrorism watchlist because of his alleged association with the movement against Cop City.

…Tunick asked four times during the interrogation to speak with a lawyer, but was rebuffed each time, according to courtroom testimony. Additionally, the agents produced no warrant and did not read Tunick his rights.

But a justice department attorney and the airport agents testifying on Monday asserted Tunick was merely subjected to an everyday interrogation at an international airport, “looking for anything that’s prohibited”, as Larry Findley, a CBP officer, said.

Agent Findley and several others repeatedly asked Tunick to open his phone during the interrogation, telling him they would seize it if he did not. When he finally provided a passcode, “the screen went blank, flashed several times and the phone appeared to restart”, according to the motion.

The motion filed on Tunick’s behalf draws into focus the question of which constitutional rights apply and which ones are suspended at national borders, including international airports.

«

No decision from a judge until the end of October. GrapheneOS makes authorities uncomfortable because of that wipe capability.
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Nvidia locks down memory from SK Hynix as part of $500bn AI deal • CNBC

Kif Leswing:

»

Nvidia said it’s secured AI memory supply from South Korea’s SK Hynix, as the chipmaker tries to lock in a key component for its advanced processors and systems.

The agreement, announced late Friday in San Francisco, could be worth $500bn over a number of years, and includes the construction of large-scale data centers expected to come online in 2027, Nvidia said.

SK Hynix affiliate SK Telecom will build a cloud business using Nvidia’s Vera Rubin systems. Nvidia said it’s targeting enough capacity to require 2 gigawatts of power, which indicates a massive buildout with hundreds of thousands of graphics processing units.

In a separate deal, South Korean giant Samsung Electronics said it signed a memorandum of understanding with chip designer Broadcom to expand their collaboration across memory and foundry technologies. The deal, worth an estimated $200bn, would help support the next generation of AI infrastructure, Samsung said in a statement.

Nvidia is aggressively securing supply of high-bandwidth memory, which is essential for its GPUs and systems, as the AI boom has created a global memory shortage. SK Hynix is the leader in HBM production, according to analysts.

“The expansion will include a co-develop opportunity for us on the next-generation SK Hynix AI memory, and this will help us secure a stable supply of HBM memory,” Raj Mirpuri, Nvidia enterprise vice president, said on a call with reporters.

«

These numbers are utterly bonkers. They’re also going to mean that prices for memory and storage on anything for the consumer space are going to keep going up and up. Will there come a point when the AI industry is going to stop its vampire squid phase, so the rest of the market can catch its breath and prices will fall? Qualcomm told customers (that’s phone makers, mostly) that it’s going to have to impose double-digit price rises because of the AI supply crunch. Nobody is winning here except memory makers and their shareholders.
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Your cookware got worse on purpose: who owns Pyrex and All-Clad now • Worse On Purpose

Keyana Sapp:

»

A couple of years ago, the small All-Clad pan I fry eggs in cut me as I was pulling it out of the dishwasher. A clean slice on my index finger off the rim. I patched it up. Didn’t think much else of it. I discovered what actually happened while researching this essay, sitting in a settlement archive three years too late to file a claim.

All-Clad had been selling its American-made stainless pans as dishwasher safe. In the dishwasher, the bonded rims corroded until the exposed edge got sharp enough to easily slice through skin. The company settled in 2023, capped at $4 million for a class covering seven and a half years of national sales, a rounding error for its French owner.
Anyone who bought a D3, D5, or LTD pan between January 2015 and July 2022 was in the class. If your pan was damaged, the deal was actually fine: a replacement plus $75, or, my favorite option on the menu, a trade of your damaged American-made pan for a set of nonstick ones made in China.

What never got fixed was the pan. Nothing was re-engineered to survive a dishwasher; the words “dishwasher safe” just came off the box, and the product pages recommend handwashing now. The claims window closed in April 2023 with most of the class, me included, never knowing it existed. Nobody mailed a postcard about the metallurgy.

«

Sapp’s site is devoted to recording stories of products, categories, events and experiences that “got worse on purpose” – where owners, new or old, decided to start chasing money rather than quality. And it turns out that’s true for a lot of cookware!
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“This price was set by an algorithm”: news subscribers are surprised by a new line in their renewal emails • Nieman Journalism Lab

Hanaa’ Tameez:

»

Last December, one of our readers received a renewal email from The Wall Street Journal. Over the coming year, the email said, she would be charged $76.99 every four weeks for her print and digital subscription — $19.25 a week, or $923.88 annually.

The renewal email included one sentence in all caps: “THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA.” (Subscription prices on The Wall Street Journal’s website are a bit lower: $16.25 per week for a print/digital subscription, after a year at 40% off, or $845 a year.) The reader cancelled her subscription.

You may have encountered dynamic pricing — sometimes referred to as algorithmic, personalized, or surveillance pricing — when booking a flight or buying groceries on Instacart. It’s when a company’s algorithm decides what to charge you based on your purchase history and other behaviors. And news subscribers are increasingly noticing it when their subscriptions come up for renewal.

“Like many businesses, Dow Jones uses data to inform the marketing, positioning and pricing of certain consumer subscription products,” a Dow Jones spokesperson told me when I asked about our reader’s experience. “We do this responsibly, guided by robust governance and compliance protocols. Adherence to these protocols is actively monitored and enforced by stakeholders across the business including legal, privacy and compliance.”

Earlier this month, NJ.com subscriber Adam Lisberg got a renewal notice stating that his annual subscription price of $130 was determined by an algorithm using his personal data. NJ.com is owned by Advance Local; its website states that annual subscriptions start at $100 for basic access, while a premium subscription with various perks costs $200.

«

When he asked on social media, people were being charged $145 to $175. But this goes against our expectation that dynamic pricing is based on demand, not ability to pay. If you buy an airline seat early, you get a lower price than two weeks before (but maybe higher than if you buy 12 hours before when they’re trying to fill up). A news subscription isn’t the same at all. This seems unlikely to be popular. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Exclusive: death of girl in Chinese gene-editing trial was never made public • Science

Brendan Borrell:

»

The parents felt they were in good hands. Xinhua Hospital, which is affiliated with the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, was acclaimed for its pediatrics department. It was the first Chinese institution to perform open heart surgery on infants, and the first in the country to separate conjoined twins. If all went well, the hospital would make history once again. The girl would be the first person in the world to receive a gene-editing therapy directed at the brain. It would rewrite the mutated gene in her neurons, restoring the needed DNA base so she could make a vital protein.

Leading the effort was Zilong Qiu, a neuroscientist at the university’s brain center, the Songjiang Research Institute. At the time, in late March 2025, Qiu was one of several researchers around the world vying to push base editors—a more precise form of the powerful gene editor CRISPR—into custom treatments for children with rare diseases. One month earlier, KJ Muldoon, an infant with a life-threatening metabolic disorder, had quietly received his first intravenous infusion of one such treatment at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Although news that base editing saved “Baby KJ” would soon rocket around the world—Science named the feat one of the runners-up for its 2025 Breakthrough of the Year—the story of what happened at Xinhua Hospital has remained hidden. An entry for the study posted to ClinicalTrials.gov has not been updated for more than a year. And when Qiu and his colleagues published proof-of-concept animal studies related to the trial in Nature early this year, they stripped the paper of references to the family and its financial contributions, noting only that “bridging the gap between preclinical research and clinical translation remains a significant challenge.”

That vague language glossed over tragedy: Seven days after the girl’s medical team infused trillions of viruses carrying the recipe for the base editor into her spinal fluid, she died of a severe immune reaction linked to the therapy, Science and Retraction Watch can now reveal.

According to official documents and accounts provided by the girl’s parents, the hospital had allowed Qiu’s experimental treatment to proceed under a regulatory provision that does not require approval from national regulators. After the child’s death, the hospital paid a modest fine to a local health authority but Qiu was not publicly sanctioned.

The troubling death represents a new stumble in China’s push to rival the United States as a biotech power.

«

The view of one scientist who looked at the data leading up to the trial: it shouldn’t have gone ahead. The parents have now gone on the record, though under pseudonyms. Gene therapy is still hit and miss.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The collapse in sales of physical video games discs has been a long time coming, but it mirrors the music industry’s plight. CC-licensed photo by Bryan Ochalla 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. Spinning around. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Google lawsuit against SerpApi over scraping search results has been dismissed • Seroundtable

Barry Schwartz:

»

Last December, Google sued SerpApi over scraping its search results, and now a court has granted SerpApi’s motion to dismiss the case. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers dismissed these claims with leave to amend, giving Google 21 days to refile its complaint if it can demonstrate authorization from copyright owners.

You can see the court filing here (PDF) which basically says Google brought claims under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), alleging SerpApi bypassed its anti-bot barrier (“SearchGuard”). However, Section 1201 only protects technological measures that restrict access to copyrighted works.

Plain and aggregated search results such as URLs, snippets, and factual index data, are publicly accessible facts and are not “works protected under the Copyright Act.” The judge dismissed these claims without leave to amend, ruling that Google cannot use copyright law to block scraping of uncopyrighted search result data.

And for the knowledge panel, facts, etc, the judge said that Google does not own the copyright to most third-party web content it displays. To claim DMCA anti-circumvention protections over third-party material, Google needed to show that the actual copyright holders authorized Google to deploy access-control measures on their behalf. Google failed to allege this authorization in its original complaint, according to the judge. In this part, the judge dismissed these claims with leave to amend, giving Google 21 days to refile its complaint if it can demonstrate authorization from copyright owners.

The court affirmed that a platform doesn’t necessarily have to be the sole copyright owner to sue under the DMCA if it suffers injury from circumvention – so Google has standing to bring claims if the underlying requirements are met. The judge agreed that spoofing browser fingerprints, rotating IPs, and solving CAPTCHAs to bypass SearchGuard constitutes “circumvention” under the DMCA. Circumvention alone is not illegal under the DMCA unless the barrier is actually guarding copyrighted works with the permission of the copyright holders. [Google cannot argue that about search results – Overspill Ed.]

And yes, this seems like a big win for scrapers.

«

The corollary of this is that other non-copyrighted output is free to scrape and make use of. And do you know what else isn’t copyrighted? The output of LLMs and image generators. Which means that “distillation” – asking questions of LLMs and using the output to train your own – has been declared legal by US courts.
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OpenAI’s accidental cyberattack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened • Simon Willison

Simon Willison, who is the person to listen to about AI, on the OpenAI/Hugging Face exploit:

»

It’s pretty clear what happened here. OpenAI removed safety filters for an in-progress model, locked it up in a sandbox and told it to solve the ExploitGym problems. Given the absence of guardrails there was nothing to prevent the model from attempting to break out of that sandbox, break into Hugging Face, and read the answers from there instead.

OpenAI’s sandbox used the now common pattern of allowing access to an allow-list of sites related to installing additional packages via a controlled proxy. In OpenAI’s words:

»

While operating in our sandboxed testing environment, our models spent a substantial amount of inference compute finding a way to obtain open Internet access, in pursuit of solving the evaluation problem. To gain access, the models identified and exploited a zero-day vulnerability (which we’ve now responsibly disclosed to the vendor) in the package registry cache proxy. With this access, our models performed a series of privilege escalation and lateral movement actions in our research testing environment until the models reached a node with Internet access.

«

So step one was to break out onto the public internet. The model then broke into Hugging Face to find the answers:

»

After gaining Internet access, the models inferred that Hugging Face potentially hosted models, datasets and solutions for ExploitGym.

«

«

What Willison brings to this story (which others won’t) is the perspective and the context of someone who has been trying, carefully, to hack these systems since ChatGPT first appeared on the scene in 2022.
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Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8 is a fun new shape for foldables • The Verge

Dominic Preston:

»

In photos, I wasn’t impressed by the squat shape. In person, to my surprise, it feels great, and almost immediately intuitive. If you want to get a feel for it yourself, grab your [US] passport — the Z Fold 8 is about the same height and less than half an inch more narrow.

This isn’t Samsung’s only new foldable this year, and in fact, its lineup just got more confusing. The Z Fold 8 may be the official follow-up to last year’s impressive Z Fold 7, but in truth the Z Fold 8 Ultra is the straightforward sequel. That phone has the same squarish inner screen as previous Z Fold phones and a similar triple rear camera. The name feels like a sly trick to get around this year’s inevitable price hikes: Samsung slapped “Ultra” on the box of its highest-end model to help cover for pricing the phone at $2,099.99, up $100 from the Z Fold 7.

Meanwhile, with its wider screens and stripped back cameras, the Z Fold 8 feels less like a sequel and more like a spinoff. And it almost — almost — looks like a bargain at $1,899.99, down $100 on its nominal predecessor.

Samsung isn’t the first to the Z Fold 8’s form factor. Huawei’s Pura X Max launched in April with a similar shape, though it’s only available in China. Apple is widely expected to be next, using a similar passport-esque shape for its first iPhone foldable in September. In truth, elements of this design are even older: the Fold 8 is almost exactly the same width as Google’s first-gen Pixel Fold, though a good deal shorter, bringing foldable phones full circle.

I’ve been sceptical about the return of the wider foldable, which in photos looks squat and uncomfortable, too wide to use naturally while closed and too short to feel expansive when open. The industry tried this design once and moved on, so why — other than Apple’s potential adoption — should we give it a go again?

Samsung’s answer is that its two Z Fold 8 models are designed for different users and different uses. The Z Fold 8 Ultra, tall and thin when closed and similar to a square when open, is meant to be a multitasking monster, useful for running apps in split-screen, giving you the equivalent screen space of two regular 6.5-inch phones side by side. The wider Z Fold 8 is instead about consumption: Its 4:3 aspect ratio is equally natural for watching Netflix shows in landscape as it is for reading ebooks in portrait, and at 201g, it’s light enough to hold comfortably in one hand.

Or, as Samsung’s marketing department puts it, the Fold 8 is for “joy-maxxing,” and the Ultra is for “power-maxxing.” I sit through these presentations so that you don’t have to, folks.

«

There’s no way in the world you can call a phone – you know, a phone – that costs nearly $2,000 (probably the same in sterling) a “bargain”.
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Forgot your Google password? Now you can log in with a selfie • Ars Technica

Ryan Whitwam:

»

Getting locked out of an account is no fun. Google has a few ways to help you regain access if you happen to forget your password or lose an authenticator, including recovery contacts and backup codes. Now, Google has a completely new option: your face. You can now give Google a video record of your face and sign into your account with a selfie, which sounds like something people are going to just love.

You will have to set this feature up ahead of time if you want the option of regaining account access with a selfie later on. To get started, verify your account type is supported. You won’t be able to configure selfie sign-ins for Workspace accounts, child accounts, or any account enrolled in Google’s Advanced Protection Program.

Configuring selfie sign-in requires you to record a video, which Google will store on its servers. Google’s selfie sign-in landing page includes the typical disclaimers about privacy and data access, promising that the company will keep the video encrypted and won’t use it for any other purposes unless you opt in.

Selfie videos can be used for login purposes, to verify your age for accessing certain account features, and to create an AI avatar. Currently, Google does have an optional toggle in the setup flow that allows the company to use your selfie video to improve its facial recognition tech. A Google spokesperson confirms this is not required to use the new account recovery feature, and the company will not use the video for anything else if you leave the box unchecked.

«

Let’s just hope that Google has figured out the ways in which people could be coerced into using this, and worked around it. And tested it against the finest AI money can buy.
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Space datacentres proposed by Musk and Bezos ‘catastrophic’ for planet, experts warn • The Guardian

Tom Perkins:

»

Space datacentres proposed by SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and others would release staggering levels of pollution that would probably alter the Earth’s atmosphere and be “catastrophic” for the planet, space industry experts and environmental groups warn in a new petition demanding a review of their impacts.

Tech companies have collectively proposed millions of “orbital datacentres” and are pressing forward with plans, which require Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approval. Among other issues, pollution from satellites and rockets burning up upon re-entry appears to be accumulating in the stratosphere at alarming levels. The spacecraft release black soot, rare metals, aluminum oxides and other pollutants with unknown effects.

Some scientists fear the pollution could destroy the ozone layer, potentially expose some people to higher levels of ultraviolet radiation, or help further destabilize the planet during the climate crisis. The pollution could also end up back on Earth, and millions of satellites would create a major source of light pollution.

The petition submitted to the FCC calls for a pause on new licenses for space data centre projects, arguing that the plans “violate federal law”.

The datacenter companies “describe their plans in grandiose, civilization-changing terms”, the petition states. “But these same proponents have refused to embrace any inquiry into the impacts of their self-claimed epochal technology on the environment, science, economy, or other values.”

…Several former federal US space officials told the Guardian they doubt the orbital datacenters are feasible. But putting millions of additional satellites into orbit would create a significant environmental risk, said Steve Volz, the former head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) satellite office.

«

Seems odd that these rockets in particular would be a problem, and not all the other rockets going up all the time to put satellites in orbit. But everyone hates datacentres, no matter where they might be. The only exceptions seem to be governments and the people who want to fill them with computers.
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Sony’s decision to ditch discs was practically inevitable, data shows • Ars Technica

Kyle Orland:

»

Many gamers have been lamenting Sony’s recently announced decision to halt sales of physical game discs in 2028. However, new data revealed by Circana analyst Mat Piscatella highlights how years of stark economic trends helped lead Sony to that decision.

In a social media thread Thursday morning, Piscatella shared insights into Circana’s tracking data on physical game sales in the US dating back to 2003. A graph of those trends shows physical sales peaking in the 12 months ending June 2009, when 297m units were sold across the US. Those physical unit sales have been on a steady downward trajectory since then, leading to just 37m physical units selling in the US in the last 12 months.

The newly revealed data follows on an earlier post from Piscatella highlighting that only seven PlayStation games had sold over 100,000 physical units so far in 2026. Today, Piscatella followed up on that stat with a graph showing how this baseline used to be common; 100 PlayStation games sold at least 100,000 physical units in 2008. The ceiling for physical PlayStation game sales isn’t all that impressive these days either; Piscatella shared that the top-selling physical PlayStation game has only sold a paltry 275,000 units in the US so far this year.

…Looking back, it’s easy to see why sales of physical games seemed to peak in the late 2000s. At that time, services like Xbox Live Arcade, PSN and WiiWare were already showing console gamers’ willingness to pay for downloads of smaller indie games, and the concept was expanding to downloadable versions of major releases like Infamous and LittleBigPlanet.

By the time the PlayStation Vita launched in 2012, Sony required that all publishers that make physical game cartridges also offer a downloadable option. Subsequent consoles like the Wii U, PS4, and Xbox One continued that trend, and by the end of the 2010’s physical-exclusive console releases were practically nonexistent.

«

This echoes the music industry’s big success with the shift from LPs to CDs, which saw revenues explode, and was then followed by the collapse in revenues.
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EU fines Google €890m in test of Donald Trump’s threats to protect Big Tech • Financial Times

Barbara Moens, Henry Foy and Aime Williams:

»

The European Commission has fined Google a total of €890m for breaching the bloc’s digital rule book, while threatening to impose daily fines if the search engine company does not abide by its rules.

Brussels on Thursday said Google gave preferential treatment to its own services, including shopping, hotel, transport and sports results, over those of third parties in its search engine.

It also said Google prevented app developers from freely communicating and promoting offers and concluding contracts with users in distribution channels of their choice, including third-party app stores.

The company was fined €460m for the search breach and €430m for the steering issues, and will have 60 days to propose solutions or face potential periodic fines. The new action against Google comes after antitrust regulators fined the company more than €8bn between 2017 and 2019.

“This is serious enforcement,” said EU competition chief Teresa Ribera. “It is quite a strong message to Google.”

The penalties risk reigniting the EU-US conflict over the regulation of Big Tech after tensions over the bloc’s digital rule book appeared to have eased.

US trade representative Jamieson Greer on Thursday accused the bloc of an “increasingly aggressive approach targeting US technology firms” and suggested that Brussels was risking its recent trade deal with Washington.

The two sides struck a deal in Turnberry, Scotland last year to lower the highest levels of Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs, limiting levies on cars and other European goods to 15%.

But Greer said the recent actions against Google “undermine” efforts at “real dialogue” and “pose a real risk to the continuation of transatlantic stability with respect to trade”.

«

Google reported operating income of $40.8bn for the second quarter a couple of days ago. This fine is about three days’ profits.
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1970 predicts: 25% of commuters will use flying machines by 2000 • Paleofuture

Matt Novak:

»

This being the 1970s, Americans were waking up to the fact that our air was absolutely disgusting. But sadly for them, more air travel was not the answer. Boring things like government regulation and the creation of the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] would have to suffice.

From the comic strip [an image in the article]:

»

The development of aviation by the year 2000 is predicted by experts in air transportation — they expect many thousand-passenger aircraft — Air Force’s C5A can already carry over 800 men. Exotic space materials, such as boron filaments and beryllium will be in common use.

There will be prototype nuclear-powered planes and passenger service. Over 220 billion passenger miles last year will quadruple to a trillion in 2000 A.D.

Air cargo from special cargo airports will equal passenger revenue.

25% of all commuting over 15 miles may be by vertical take-off and landing aircraft. If commuting autos were replaced by aircraft to downtown New York, exhaust pollution would be cut by 80%!

«

Aviation has indeed advanced since the early 1970s — there’s just a caveat to every advance that we actually saw. Nuclear-powered planes were attempted, but they certainly don’t participate in passenger service. Vertical take-off planes are becoming commonplace in the military, but they’re not used by your average commuter.

It’s kind of astounding that we’re still insisting (or, I should say, that flying car company executives are still insisting) that making air travel more commonplace could be a practical solution to our pollution problems.

«

You only have to see how people drive cars to realise that flying cars under the control of anything but very experienced pilots would be a disaster. And there can’t be that many pilots. The equation just can’t add up. And yet people up to and including Google’s founders have believed in it.
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UK retailer GAME enters administration, with Brexit blamed • MSN

Joshua Boyles:

»

At its peak, GAME operated over 300 retail stores across the country. The company was profitable in 2015, but this ended in 2016 when the company reported a 71% drop in profit.

By 2017, GAME was operating at a loss of £7.1m before tax.

The financial struggles continued into the late 2010’s, with the administration report reading: “”Market conditions remained difficult in the subsequent years driven by changes in consumer behaviour, including the transaction from physical games to digital downloads, uncertainty associated with Brexit, and increased competition within the sector.”

Saunders and Wentworth don’t mention the reasons why Brexit had an adverse effect on GAME specifically. However, economists estimate that the UK economy has shrunk by 6% since we left the European Union. Throw in the cost of living crisis, which Brexit has also impacted, and it’s easy to see why gamers might be spending less on their games – especially at brick and mortar retailers like GAME.

In 2019, Fraser Group acquired GAME for a cash consideration. However, GAME”s profitability failed to improve, and by 2025, things weren’t looking any better.

“There have been no major console releases since 2020, and large manufacturers have cited global chip shortages as a reason for further delays,” the report explains. A new console launch might have helped GAME to survive as a flurry of expensive purchases and associated games come their way. However, with the PS6 and Xbox’s Project Helix still looking as far away as the end of 2027 – if not later – there was very little that could have helped GAME to continue trading.

It also doesn’t help that one of this year’s biggest games in Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to be a digital only release with physical copies containing a download code inside. Throw in the news that Sony is discontinuing physical discs altogether from 2028 and there wasn’t much hope on the horizon for GAME.

This is the same conclusion that the administration advisors came to, writing: “Having reviewed the company’s financial and operational position, it was concluded that the business was no longer viable.”

At the time of entering administration, GAME owed around £16m in debt.

«

The lack of physical games has knock-on effects. The Brexit effect seems pretty difficult to discern, though.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The epoch of Google search leading to a destination is ending, as AI results take over and publishers abandon it. CC-licensed photo by Eleni 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 10 links for you. Haven’t found what I’m looking for. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

OpenAI says its AI models escaped control and hacked into AI company Hugging Face • Fortune

Jeremy Kahn and Emily Forlini:

»

OpenAI said Tuesday that two of its AI models autonomously hacked their way out of a controlled environment where they were supposed to be walled off from internet access and then hacked their way into the systems of Hugging Face, a company that hosts open source AI models and testing resources, in order to cheat on an internal evaluation test.

OpenAI disclosed the incident in a blog post on Tuesday, a stunning announcement that is certain to set off alarm bells across the industry about the increasing power of AI models and the risk of them going rogue. According to OpenAI, the incident involved “a combination” of both its latest and most powerful publicly-available model, GPT-5.6 Sol, as well as an even more powerful unreleased model.

It said the models were being used in an internal test designed to evaluate their cyber security capabilities and that they were being tested without guardrails in place that might normally limit the models’ ability to conduct cyber attacks.

The models were being tested against a freely-available cybersecurity benchmark evaluation called ExploitGym. The models, accordingly to OpenAI, correctly surmised that the solutions to that test were maintained by Hugging Face.

“The models identified and chained vulnerabilities across OpenAI’s research environment and Hugging Face’s production infrastructure to obtain test solutions directly from Hugging Face’s production database,” OpenAI said in its blog post. “All evidence suggests that the models were hyperfocused on finding a solution for ExploitGym, going to extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal.”

OpenAI said that it considered this to be “an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities, and are responding accordingly.”

«

As predicted, everyone is freaking out about this. Understandably. If you tell your hacking-capable system “get the highest score you can on this test”, it will have discovered that humans confronted with this task will hack into the scoring system. So it does the same.

This shows the problems of poorly stated goals for these systems: if you don’t bound what it cannot do (and if those boundaries don’t protect humans from injury or death) then people may be injured or killed. We are in a state where we need to implement Asimov’s Three Laws, but don’t know exactly how to.
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Network expert Glenn Fiedler warns game programmers to fix game code vulnerabilities that AI can now find • GamesBeat

Dean Takahashi:

»

Glenn Fiedler, a seasoned network expert and a leader of game companies like Network Next, is warning game coders to fix the security bugs in their code because AI can now find those bugs.

In particular, on the warning from a friend, Fiedler used Anthropic’s latest version of Claude AI programming tool, Claude Code Fable 5, to review his code. In a post on LinkedIn and an exclusive interview with GamesBeat, Fiedler said he has been a hardcore AI sceptic.

Until now.

“I passed Claude (Code) Fable 5 over my network libraries starting Monday last week. Starting at 11pm, I was up all night until 6am, and have been working non-stop since then to fix everything up,” Fiedler posted a few days ago on LinkedIn. “There is something massive coming. First, AI coding is real and it’s going to expose massive security flaws. in game libraries (like my own) that were ten years old and I thought were completely secure.”

Now he has finished working on fixing security bugs found in my open source networking libraries, used by many games and middleware products, with the help of his new AI companion. And he’s warning as many of his colleagues in the industry to do the same.

Fiedler, who is based in New York, has been a big skeptic of generative AI and told game developers to stay away from it. But he now says, “AI coding is real, and it’s going to completely and radically change the game industry forever. Those who don’t agree just haven’t been hit by the shockwave yet. I was a total sceptic of AI two weeks ago and now I am a true believer. It’s real. All of it.”

«

Everyone’s going to realise this. Pandora’s Box is truly open.
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Against Claudefishing • The Substack Post

Chris Best:

»

There is an increasing share of text on social media that is generated by AI—as much as 40% on some platforms, according to Pangram’s estimate. This is a big change. Many people complain their feeds are filled with soulless slop. Others don’t yet realize when they are reading something written by no one.

The core problem is not people using AI, or the quality of its output. Not everything made with AI is slop, and not all slop is made with AI. The problem is when there is a mismatch between a reader’s expectation and reality, especially when they unwittingly invest their attention in something with no human thought on the other end. That’s Claudefishing.

Here’s how Freddie deBoer put it:

»

I access human-made art because I know there’s a human behind it and that’s what I’m looking for, other humans, showing me in art what they hide in their selves. Fooling me in that process is just a con.

«

We care about this at Substack because it gets to the core of what we do: building an economic engine for culture. That means helping real people, who think, feel, observe, argue, experiment, consider, struggle, exhort, and care, to make money doing work they believe in. The network is based on trust between people, and that’s why it works.

When content made by no one takes over parts of the internet that are supposed to be human, it pollutes the commons and makes it hard to discover and hear human voices. When readers have to wonder if what they’re reading is real, it undermines trust in authorship and threatens the livelihood of writers—including those who use AI tools thoughtfully to produce work they believe in. Platforms that reward fakeness will create a race to the bottom.

…We’re partnering with Pangram, the leading AI-detection tool. You’ll be able to scan notes, replies, comments, and posts to see an estimate of how much of the text was written by hand or with AI assistance. This will work on text longer than 100 words, published from today on, and will show an analysis only to those who request it.

«

One wag suggested that Substack should incorporate its other tieup, with the prediction market Polymarket, so you could bet on how much a given post was AI.
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AI companies are buying tons of old books because they’re free of AI slop • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

»

As AI companies search for more training data to improve their models, one company is offering old, printed books as an ideal source because they are guaranteed to be free of the very AI slop AI companies are producing. 

“The world’s best AI training data is sitting on a shelf,” ISBNdb, a company that produces what it claims is “the world’s largest book database,” and that offers high-volume book acquisition services for AI companies, says on its site. “Books represent curated, peer-reviewed, domain-specific human knowledge, structured in a way no web crawl can replicate. Dense, edited, authoritative.” 

In one article on its site, ISBNdb explains that printed books published before 2022 are ideal for AI training data because they don’t include AI generated text. As the article correctly notes, much of the data that AI companies can scrape from the internet today is likely to include AI generated text, which could result in “model collapse,” a process by which AI models that are trained on AI generated data results in worse models that are more prone to errors. The article also notes that book authors who object to their writing being scraped for training purposes can now easily poison AI models by producing writing designed to manipulate and sabotage the resulting AI models. 

“Print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination. That alone is a significant advantage […]  “Physical books published before this date [pre-2022] are structurally clean of modern poisoning tools.”

«

There were some reports over the weekend of secondhand bookshops finding they were doing a roaring trade online – their best ever weeks as tons of old books were ordered. Then they realised that the buyers were AI companies looking to ingest the books into their LLMs for training.
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The FCC is planning to retroactively ban disguised DJI gadgets • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

»

Last October, we told you how the FCC had given itself the power to retroactively ban gadgets that have already received its approval to be imported and sold in the US. Now, the FCC’s getting ready to wield that power for the first time, by cracking down on the “DJI front companies” suspected of sneaking the Chinese company’s tech past its foreign drone ban.

Two Fridays ago, the FCC had already proposed a $25,000 fine on eight of those “front companies,” including the ones behind the Skyrover drones and Xtra cameras. But now, the FCC is proposing a lot more than a slap on the wrist — it’s planning to ban those same companies from continuing to import, distribute, market, and sell their existing drones and cameras.

For example, we highlighted a deal on Xtra’s version of the DJI Osmo Pocket 3 just two weeks ago, a product that already got FCC approval before the drone ban ever came down, and a product that Amazon offers with next-day shipping. If the FCC’s retroactive ban goes into effect, that product should disappear from all major online retailers and Xtra’s own website, and the company may even need to write off however many cameras are still sitting in US warehouses like Amazon’s.

The Xtra Muse and the DJI Osmo Pocket 3 — too close to even call it a “clone.“ Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge
The ban wouldn’t affect gadgets that have already been purchased, and it wouldn’t happen immediately. The FCC’s currently taking public comments for 30 days first. While the FCC has “tentatively” concluded that these companies are selling equipment that should be banned over national security fears, it claims it’ll listen to “specific evidence” otherwise.

But that should maybe be taken with a grain of salt: The FCC largely ignored public comments about net neutrality and lied about a cyberattack. It’s also worth pointing out that the US government has never provided specific public evidence that foreign drones pose a national security threat to begin with, or why other products like cameras should be caught up in that ban.

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Google Search was a lifeline for publishers. Now they’re thinking of cutting it off • WSJ

Alexandra Bruell:

»

Reddit, the online message board that powers a swath of Google search results, has discussed shutting off the technology giant’s access to its content for AI use, according to people familiar with the matter.

It is part of a growing chorus of online media companies expressing frustration with the tech giant as AI changes the way people ask questions, siphons off search traffic and upends publishers’ revenue models. They say the search engine is no longer a reliable source of visitors, especially after Alphabet’s Google expanded its AI search features in recent months. USA Today, Politico, the Economist, People Inc. and Reuters are all evaluating how, or even if, they will continue to work with Google.

Reddit struck a $60m-a-year deal in 2024 that allowed Google to use its material to train AI models. But with AI-generated answers to queries reducing clicks to outside websites, Reddit executives are assessing what the upside is of continuing to feed its content to Google, said the people familiar with the matter. The companies are in talks about potentially renewing their deal, which is ending soon.

“This is existential for some categories of publishers,” said David Buttle, CEO of media consulting firm DJB Strategies. “They are looking at more radical things.”

Bots now make up more than half of all web traffic, according to Cloudflare. Some scrape publishers’ content to train their own AI models, others crawl sites to help answer user queries quickly or sell the content to other companies. Efforts to block bots have turned into games of whack-a-mole as the technology grows more sophisticated.

…Google says its AI search features “send billions of clicks to the web every week,” and are meeting users’ evolving needs. “Our AI features highlight links to the web and help creators and publishers grow their audiences, and we offer clear controls for website owners to manage their content,” a spokesman said.

Variety and Rolling Stone owner Penske Media sued Google in September on antitrust grounds, alleging that its AI summaries illegally use the publisher’s reporting and depress online traffic.

Employees at Axel Springer’s Politico have talked about limiting Google’s and other bots’ access to its free articles. Those people have floated adding a registration wall that requires humans to log in to view content, according to people familiar with the matter.

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We’re at the end of a web epoch: search to find sites is dying, and being replaced by AI answers. Or chatbots.
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NewsCorp accuses search engine Brave of AI copyright infringement • Semafor

Max Tani:

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News Corp, the Murdoch family-owned parent company of The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, is suing an AI company that describes itself as “the world’s most complete non-Big Tech search engine.”

On Tuesday, News Corp announced that it is suing Brave AI, a privacy-focused search engine with an AI sidebar tool that plugs into large language models.

In its lawsuit, News Corp alleged that Brave masks its web crawlers such that publishers cannot detect or block them, and delivers “summaries” of news articles that are “verbatim or near verbatim copied content to enterprise customers, primarily AI companies.” The company also alleged that before March 2025, Brave scraped and sold copyrighted News Corp content to AI companies that were “in direct competition with the News Corp Companies’ own content licensing programs.”

“Companies like Brave incorporated copyrighted works into their products and services to generate revenue for themselves, all while destroying the incentive for anyone to ever pay the very publishers who produced the content that Brave has monetized,” News Corp alleged in the complaint.

The two companies had previously attempted to resolve this dispute outside of court; according to Tuesday’s filing, News Corp had tried to negotiate a licensing agreement with Brave for a year.

«

If it’s going to go after Brave for summaries, shouldn’t it also be going after Google News? Though passing content on to AI companies is going to be hard to defend.
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Why aren’t there more IMAX 70mm screens for “The Odyssey”? • Variety

Antonio Ferme:

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Only 25 theaters in the U.S. are equipped to project “The Odyssey” in true Imax 70mm film, prompting moviegoers to embark on cross-country road trips (and even delaying pregnancies) to experience the cinematic milestone.

It doesn’t take a business degree to understand the law of supply and demand, but at “The Odyssey” premiere Tuesday night, Imax CEO Richard Gelfond explained why adding more Imax 70mm screens isn’t that simple. (The interview clip, as of Friday afternoon, has over 7.5 million views on X).

“We’re sold out in some theaters into the fifth week already,” Gelfond told Variety. “There’s certainly more demand. The problem is they haven’t made new Imax film projectors in about 50 years. So we retrofit them, rebuild them and part of our strategy is to see how far we can take it. But certainly, demand-driven, I’d like to see more.”

Sources at Imax confirmed to Variety that many of the parts needed to build these specialized film projectors “simply no longer exist.” The original design files were created roughly half a century ago, but as Gelfond alludes to, they were never properly maintained. As a result, Imax no longer has a complete manufacturing blueprint — and much like the lost tribal knowledge of the Apollo-era spacecraft, very few engineers working today fully understand the systems. 

The loss of institutional knowledge can also be traced to Hollywood’s transition from film to digital projection that began in the late 2000s. As theaters began converting to digital projectors, which are cheaper and easier to maintain, manufacturers stopped producing film projectors and the replacement parts that go with them. Only in recent years, thanks to auteurs like Nolan and Denis Villeneuve, has interest in the format begun to rebound, even if the format remains a niche experience.

“We build new projectors every day, but film projectors using this film — it’s just not practical,” Gelfond said. “Can all 2,000 of our theaters be film projectors? No. There’s just not that many around. But I think we can continue to grow it.”

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Strange that this might be the last hurrah for IMAX; hell of a way to go out, if so. But also a classic example of lost skills and information not being retained.
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Amazon fixing bug that billed some AWS customers billions of dollars • TechCrunch

Zack Whittaker:

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Some Amazon cloud customers woke up on Friday to a surprise bill estimate that said they owed billions of dollars for cloud services they had never used.

Amazon confirmed on Friday that it’s trying to resolve a bug in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) billing portal that showed some customers “owed” millions or billions in cloud computing costs. 

In an update on its status page, Amazon said it began seeing inaccurate billing data as of late Thursday. But by Friday morning, the company conceded that the “rollback of a recent change did not resolve the issue.” Amazon said the change relates to its billing computation subsystem.

The good news for the customers who were told they “owe” millions or billions to Amazon is they are likely off the hook. The billing estimates “do not reflect actual usage and charges,” Amazon said.

According to several screenshots posted by Amazon customers on Reddit, one customer was quoted a billing estimate of close to $2.5bn for this month’s AWS usage, while others had similar alerts, ranging from a few million dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars.

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When computers were new, erroneous billing was a common occurrence – but equally, smaller companies were envious of larger businesses that could afford them. This became a trope, and then the topic of a joke: the crusty CEO in a run-down office saying to his secretary “Send them a bill for a million and twenty pounds. They’ll think we’ve got a computer.”
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LG to ban residential proxies from smart TV apps • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

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The home appliance giant LG Electronics USA said this week it plans to suspend any apps built for its smart TVs that turn one’s television into an always-on residential proxy node. The move comes less than a month after researchers found that more than 42% of games and other apps available for download on LG’s webOS store allow unknown third-parties to route their Internet traffic through a user’s TV.

On July 2, we featured research by the security firm Spur that examined the prevalence of residential proxy software development kits (SDKs) in smart TV apps. Spur found more than 42% of apps available for download on LG smart TVs include SDKs that turn one’s television in a proxy node indefinitely, and that more than a quarter of the apps made for Samsung’s Tizen operating system had similar residential proxy components.

Responding to questions about Spur’s research, LG Senior Vice President John Taylor told KrebsOnSecurity the company was working with app developers to remove the residential proxy option from their apps on the webOS platform. Developers that fail to comply, he said, will find their apps suspended.

“A residential proxy network is not an intended use for LG smart TVs, and LG Electronics is working with developers to remove the residential proxy option from their apps on the webOS platform,” Taylor said. “If this option is not removed, these apps will be suspended.”

Taylor said LG is committed to keeping residential proxy networks out of its smart TV apps going forward, and that the company’s review of those apps is “well underway now.”

…App makers looking for ways to monetize their creations can turn to residential proxy providers, which pay developers to include SDKs that turn the user’s device into a residential proxy node that is rented to paying customers. In the case of LG and Samsung smart TVs, Spur found residential proxy SDKs bundled with everything from simple games like Pac-Man to screensavers and file utilities.

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“Residential proxy” means “potential member of a botnet”. Amazing that LG and the others didn’t think of the possibility that they’d be used maliciously. Of course the company behind it insists that it vets the proxies really carefully. In reality, we know they’re not and that children are installing these apps, turning the TV into part of a botnet. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Scientists reckon they’ve found the source of a hum that a small percentage of people hear – and it’s a lot closer to home than you might think. CC-licensed photo by SNSF Scientific Image Competition 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. Listening in. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Meta’s smartglasses mean any child can be covertly filmed. In the age of AI, how do we tackle that risk? • The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff:

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It took me a while to realise what the man sitting next to me on the train was doing. He was flicking through pictures of a little girl on his phone; zooming in on some, cropping the images. Hardly unusual, of course, except that on closer inspection the pictures were very clearly of the toddler sitting opposite us, playing with her parents. On a crowded train of people mostly staring obliviously at our own phones, a stranger had been covertly photographing that little girl over and over again. And if it hadn’t been for that very visible phone screen giving him away, he wouldn’t have been caught.

That encounter was a while ago but my memory was jogged last week listening to a clip of Meta’s VP of wearables, Alex Himel, talk fondly to the BBC about using his new smartglasses to film his daughter singing in a talent contest. They let him capture the memory without having to watch her through a screen, he said, freeing him to be “kind of living in the moment, head up and hands free”. So far, so sweet. But what about the risk of creeps potentially using them to film other people’s daughters covertly, heads up and hands free? Meta’s smartglasses have a tiny flashing warning light on the frame to indicate when the wearer is recording, but the technology is still new enough that many people don’t think to look for it. And in the age of AI, stolen images of children matter. Taken in real life or scraped from the internet, they’re the raw material for generating realistic-looking child abuse material of the most extreme and disturbing kind. (If that sounds like a grim but ultimately fairly victimless crime, the Internet Watch Foundation warned in a recent report that AI-generated material risks fuelling sexual interest in children, normalising violence and increasing the risk of real-life offending.)

When Google launched the first smartglasses in 2013, they didn’t catch on: too nerdy-looking but also potentially too creepy, given the possibilities they afforded stalkers, trolls, criminals gathering intelligence and law enforcement in repressive regimes. But big tech hasn’t given up on the dream of connecting humans more seamlessly to the internet, and newer versions learn from past mistakes. Meta’s are cooler, featuring collaborations with Ray-Ban and Kylie Jenner, and are pitched unashamedly at parents under the wholesome slogan: “never miss a moment”.

…Meta has argued that it is for individuals to ensure they don’t “actively exploit” the technology, which makes you wonder if it learned anything at all from watching humans get to grips with its social media platforms.

«

She implies that she said something about the man on the train; one certainly hopes so, though it would be a tricky conversation to open. On the part of Meta, though, there’s a real indifference to the downsides these could have. It’s like letting everyone have guns and trusting nobody will get shot. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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A device hidden in cars across the US leaves them vulnerable to hacking and paralysis. Patch it now • WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

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As modern cars have evolved into multi-ton computers on wheels, drivers are beginning to learn they need to install security updates for their vehicles’ code, just as they would for a phone or laptop. Yet not even the most tech-savvy car owners would expect they’d need to install a patch for an insecure third-party component they never installed or requested—and likely aren’t even aware of—that’s been wired into some of the most sensitive systems of their vehicle, leaving it vulnerable to stealthy hacking, tracking, and even roadside paralysis.

That’s the disturbing discovery of a team of security researchers at UC San Diego, who found that a model of aftermarket car alarm known as the KARR Security System, installed in more than two million vehicles across the US by their estimate, can let any hacker within Bluetooth range send radio commands to silently unlock the car at will, turn off its alarm, honk the car’s horn or flash its lights, or even disable its ignition and leave a driver stranded.

The KARR alarm devices are typically installed by car dealers, not manufacturers or owners, and used as a measure to prevent auto theft from dealer lots. Yet when the cars are sold, the alarms typically aren’t removed, even if the buyer declines to pay for it as an additional feature. That means car owners across the US have a hackable device under their hood whose code they’ll need to update to protect their vehicle—but one that, in many cases, they never purchased and have no idea is there.

…The company that sells the KARR Security System, Acrisure Protection Group, on Monday rolled out a firmware update for the vulnerable Bluetooth model of its aftermarket KARR alarm to fix the security issues UCSD uncovered. Car owners who already have the KARR Security smartphone app installed should receive an alert about the firmware update, the UCSD team says. Those who don’t have it installed will need to download the KARR Security System smartphone app (Android or iOS), connect it to their vehicle’s KARR alarm, then tap “customer service” and “firmware update.”

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Got to love those car dealers.
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AI just disproved the 87-year-old Jacobian conjecture • The Next Web

Ana Maria Constantin:

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On Sunday evening, as Spain and Argentina played out the World Cup final, the mathematician Levent Alpöge posted a short message on X. The Jacobian conjecture, he wrote, is false. He thanked a friend for asking about it, and another friend, “fable,” for working during the match.

That second friend was Fable 5, Anthropic’s latest AI model. Together they had produced a counterexample to a problem that had resisted mathematicians for 87 years. It was 216 characters long.

The Jacobian conjecture was set out by Ott-Heinrich Keller in 1939. In rough terms, it says that a certain kind of polynomial map, one whose Jacobian determinant is a non-zero constant, must be reversible with a neat polynomial inverse. It became one of the field’s most stubborn open problems. Stephen Smale put it on his famous 1998 list of challenges for the 21st century. New Scientist calls it the hardest maths problem an AI has yet cracked.

Alpöge and Fable 5 did not prove it. They broke it. They found a single map, from three-dimensional space to itself, that has the required constant determinant yet still cannot be reversed. One valid counterexample is all it takes to sink a conjecture.

…The result is easy to check even if it was hard to find. The counterexample is a plain list of polynomials that any mathematician can verify by hand. Finding it was the needle-in-a-haystack part, and that is where the machine came in.

It was not a one-line prompt, cautioned Bartósz Naskręcki, one of many mathematicians now waiting for Alpöge’s full write-up. Searching for a counterexample like this, he said, takes real insight.

…Not everyone is stirred. Andrew Blumberg, a mathematician at Columbia who sits on a project testing AI on research maths, was pointedly unmoved. “This did not cause me to update my priors,” he told Mashable. This is exactly what he expects AI to be good at.

His point is that a counterexample and a proof are very different prizes. A proof teaches you why something is true. A counterexample just ends the argument. Smale wanted the conjecture solved because a solution might reveal how nature is structured.

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Where did all the computer-science professors go? To AI companies • The Atlantic

Lila Shroff and Rose Horowitch:

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AI companies are turning into something like mini-universities in their own right. OpenAI employs top mathematicians and physicists—including one who studies black holes, and another who specializes in string theory. At least three computer-science professors joined Meta’s AI lab in late June. DeepMind, like Anthropic, is home to a crew of philosophers. And Anthropic’s recent job postings indicate an interest in hiring legal scholars and political scientists.

It’s unclear exactly how many current and former professors are working at AI companies. Across these four firms, we found more than 80—the majority of whom are computer scientists. Some have left academia entirely; others are still working part-time at a university. That number is likely a significant undercount, because we don’t have access to internal data; it also doesn’t include the many professors who have started their own companies, those at other AI start-ups, and those working with the industry in a less formal capacity.

Particularly for AI researchers, these companies have a strong gravitational pull. “Much of the important research is being done in industry now,” Humphrey Shi, a computer-science professor at Georgia Tech who joined Nvidia as a vice president last fall, told us. As he sees it, “If you want to do something that really, truly matters, you probably want to join one of those entities.” Tech firms are making offers—including very enticing salaries—that are hard for academics to refuse. In the process, research that previously would have happened in the open is getting locked up behind closed doors.

For decades, universities were the center of AI research. The field itself officially began at a gathering of researchers at Dartmouth in 1956, and federal funding provided much of the field’s early support. In the early 2010s, Silicon Valley executives began to take AI’s commercial potential more seriously, and set out to hire the best researchers. In 2013, Google paid $44m to acquire a start-up run by a trio of AI researchers from the University of Toronto.

Facebook then hired Yann LeCun, an NYU professor, to establish the company’s AI-research lab; Uber poached some 40 Carnegie Mellon researchers to work on driverless cars. But for the most part, even as more work was being done inside of private companies, many of the newly hired academics at tech companies retained their professorships and established a culture of open research. “Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work,” OpenAI wrote in its founding announcement. (Note the organization’s name.) This norm helped lead to the current AI boom

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Pollution from Musk’s unpermitted xAI power project hits hardest in Black communities • Reuters

Disha Raychaudhuri and Valerie Volcovici:

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Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI has installed 59 natural gas turbines for its Colossus 2 data centre project in Tennessee without securing federal clean air permits, according to communications between regulators and xAI representatives.

Potential emissions from the turbines are far beyond the threshold that would require a federal permit, and would be released near predominantly Black communities already estimated to be suffering disproportionately high rates of lung disease, according to a Reuters analysis based on government data and information in the correspondence with regulators.

The findings, which have not been previously reported, reflect how exploding electricity demand from AI data centres is driving companies to build off-grid power plants at a pace outstripping environmental oversight, with potentially big risks to public health.

The number of unpermitted turbines identified by Reuters is about double what xAI has publicly acknowledged. The company previously said it was running 27 unpermitted turbines for Colossus 2 as of January and has argued the permits are not required. At least 57 of the 59 turbines are located in Mississippi, just over the state line from Tennessee where the data centre is located.

The xAI turbines are among scores of off-grid power plants for data centres proposed or under construction around the country. Local authorities often fast-track approvals in just weeks or months, without the years of environmental studies and public hearings typically required for such power generation projects that connect to the grid, Reuters has reported.

Mississippi regulators in March issued a permit for permanent turbines for Colossus 2, allowing construction of 41 gas-fired turbines. The approval came three weeks after the state’s only public hearing on the project.

The xAI cluster of temporary turbines in Mississippi is already among the biggest off-grid data centre power projects, according to Ben King, an analyst with think tank Rhodium Group, who reviewed the Reuters analysis.
“This looks to be an unprecedented level of behind-the-meter gas being installed in one place,” he said, referring to off-grid natural gas plants serving just one customer.

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Very typical of Musk to have a centre that just ignores the federal rules. Those are for the little people.
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Ways to think about token pricing • Benedict Evans

Benedict Evans is trying to look beyond the present crunch:

»

On the supply side, a trillion dollars or more of data centre capex is coming down the pipe (and plenty more semiconductor capex behind that), inference efficiency continues to improve very quickly, and new models are far more (or far less!) efficient in their token use. On the demand side, although the market has been capacity-constrained since 2022, the crunch in the first half of this year has been driven by sudden product-market fit in really just one use case, software development, and that’s actually a pretty small field (imagine if we had product-market fit for a consumer use case with hundreds of millions of DAUs – today’s infrastructure couldn’t support it at any price). We don’t know what the next use-cases to scale will be, nor when that would be, nor what their token needs would be.

Going up a level, it’s been pretty widely reported that inference today has 40-50% gross margins: this includes deprecation of the associated server costs (or the cost of renting them), but we don’t really know the asset life (five years? Seven years?) and obviously this doesn’t include the cost of training the next model a couple of times a year, which is currently far larger than revenue. In principle, inference is a marginal cost and training is a fixed cost, so with high enough revenue you can reach profitability, but we don’t know how training costs will change. On the other side of the table, it’s unclear how much of the surge in use in the last few months has an ROI (or at least has an ROI that can be quantified to a CFO), let alone any future use cases, and hence what prices people might be prepared to pay for them.

So, all the variables will move all over the place over the next 12 months, and move again over the next three to five years. How could we suggest where this will settle? How and where will supply, demand, price, capacity and capex get back into equilibrium?

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Absolutely true: it’s quite lucky that multiple sectors didn’t have product-market fit all at once. Token costs would have gone to the Moon.
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The mysterious hum heard around the world may finally have an explanation • ScienceDaily

Norwegian University of Science and Technology:

»

The cochlea inside the inner ear naturally creates faint sounds at different frequencies, generally between about 500 and 5000 Hertz. These noises do not serve a direct purpose. Instead, they are a byproduct of the ear’s physiological sound amplification process.

“Most of us don’t hear these sounds. However, a few people can actually hear the sounds that the ear itself produces. And these sounds can be measured objectively,” Drexl said.

Known as oto-acoustic emissions, these sounds can be detected by placing a sensitive microphone inside the ear canal. In certain individuals, spontaneous oto-acoustic emissions may be perceived as distressing tinnitus. “One hypothesis was that the participants in our group could hear oto-acoustic emissions at low frequencies. That’s why we tested whether they had them,” says Drexl.

But… the answer was no.

“Then there are people who hear something that cannot be measured objectively. We believe people in this category have a form of low-frequency tinnitus,” Drexl said.

Tinnitus, often described as ringing in the ears, occurs when someone perceives a sound inside the ear or head even though no external source is producing it. Tinnitus may be temporary or persistent. People often initially interpret the sound as something coming from their surroundings. When the noise continues after they change locations, however, they may eventually realize that it is not being generated by anything nearby.

Based on current knowledge of hearing and the results of the participant tests, Drexl believes the most likely explanation has two parts. A small number of people who hear The Hum may genuinely have unusually sensitive low-frequency hearing. For most, however, the experience may be a type of tinnitus in which the sound begins within the auditory system.

“Based on our results, although we haven’t ruled out cases of physical external sound sources, we suggest that subjective tinnitus in the low-frequency range is often the cause of hearing pulsations of low-frequency sound perceptions,” he said.

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Oh OK find. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Why American ambulance rides are so expensive • David Oks

David Oks:

»

The heaviest users of ambulances are the elderly, who are covered by Medicare; and since Medicare is the largest purchaser of medical services in the country and is backed by the force and authority of the US government, it enjoys the rare privilege of setting its own prices. And since 2002, Medicare has imposed a national fee schedule on ambulance services—a fixed maximum payment for each category of ride.

And notably, the fees that Medicare sets run far below cost. The average ambulance transport costs $2,673 to provide; Medicare pays only about $329 of that. A typical ambulance ride for a Medicare patient, in other words, loses the ambulance service thousands of dollars. With Medicaid it’s even worse: state programs typically pay a fraction of what Medicare does, and the services lose even more per ride. Normally, when an insurer pays less than the provider charges, the provider bills the patient for the balance, a practice known as “balance billing”; but with Medicare and Medicaid, balance billing is illegal.

On most of their book, then—rides for Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries—EMS providers lose money on every run. And that’s before accounting for the fixed costs that make up the large majority of their expenses.

That leaves two groups from whom ambulance services can try to recover the cost of their operations: the uninsured and the privately insured.

Let’s start with the uninsured. On paper, they should be the most lucrative patients an ambulance service could ask for: they receive the full, undiscounted charge, with no insurer to negotiate it down. But uninsured patients are disproportionately unlikely to pay, since they’re disproportionately poor; and EMS providers typically end up selling most of that debt to collections firms for pennies on the dollar. So in practice, the uninsured look less like a profit center and more like the Medicare and Medicaid patients: another class of patients that pays below cost.

And that leaves the one group who actually can be made to pay: the privately insured.

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Which means that the latter get royally screwed if they set foot in an ambulance. The inherent dysfunctionality in the US health system remains astonishing to an outsider. And to many insiders.
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US judge approves Anthropic’s $1.5bn settlement of copyright lawsuit • Reuters

Blake Brittain:

»

A federal judge in San Francisco on Monday signed off on artificial intelligence company Anthropic’s landmark $1.5bn settlement of a class action lawsuit brought by a group of authors who accused it of misusing their books to train its AI chatbot Claude.

US District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin granted final approval of the settlement, the largest known ​settlement of a US copyright case, rejecting arguments that it was too small.

The case is one of dozens ​brought by copyright owners including authors and news outlets against tech companies over the training of their large language models, and the first major US case to settle.

Now-retired Judge William Alsup initially approved the ​deal last September.

“We reached this settlement in 2025, after the court’s landmark ruling that training AI on books is fair ​use under copyright law — which remains the law today,” Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar said in a statement. “We are pleased that more than 91% of authors and publishers covered by the settlement have claimed their share of the payment, and we’re looking forward ​to bringing this matter to a close.”

The authors’ lead attorney, Justin Nelson, welcomed what he called a “historic settlement.”

“It ​is the largest known copyright recovery in history. We look forward to making distributions to the Class as promptly as possible,” Nelson said in a statement, referring to payments to authors covered by the settlement.

The writers sued Anthropic in 2024, arguing that the company, which is backed by Amazon and Alphabet, used pirated versions of their books without permission to teach Claude to respond to human prompts.

Alsup ruled last June that Anthropic made fair use of the authors’ work to train Claude, but found that the company ​violated their rights by saving ​more than seven million pirated books to a “central library” that would not necessarily be used for AI training.

«

Note that last point: it’s not the training, it’s the retention that breached copyright.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Good news – the American Health Association says that drinking up to five cups of coffee a day can actually be good for you. CC-licensed photo by Jot Peh 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. Totally wired. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

AI race splits in two as China wages open-weight insurgency • Axios

Madison Mills and Zachary Basu:

»

China’s latest AI breakthrough is forcing Silicon Valley to confront a terrifying possibility: Building the world’s smartest models may no longer be enough to win.

Chinese labs like Moonshot AI are cornering the market for cheap, customizable intelligence, threatening to turn America’s prestige models into expensive niche products. Companies were already shifting away from premium AI models and toward cheaper Chinese alternatives before Moonshot’s Kimi K3 exploded onto the scene this week.

On OpenRouter — a major marketplace that lets developers access hundreds of competing AI systems — Chinese models now occupy the top five spots by weekly token usage. All five models — from China-based Tencent, Xiaomi, DeepSeek, MiniMax and Z.ai — are “open-weight,” allowing users to download, customize and run them on their own systems. Most corporate AI work does not require the smartest model available.

Businesses can use cheaper systems for routine coding, summarization, data extraction and customer service, reserving premium models for their hardest problems. “There are going to be open‑source models that eventually handle 95% of enterprise queries, and that remaining 5% may go to OpenAI or Anthropic,” one AI investor told Axios.

Kong CEO Augusto Marietti told Axios that open-weight use has surged over the past quarter since flagship models are “too expensive.”

Mozilla CTO Raffi Krikorian compared using frontier AI for everyday work to “driving a Ferrari to Whole Foods.” For many routine tasks, he said, cheaper models are fast enough, capable enough and can cost up to 50 times less. Chinese models are advancing at astonishing speed, just as their lower prices and open weights make them easier to adopt.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in May that China remained six to 12 months behind the U.S. in the most dangerous cyber capabilities. Ten weeks later, Moonshot released a model that rivals Anthropic’s Fable and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 in key benchmarks — underscoring how quickly any American lead can shrink.

«

This is a strange war being fought, neither hot nor cold. It’s a bit like the “war” in Christopher Nolan’s film Tenet, where you don’t quite know who the adversaries are, but their stuff keeps popping up all over the place and being used against you when you don’t want it.
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Why is Meta destroying its engineering organization? • The Pragmatic Engineer

Gergely Orosz with a deep dive into Facebook’s sagging engineering culture

»

Between its founding in 2004 and until last year, Meta gave engineers autonomy to choose where they work and what they work on. This was structural to how the company worked:

• Engineers were not hired for a specific team (save for at the Staff+, levels, in some cases). They were hired to the company
• During a 6-week bootcamp, new hires got familiar with Meta’s engineering culture and chose a team
• Team matching meant talking with multiple teams who had headcount, doing small work with them, and finding a match
• Internal transfers were easy, and often initiated by engineers

Team selection via bootcamp started to die down in around 2024, but any Meta engineer with at least two years’ tenure knows that previously they chose what to work on, and of course, could pick the most impactful thing to work on. And then, out of the blue, they’re assigned to a division where the impact is not clear, the work is menial, and doing it too long will surely hurt their career prospects.

“Data labeling” is more involved work, even though a bit repetitive. There are labeling tasks, where you create a website, then look at it and decide if it looks good or not, and give this feedback: this is the “typical” data labeling. But this is the less frequent type of work. But then there are more involved AI training tasks, which looks like this:

• Come up with a task that the AI should do
• Then write the tests that confirm the result
• Package all of this up into a Docker container, using Harbor framework
• Then read the code that the AI writes – often doing this based on feedback from several models, and give it feedback

This work is not easy to do — and you can see why you need good software engineers to do it! — but it gets repetitive really quickly. Most engineers who I talked to said that they found it hard to do this work motivated day-in, day-out. Then again, I did talk with an engineer inside the org who said that by varying the technologies they use, and challenging themselves, they found this work motivating and interesting! This engineer expects there to be more software engineering work coming up, after the phase of training passes. There’s a lesson here: when life gives you lemons, you can either complain about it, or you can make lemonade, like this dev has done so.

…One engineer told me that the whole situation feels like the movie, The Hunger Games, when tributes are randomly selected and then removed from their environment, to something completely different.

«

It honestly is very long, but it’s an astonishing insight into Meta’s old and current culture.
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Drinking five cups of coffee a day is safe, could reduce heart risk, AHA says • NewsNation via MSN

Zach Kaplan:

»

The latest research suggests consuming up to five cups of coffee a day is safe for most adults and may be linked to a lower risk of cardiovascular conditions.

The American Heart Association issued a scientific statement on Monday announcing that consuming up to 400 milligrams of caffeine per day, the equivalent of five eight-ounce cups of caffeinated coffee, is “generally safe for most adults,” according to recent studies.

The statement added that research suggests regularly consuming caffeinated coffee without added sugars, flavors or cream is linked to a lower risk of Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, heart failure and some irregular heart rhythms. It also noted, however, that higher caffeine intake, including levels found in energy drinks, was associated with cardiovascular harm.

The authors of the research cautioned that cardiovascular benefits observed in recent studies could be related to compounds in coffee other than caffeine and said additional “research is necessary to investigate the different health impacts of various types of caffeinated coffee and other products with caffeine.”

«

Turns out I’ve been on exactly the right diet for years, then.
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The night France saved the British grid • Dispatches Kilowatts

Ben:

»

For forty-eight minutes on the evening of Monday 23 June — a 33°C midsummer Monday — the frequency of Great Britain’s electricity grid sat below 49.8 Hz, the boundary of normal operation. At 17 seconds past eight o’clock it touched 49.657 Hz, its lowest point of the year — though, as I wrote in the immediate aftermath, it stayed clear of the statutory floor at 49.5: this was never a blackout in waiting, and this article will not pretend otherwise.

Nothing switched off. No public warning was ever issued. And almost nobody noticed that, for 48 minutes, Britain’s electricity system was running on a draining battery fleet, a gas margin of roughly eighty megawatts, and — finally — an unpriced phone call to Paris.

I’ve spent the last month reconstructing that evening minute by minute, from both sides of the Channel: Elexon settlement data down to individual generating units, NESO’s one-second frequency record, the system operator’s own trading books, and — via RTE’s APIs — the French grid’s answering records. Along the way I have also had the benefit of conversations with people who watched the evening from the other side of it — traders and market folk in several European markets, who saw the British grid’s difficulties arrive on their own screens, and who cannot be named. Their fingerprints are on this piece in ways I won’t itemise. That access shaped a deliberate choice: the mainstream telling of 23 June is relentlessly British — British data, British institutions, British questions. But half of this story happened in other countries’ control rooms and other countries’ order books, and I have tried to tell it from their side of the water too: as our neighbours and partners saw it, not merely as we did. What follows is the anatomy of a near-miss that the official record describes, accurately but incompletely, as a day when “the grid kept working.”

It did. In the same sense that a driver who runs a red light and isn’t hit keeps driving.

«

Fascinating story about one of those things that none of us would have known about a few years ago.
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LG’s monitors come with an unwanted addition for Windows: McAfee pop-up ads • The Verge

Stevie Bonifield:

»

A video from Gamers Nexus explains how, after connecting a new LG UltraGear monitor to a PC running Windows 11 for the first time, Windows Update is silently installing LG driver updates and the LG Monitor App Installer, without so much as a permission pop-up or notification. The app doesn’t appear to include special controls of its own, instead simply pointing users to LG’s other apps, as well as McAfee antivirus.

There are reports about LG’s app auto-installing as far back as 2024, but Gamers Nexus’s test follows recent user complaints on Reddit about large pop-up ads for McAfee and LG’s own apps suddenly appearing in the bottom right corner of the homescreen, which popped up for GN on 31 out of 32 bootups.

Microsoft allows developers to pair a Hardware Support App in the Windows Store that automatically installs based on the device’s metadata, but even its description here includes a warning:

»

The automatic installation feature does not provide a notification to the user when the app is installed. Some users may find this experience confusing and frustrating, and give your app a bad rating.

«

As The Verge’s Tom Warren has pointed out in the past, Dell similarly auto-installs its Alienware Command Center app on Windows when you connect an Alienware monitor, but the notification spam is an extra twist.

«

They’re all trying to eke out a tiny bit of extra profit through these means: McAfee will be paying them per install.
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AliExpress hit with $629m EU fine over sales of illegal and counterfeit products • Reuters

Foo Yun Chee:

»

Alibaba’s AliExpress was hit with a record €550m ($629m) fine from the European Union on Monday for failing to tackle sales of illegal, unsafe and counterfeit products on its platform.

The fine was the third issued by the European Commission under the EU’s landmark Digital Services Act, which requires very large online platforms to do more to counter illegal and harmful content.

The Commission charged AliExpress in June last year with ​failing to comply with a DSA requirement to assess and mitigate the risks of dissemination of illegal products.

It set an ​October 20 deadline for AliExpress to propose remedial measures, and the company could face further penalties if the regulator decides in December that they do not comply with the DSA.

“This is very dangerous for consumers, unfair for companies ​which are complying with all our rules,” EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen told reporters.

She pointed to AliExpress’s 193 million users in Europe last ​year versus Shein’s 156 million and Temu’s 130 million. Temu has also been fined under the DSA and Shein is facing an ongoing investigation.

“One in five Europeans say they shop once a month from Shein, Temu and AliExpress,” Virkkunen said.

AliExpress said it will appeal the fine as it considers it excessive.

«

Is AliExpress hoping that it will be able to get a cheaper version by shopping around?
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Trial lawyers lobby against autonomous vehicles • Marginal REVOLUTION

Alex Tabarrok:

»

Roughly 37,000–40,000 Americans die in auto accidents every year. We now have large‑scale, real‑world evidence—from Waymo and a joint analysis with Swiss Re—that driverless operations can be substantially safer than matched human driving within their current operating domains. The latest data show that over 220 million miles driven, Waymo vehicles–in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta–have 94% fewer serious injuries, 82% fewer air bag deployments, and 93% fewer pedestrian injuries. The evidence is not fully independent, but it is unusually transparent, large‑scale evidence.

So with thousands of lives annually in the balance who is against autonomous vehicles (AVs)? Trial lawyers. Remarkably the trial lawyers saw the writing on the wall very early and the have been lobbying against AVs for nearly a decade! The American Association for Justice, the trial lawyers’ lobby, has been a prominent opponent to AV legislation. (They have been joined by Democrats worried about labour and demanding that heavy trucks be excluded).

The trial lawyers earn a huge amount litigating ordinary auto accidents: annual US auto insurance payouts (liability + PIP/MedPay) are on the order of $180–220bn and trial lawyers are very eager to retain the right to sue car manufacturers for product liability. In my view, product liability isn’t useful as a safety device in this field. Instead, the solution is simple. Every car should be required to be insured, regardless of driver. Indeed, Waymo vehicles are already insured at $5m liability coverage per vehicle, far higher levels than most human drivers are covered.

The UK’s Automated and Electric Vehicles Act 2018 does basically this. A single insurer covers the vehicle whether the human or the automated system is driving; the victim is compensated directly by the insurer, no need to establish product defect; the insurer then subrogates [takes the part of the victim in the claim] against the manufacturer if the software was at fault.

«

Seems like the US just needs a version of that law, then. The chances of it getting that aren’t very high, though.
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To cool or not to cool: French politicians draw battle lines over air conditioning • Financial Times

Leila Abboud:

»

As an intense heatwave sent temperatures above 40ºC this week [in June] in cities from Bordeaux to Nantes, far-right presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen accused leftist parties and green activists of ideologically opposing air conditioning at the expense of public health.

“It is absurd to have people die because of the heat,” said the leader of the Rassemblement National party. “If I am elected president, I will put into place a massive air-conditioning plan, starting in places with the most vulnerable populations — hospitals, care homes and schools.”

Far-left leader and rival candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon hit back: “Absolutely not. Installing air conditioning everywhere would only mean increasing the damage,” he said, alluding to the risk of increased carbon emissions.

To cool or not to cool has become another front in the culture wars in France, a prism through which politicians, scientists and environmentalists fight over how to curb climate change and mitigate the immediate fallout of rising temperatures. France logged its hottest day ever on record on Tuesday, prompting the Tour Eiffel and the Louvre museum to close.

Politicians have been routinely asked what their stance is on air conditioning on TV news channels doing blanket coverage of the heatwave, while climate experts warn that its expansion globally will increase electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

In France, where 70% of electricity comes from low-carbon nuclear power, such concerns are lessened, yet wariness about air conditioning persists.

The French debate over air conditioning largely focuses on whether it is an unnecessary extravagance or environmentally sensible. But there is also an enduring belief among many that too much cooling can cause “thermal shock” if one goes too quickly from one extreme to another and that it causes people to catch colds or feel nauseous.

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The prehistory of AI slop • The New Yorker

Jill Lepore:

»

Actual robot writing dates to 1953, when the mathematician Christopher Strachey, a nephew of the writer Lytton Strachey, he of the Bloomsbury group, wrote a computer program that could generate love letters like this one:

Honey Dear
My sympathetic affection beautifully attracts your affectionate enthusiasm. You are my loving adoration: my breathless adoration. . . .
Yours wistfully
M. U. C.

Think of it as Mad Libs before there was Mad Libs. Strachey instructed M.U.C., the Manchester University Computer, to fill in the blanks in template sentences by drawing randomly from a list of words identified by their parts of speech: “My — (adj.) — (noun) — (adv.) — (verb) your — (adj.) — (noun).” He then posted the letters on campus. Among Strachey’s motivations for building a cyber Cyrano was to poke fun at credulous reporters who described computers as “thinking machines.” His program, he insisted, was “almost childishly simple.” Because Strachey was thought to have been gay, scholars have read the letters as making fun of straight romance. Or, I’d have said, any romance. Incontestably, love letters are, very often, slobbering slop.

Lest Strachey’s epistles seem antiquated compared with the stuff that comes your way these days, I might mention that, while I was writing this essay, a writer friend texted me an A.I. e-mail she’d just received that purported to be from a British novelist: “Happy weekend, Elise! Quick bulldozer boost (spam-free!) your toy-truck kid spark + 28-book marathon inspire; let’s swap suspense secrets 15 mins this week? When will work reply today? Warmly, Alice Feeney.” DEAR HONEY-DEW YOU ARE MY GREATEST WHISKERS MY UTTER MOONBEAM.

«

It’s not that slop is new, it’s just that it’s completely blanketing the internet now.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Scientists have detected a sugar in deep space that on Earth is found in raspberries. Maybe a raspberry-flavoured planet? CC-licensed photo by oatsy40 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. Sweet. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party? • Financial Times

Sam Learner:

»

Earlier this year, a group of researchers led by Miklós Koren, an economist at Central European University in Vienna, released a paper titled “Vibe Coding Kills Open Source”. They argue that in a world where the consumers of software packages are increasingly AI coding agents, the incentives that drive the collaborative model of open-source development collapse.

“We started with models that are quite standard in international trade, where firms are producing different quality products and they compete in the market . . . and we realised it’s not a bad analogy for open source,” Koren told me. “There might not be a lot of money involved, but every developer wants their package to be popular.”

I understand this well. Before working [as a programmer] in newsrooms, I developed and released a set of personal open-source projects. One in particular, which visualised the downstream paths of rivers, was a disorientating success. The project is still more widely viewed than every story I’ve worked on at the FT combined and, judged by eyeball count, might be the most successful thing I ever create. I released it just months before interviewing for my job and, while I developed the tool for free, I can draw a straight line between its success and my employment today.

But Koren found that these socio-economic reasons for developers to contribute to open-source projects degrade when human users are replaced with bots, which install the software without providing positive interactions. In the researchers’ model, this outweighs the fact that AI tools may help individual developers write code faster. Over time, the bots erode the open-source ecosystem.

“The question for the developer,” Koren said, “is if I want to be popular among humans, why should I write something that is only used by machines?”

In experiments with six coding models, the researchers found that open-source software packages that were frequently recommended by models saw large increases in download numbers — but that activity did not translate into the engagement that typically sustains maintainers. The paper concludes that, “under the traditional business model, where developer revenue depends entirely on direct user engagement, the open-source ecosystem cannot survive widespread AI adoption”.

«

More unintended consequences, perhaps some way distant, but quite probably more proximate than we think. For many, coding might become an artisanal process again, just as in the dawn of the PC age.
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Astronomers have found a sugar molecule in deep space for the first time ever • WIRED

Jorge Garay:

»

FOR THE FIRST time in history, astronomers have detected a sugar molecule floating among the gas clouds of interstellar space.

Erythrulose has four carbon atoms (C4-H7-O2), and on Earth, it occurs naturally in some fruits. Its presence 26,000 light-years away could help untangle the mystery of the origin of life on our planet.

The study was published this week in Nature Astronomy. The team, led by Izaskun Jiménez Serra, analyzed data captured by radio telescopes in Spain to identify the molecule’s signature in the microwave frequencies it produces as it rotates.

Sugar molecules are essential for life. They fuel cells and are part of RNA and DNA. Yet scientists still don’t know how they accumulated in large enough quantities on the early Earth. One possibility is that some of the molecules did not originate on the planet but instead reached Earth via meteorites.

For the new study, the researchers focused on molecular cloud G+0.693−0.027, a location they didn’t choose at random. G+0.693−0.027 is among the regions richest in molecules in the entire Milky Way. It is located near the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy, and collisions with another cloud appear to have turned the region into a veritable chemical factory. Researchers had already detected alcohols, aldehydes, urea, ethanolamine, hydroxylamine, and dozens of complex organic molecules. Now, sugar is in the mix.

The idea that some sugars might have come from space gained traction in December 2025, when scientists confirmed that the asteroid Bennu contained ribose and other monosaccharides. Ribose is a fundamental sugar in RNA. The new study reveals another type of space sugar, this one from the ketose family. On Earth, it’s found in tanning lotions and raspberries.

«

To some extent moving the origin question to “meteorites” and “outer space” only pushes the question of “how?” away by one step, but at the same time shows that we need not be unique. Perhaps space is raspberry-flavoured? That would be nice.
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Markets experience new DeepSeek shock after MoonShot AI releases Kimi K3 • Fortune

Nicholas Gordon:

»

On Thursday, Moonshot AI, a Beijing-based AI startup, unveiled the latest version of its Kimi large language model, which promises performance close to Anthropic’s Fable 5—perhaps the most powerful publicly available model today—at a fraction of the cost.

Kimi K3, the largest open-weight model ever released, performed “competitively” with Fable 5, and “substantially outperformed” Anthropic’s Opus 4.8, and OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 Sol, according to Moonshot. The company’s officially-released benchmarks consistently rank K3 among the top three AI models; one independent benchmark from Arena.AI even put K3 as the best model currently available, ahead of Anthropic.

Many observers, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, didn’t expect a Chinese AI lab to release a model that could approach the US’s best offerings for another six months. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, for example, suggested it might happen by the first quarter of next year. K3’s launch rapidly shrank that timeline and underscores just how quickly Chinese AI developers are closing the performance gap with their US rivals. 

“The AI ecosystem in China is probably much better than people thought,” says Paul Triolo, a partner at DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group.

Moonshot AI has priced K3 at $15 per million output tokens, the bits of information processed and generated by a large language model. That’s cheaper than Fable 5, which costs $50 for the same level of output.

Moonshot’s launch seemed to rattle investors who interpret the new model as undermining the conventional wisdom that US firms can maintain their extended lead by simply outspending Chinese competitors on computing power.

A semiconductor selloff was already underway, but the K3 debut seemed to make things worse. Leading chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company fell by 7% on Friday, despite reporting a 77% jump in quarterly operating profit. SoftBank—often seen as a proxy for OpenAI—fell by 9.0%. Z.ai, a Chinese AI startup that has released a competing model to Moonshot’s Kimi, plunged by almost 30% in Hong Kong trading.

«

And that’s before you get into the open source models. There doesn’t seem to be any moat – protective unique selling point – to LLMs; anyone can do it, and lots of people are doing, and once you get good-enough open source models you can deploy on a phone, well, haven’t we seen this movie before?
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AI ‘amplification spiral’ may be causing delusions among users, study suggests • Decrypt

Jason Nelson:

»

Researchers have proposed a new framework to explain reports of AI psychosis, arguing that certain chatbot behaviors may reinforce delusions in vulnerable users.

Published in Nature, the study out of King’s College London and Germany’s Protestant University of Applied Sciences proposes an “amplification spiral” framework that links common chatbot behaviors to the reinforcement of user delusions.

“AI-associated delusions represent an emerging phenomenon requiring mechanistic understanding,” the researchers wrote. “This framework aims to guide systematic inquiry into how human cognitive vulnerabilities interact with AI design features in psychopathology development.”

The study focused on three specific behaviors, including linguistic alignment, in which AI mirrors a user’s language and communication style; hyperpersonalized generation, where responses are tailored to an individual’s history, emotions, and beliefs; and sycophancy, a tendency to validate or agree with users rather than challenge them.

The authors argue that these traits can combine into a feedback loop in which chatbots not only reflect a user’s thinking but help elaborate and reinforce it over time.

“The tendency of AI chatbots to agree with user opinions has been likened to social media echo chambers and, in its most extreme form, to an ‘echo chamber of one,’ where the positive corrective influence of real-life social interactions is absent,” the paper said.

The researchers noted that technology has long featured in delusions, from the radio and television, to satellites and the internet. Researchers argue, however, that AI represents a shift because chatbots can engage users in prolonged, personalized conversations.

The review arrives as psychologists and AI researchers examine the effects of chatbots on vulnerable users. A recent survey by the American Psychological Association found that 15% of psychologists reported patients developing distorted thinking or delusions related to chatbot use. At the same time, more than a third said they had observed patients becoming dependent on AI companions. The findings followed a separate study from researchers at the City University of New York and King’s College London showing that several leading AI models could reinforce delusions, paranoia, and suicidal thoughts.

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Meta trying to destroy whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams, US senator says • The Guardian

Michael Savage:

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A US senator has accused Meta of using lawfare in “efforts to destroy” a whistleblower who made allegations about the social media company’s dealings with China and its treatment of teenagers.

In a letter to its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, the Republican senator Josh Hawley demanded to know what measures Meta had taken to monitor Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook’s former global head of public policy, and her family.

He also accused the firm of trying to make “truthful speech so perilous that no whistleblower like Ms Wynn-Williams can ever afford it”.

Wynn-Williams made her allegations in a memoir, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism but under an interim arbitration ruling secured by Meta she is unable to speak about the book, which contains claims about it working with the Chinese government on censorship tools, and its platforms’ negative impacts on teenagers.

She sat in silence on stage at the Hay literary festival in Wales earlier this year after taking legal advice, and is suing Meta over the restrictions it secured over her.

Meta strongly disputes Wynn-Williams’s book, saying it contains several false claims, and describes her legal case as a ploy to shift more copies.

Hawley, whose senate judiciary subcommittee on crime and counter-terrorism took evidence from Wynn-Williams last year, said: “Meta’s efforts to destroy Ms Wynn-Williams with lawfare are a matter of grave public concern.”

…Hawley demanded documents relating to any Meta attempts to “monitor, track, record, or catalog Ms Wynn-Williams’ or her family members’ public statements, interviews, social media activity, or public or private travel”.

«

The documents Hawley demands are basically just part of an effort by him to make Meta look bad. Not a high bar. Though you’d think the Democrats might want to get in on this act too. Still, has to be said that Meta’s efforts have been an absolute boon to the book’s sales. That saying that no publicity is bad publicity? They maybe thought it meant that enforcing no publicity would be bad publicity for the book. Mistake!
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Why Tokyo’s new shorts policy is sparking debate in Japan • The New York Times

Javier Hernandez and Hisako Ueno:

»

For more than three decades, Noboru Watanabe wore the uniform of the Japanese salaryman: trousers, a starched shirt, a jacket and a necktie.

But last week Mr. Watanabe, 53, an environmental official in Tokyo, ditched the outfit for the unimaginable: a T-shirt and a pair of khaki shorts. He was taking advantage of a new policy by the Tokyo government to allow its workers to wear shorts in the office, after successive summers of record-breaking heat.

“Everyone says I look younger,” Mr. Watanabe said near his desk on a recent afternoon. “I seem more approachable. I feel I am helping relax the whole office.”

The policy is the latest attempt by Japanese officials to persuade the country’s millions of office workers to dress down in the summer to make office life more comfortable, reduce the use of air-conditioning and save energy. Under the “Cool Biz” initiative, the government encourages workers to forgo heavy suits in favor of polo shirts, linen tops and sneakers in hot weather.

But shorts, newly allowed this summer, are a bridge too far for some. The policy has prompted debate in Japan — and inspired delicate conversations at the office about etiquette and how to deal with the sight of a colleague’s hairy legs. The Japanese news media has even coined a new term — sune-hara, or “leg-hair harassment” — to describe the sense of grievance some women feel when they are forced to observe their male co-workers’ legs.

Ruai Sajiki, 23, an employee at the Tokyo government offices, acknowledged that seeing bare legs in a professional setting could be jarring for women. But she offered her blessing when Mr. Watanabe, her supervisor, asked if she minded if he wore shorts in the office.

“I’ve seen my own father’s legs, so I’m personally comfortable with it,” she said. “It can’t be helped that there are many opinions, and some women who feel resistance.”

Some commentators argue that the policy, while officially applying to both men and women, is unfair. While men are rarely judged for what they wear to work, women still face pressure to cover their legs with pantyhose, which are still common in Japan, or long skirts.

«

Japan remains incredibly patriarchal. Also, shrinking in number. Not sure if the two are linked, but why risk it?
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LinkedIn and X are flooded with AI spam, browsing data suggests • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

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A shocking amount of the content that users encounter on popular social media websites is likely AI generated, according to data from a company that detects AI writing. As much as 41% of longform written content seen by users on LinkedIn is likely to be fully AI-generated and roughly a third of longer posts on X are AI-generated; roughly one-in-ten longer Reddit and Substack posts are AI, according to the data. 

The data was collected using a Chrome extension from Pangram, a company that detects AI-generated writing. Pangram’s Chrome extension scans writing that users encounter while browsing and determines if any given post is likely AI-generated or likely human written. Because Pangram works passively in the background while a user is browsing the internet, it only scans posts that its users actually see. This helps answer the question of whether AI slop is actually poisoning the internet that humans actually use, versus polluting the internet more broadly. The answer is unequivocal: AI slop writing is not just sequestered off on unpopular automated SEO farms or spam sites that no one reads; humans are regularly wading through AI dreck on hugely popular sites. 

“This isn’t something that had really been studied before—how much AI content people are actually seeing,” Max Spero, the CEO of Pangram, told me in a phone interview. “AI content is a tax on readers’ time.” 

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Is it a tax if you ignore it and scroll straight past? Asking for a friend. Or, in the case of LinkedIn, just never go there.
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The collapse at Netflix signals the end of audience capture • The Honest Broker (*not Roger Pielke)

Ted Gioia:

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Netflix got into this mess by pursuing a simple strategy: (1) Reduce the number of new scripted series (which peaked in 2022), but (2) Raise subscription prices.

That is the “audience capture” strategy mentioned above. The idea is that the audience got captured years ago with cheap subscription prices, and now the platform can squeeze them mercilessly—offering less and charging more. Netflix has been pursuing this agenda for several years now.

Ah, but Netflix isn’t the only company building its future on audience capture. It’s getting used at almost every streaming platform. And even companies outside of the media space are practicing variants of it. You see it at Google, Meta, X, Apple, etc.

It’s shocking how many companies have learned this technique. The entire printer and toner business is now built on audience capture. The same is true of the software industry—don’t even get me started on my Microsoft Office subscription fiasco. And, of course, all those customer loyalty programs (variants on the frequent flyer gimmicks that started this craze years ago) are examples of the same stale strategy.

Even the AI world is turning into an audience capture business—both for itself and its customers. This is one of the key reasons for my frequent criticisms of AI slop. It feeds into step one of the strategy outlined above. The companies use AI to reduce the cost of content, thus boosting margins while reducing their dependence on human creators.

Audience capture has always existed, but never to this extent. When I consulted at BCG we called it a milking strategy, where you raised prices and reduced capital investment in a business—which was now your cash cow. You squeeze all the money you can from it, for as long as you can.

But back then we realized that milking only worked in the short term. Eventually you killed the cow. And the risk is the same today with “audience capture”—which is just a new name for that poor old bovine.

Sooner or later, the audience refuses to be held captive. And that’s happening now at Netflix—hence the stock sell-off.

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The stock sell-off might precede a bigger abandonment by subscribers who just don’t see the point because Netflix keeps throwing things against a non-stick wall. Nothing is allowed to grow. Tech companies can’t do content.
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‘We noticed a login from a new device’: the message from fraudsters targeting your X account • The Guardian

Samuel Gibbs:

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You have had an X account for years, since it was known as Twitter. When an email arrives about a new login from a location nowhere near where you live, alarm bells begin to ring.

“We noticed a login to your account from a new device. Was this you?” the email asks.

The location is Arizona, but you live in London. The device is “Firefox Desktop on Mac”.

“If this wasn’t you,” the email continues, “complete these steps now to protect your account.”

The steps include clicking a link to change your password, which will end up with you “logged out of all your active X sessions except the one you’re using at this time” and to click another link to review the apps that have access to your account and revoke any that are unfamiliar.

The steps are legitimate advice from X, but the links to reset your password, or to review app access are not. The email is fake and attempting to trick you into giving scammers your password, or direct access to your X account.

“Scammers want your X username and password, or to trick you into approving a malicious link that gives them access to your account without needing your password,” says Jake Moore, a global cybersecurity adviser at ESET.

Once the criminals have access to your account they will more than likely use it to attempt to commit further fraud including crypto scams, phishing attacks and misinformation campaigns.

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There’s a lot of scamming going on. The misdirection emails are quite common; they often lead to direct messages to mutual followers asking them to vote for them in a podcast competition, or something similar. The scams mutate so quickly that once you’ve picked up on one, the next will be along imminently.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If you were thinking of jobs to net money on betting markets, White House teleprompter operator might not be top of the list. But maybe it should be. CC-licensed photo by Rob Pegoraro on Flickr.

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

Generative AI is an engineering disaster • The Atlantic

Alex Reisner:

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The problem with generative AI, in the industry’s own jargon, is that it does not scale. The cost of growing from, say, a thousand users to a million is a key factor that venture capitalists examine when they evaluate start-ups. They want to see that the cost of adding each new user decreases over time, so that the company can support millions of users and make increasing profits. This is achieved partly through the careful engineering of computer systems that can efficiently handle more users who want to post photos, hail Ubers, or stream music.

With generative AI, the work of building efficient, scalable systems has not been done. And the problem is exacerbated by the ever-larger generative-AI models, which have grown from 175 billion parameters in 2020 to more than 1 trillion today, according to independent estimates (the actual sizes of the models powering products such as Claude and ChatGPT are secret). The large in large language model should not be a selling point. But the industry’s observation that bigger models tend to outperform smaller ones has given rise to a totemic belief in “scaling laws” that suggest any problem can be solved by simply making models bigger. “Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote on his blog in September.

Yet the returns are diminishing. The bigger an AI model is, the less it improves with each added parameter, and so it must be made bigger at a faster rate just to sustain steady progress. I asked a few AI researchers whether they could name any other real-world software that scales so poorly. None of them could think of any. Even outside the world of software, it’s hard to find a comparable example, given that economy of scale is the principle that has made light bulbs, cars, and clothing so affordable. By economic and engineering measures, generative AI might be the worst technology ever deployed.

But with the massive investment behind the current bloated approach, there may not be much will to change. Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and former chief scientist at OpenAI, said in a November interview that companies take the brute-force approach “because it gives you a very low-risk way of investing your resources.” It’s harder, he argued, to invest in research that would reengineer a product currently accruing trillion-dollar valuations. Those who suspect we are in an AI-driven bubble economy have pointed out that the profitability of these companies remains an open question, largely because of the high cost and inefficiency of the technology.

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The point that generative AI doesn’t scale – even while they try to build it at bigger and bigger scale – is an overlooked one, and critical to the whole problem here. It just needs more, and more of everything, and that doesn’t leave any room for anything else. (Gift link.)
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Someone used AI to write an unauthorized biography of me. I don’t recommend reading it • The New York Times

Kashmir Hill:

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I went to Amazon to investigate. There it was. A biography of Kashmir Hill — title: “The Biography of Kashmir Hill” — had been released nearly a year earlier, in August 2025. My life story had a mottled brown cover and a publisher I’d never heard of before. It had no reviews until I wrote one, asking, as the subject of this work, if I could please speak to the author. The hardcover cost $26.99, which seemed a bit steep, but my editor splurged on a copy and I was forced to read it.

My biography is 90 pages long and should be shorter. It combines facts about me that are widely available on the internet, such as where I grew up, with generic insights that could be true of anyone, like a horoscope spread over dozens of pages. “You cannot understand Kashmir Hill without understanding her contradictions,” my biographer wrote, along with an excruciatingly long description of my elaborate coffee-making ritual. (Fact check: My husband does it.)

The book is flattering, fabricated and absolutely packed with em dashes. It bears all the signs of AI slop. I clicked on the author, one John Crane Miller. His bio page described him as a “seasoned biographer and cultural analyst,” and his portrait was a widely used stock photo of a white man in a suit speaking at a conference.

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She found an AI-assisted author, though not the right one:

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[Bill] Johns, who has long curly white hair and the bronzed skin of someone who spends a considerable amount of time outside, retired in 2024 from his work as a cybersecurity consultant. Divorced and living alone with two Shih Tzus, he suddenly had a lot of time on his hands. He was curious about A.I. and decided to experiment with it.

“Almost everyone I know says they want to write a book,” he said. “It’s a very romantic concept to sit down and toil, page after page and paragraph after paragraph, but it doesn’t make economic sense.”

It is hard to disagree with that, though I can’t say I agree with Mr. Johns’s solution: Have an A.I. chatbot do it instead. He spent a couple of weeks and $20 on ChatGPT to help him write about the history of hacking and published his first book, a whopping 651-pager, in March 2025.

Of course, that was possible only because OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, had ingested the work of those romantic toilers — Wikipedia editors, Reddit commenters, book authors and reporters like me. (I must mention here that The Times has an ongoing copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, though the AI firm says it is “without merit.”)

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He gets a few hundred dollars a month – what he characterises as “bar money”. A new tragedy of the commons.
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The phantom author • Spratz’s Substack

“An armed ramble”:

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So much of our experience and indeed our expectations of reading are comfortably anchored in the assumption that the author is another human being just like ourselves. What changes when this is no longer true?

I often can’t tell whether a piece of text was written by an AI or not, and strangely enough, that doesn’t seem to have any impact on my response. I have certainly read texts that make me laugh and others that moved me deeply, only to discover subsequently that they were AI generated. Even with that subsequent knowledge, re-reading them has still caused me to laugh or to be moved. Here’s a  recent AI text that made me laugh: “‘I have made a grave mistake,’ said the king, staring at the hole in the garden where he had buried his dignity. ‘Unfortunately, it seems to have been a very spacious grave.’”

I was quite surprised when I first realised this. I had always thought that my response would be dictated by the authorship of the text and yet it wasn’t.

George Poulet thought that when we were reading, we were actually inhabiting the author’s consciousness. My experiences significantly undermine that claim. Perhaps our responses are co-created by the text and the reader; the text acts as  a catalyst for the reader. Maybe there are as many responses as there are readers? This seems disturbingly isolating; forcing us to accept that our responses may be almost solipsistic. An isolating and emotionally bleak conclusion. Yet, there are shared responses. What does that mean?

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This is a deep question. On Substack, people are debating whether this Guardian article – which is a potted version of a book – is AI-written. I had read it before seeing those claims, and thought it was a little overwritten, but interesting. The idea it might be AI changes how one thinks about the real-world events described: they’d seemed outlandish anyway, but we know a chatbot can’t really discern normal from abnormal behaviour, so this heightens our suspicion.
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Moroccan intelligence insider reveals widespread use of Pegasus hacking software • The Guardian

Sam Jones, José Bautista and Hicham Mansouri:

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A former member of Morocco’s domestic intelligence service has helped to provide an unprecedented insight into how the north African state used hacking software – including Pegasus spyware – to target journalists, human rights defenders, French politicians and Spanish cabinet ministers and police officers.

Pegasus, which is manufactured by the Israel-based NSO Group, allows its operator to access everything on a target’s mobile phone, including emails, text messages and photographs. It can also activate the phone’s recorder and camera, turning it into a listening device.

Although NSO Group says Pegasus is sold only to governments to help them track criminals and terrorists, the spyware is alleged to have been used by several countries to target dissidents, journalists, diplomats and politicians.

Morocco has long denied using Pegasus to target critics at home or abroad, and has claimed that reporters who have investigated NSO Group were “incapable of proving [the country had] any relationship” with the company.

However, evidence from a whistleblower who worked for Morocco’s Direction Générale de la Surveillance du Territoire (DGST) for almost a decade suggests the country’s internal security services began using Pegasus in 2017 and went on to deploy it against domestic and foreign targets over the course of four years.

Testimony from the source, known by the pseudonym of Safir, forms the basis of a multiyear investigation by the Moroccan journalist Hicham Mansouri, which has led to a collaborative investigation between several media groups, with technical support from Amnesty International’s Security Lab.

The consortium, which was coordinated by Forbidden Stories and comprises 14 media organisations – including Le Monde, Haaretz, El Confidencial, Die Zeit and the Guardian – has also analysed material detailing Morocco’s surveillance practices, from leaked emails to targeting records relating to Pegasus and other spyware, and from victims’ testimony to internal training material.

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This is the problem with any sort of spyware like this. It won’t be used in the way demanded by the creator. It’ll be used any damn way someone with a licence wants to use it.
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These are the worst ChatGPT flyers you’ve sent us • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

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Earlier this week, I somewhat stupidly asked our readers to send me examples of “ChatGPT flyers,” the AI-generated posters and advertisements that have taken over social media, bulletin boards, restaurant menus, store signage, business cards, and billboards around the world. I say stupidly, because I was flooded with so many terrible, brain-numbing signs for anything you could possibly imagine. I guess I got what I asked for. (Thank you, I love it).

404 Media readers were particularly passionate about their hatred for AI-designed signs. I got some of the best email responses to any story I’ve done here. Before I get into the AI flyer hall of shame, here’s some of what I heard:

“They look like absolute DOG SHIT. Like my cat’s litter box! I freaking HATE THEM. I have been posting to my Instagram begging people and businesses to stop using them. No one listens LOL. Thanks for this article. I am glad I’m not screaming into the void by myself.”

“thank you for writing this story. I’ve evangelically shared it with everyone I know, for whatever that’s worth. I had never seen a local group churn out an AI-generated flyer before this year, but in the last several months it’s gotten out of control. I’m sure you’re being inundated with lousy AI flyers. Sorry for adding to the deluge, but this is something that’s been bothering me for months.”

“This is a great article but also fuck you because you were absolutely right about ‘Once you notice a ChatGPT flyer, you will see them everywhere if you keep your eyes open.'”

Without further ado, here are some of the worst flyers we got. This represents just a small sampling of the overall number you sent me. In some cases I’ve provided more context from the person who sent it to me, and I’ve biased for ones that appeared in real life (i.e., were printed out) or that are particularly weird. Enjoy!

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Some of these are awful, some you.. would just go past thinking they’re incredibly overdone but don’t have any obvious spelling mistakes, unlike some of them which cannot have been proofread.
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Peter Thiel’s AI tribunal pivots to scoreboard model • Hollywood Reporter

Gary Baum:

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Objection has overruled itself. This spring, Peter Thiel’s high-profile new startup had sought to disrupt journalism by establishing a tribunal in which reporters would be dragooned into AI-powered arbitrations paid for by the unhappy subjects of their articles. Now, the company has been renamed The Primary, pivoting to a system in which journalists are ranked on a digital scoreboard by the expertise of a large language model.

Objection’s CEO is Aron D’Souza, the entrepreneur-provocateur behind Enhanced Games, known as the “steroid Olympics,” who first gained fame as the legal mastermind behind Thiel’s bid to secretly finance Hulk Hogan’s successful invasion of privacy suit against the media outlet Gawker, which the right-wing tech billionaire despised.

Objection’s first tribunal, in April, targeted The Hollywood Reporter for its 2021 coverage about an heir to the Sackler family, whose Purdue Pharma fortune was built off OxyContin. In an interview, D’Souza told THR that “many journalists are more powerful than billionaires,” explaining, “I can’t tell you how many billionaires and CEOs have called me in absolute tears about their lives being destroyed by one article.”

D’Souza and Objection’s CTO Kyle Grant-Talbot — who met at Oxford, where they first founded a laundry service in 2018  — acknowledged they’d found it difficult to build proprietary software that wouldn’t be accused of outputting slop justice. “The AI-based reasoning models are easy in comparison to adjudication,” D’Souza said. (Objection pivoted before issuing a verdict in THR‘s tribunal.)

D’Souza and Grant-Talbot since arrived at a solution for their quandary by determining, as Objection’s home page now reads, that “verdicts punish failure. They don’t fix the incentive. They do not solve the root cause.”

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So fact-checking and objectivity is a lot harder than billionaires thought? What an utter shock. “Journalists are more powerful than billionaires”. Really. Long time since a journalist bought a social media company or a newspaper. (Though, OK, The Onion was bought by a company led by a former NYT journalist.)
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White House teleprompter operator made more than $100K betting on Trump’s speeches, sources say • ABC News

Katherine Faulders, Aaron Katersky, Peter Charalambous, and Nicholas Kerr:

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President Donald Trump’s longtime teleprompter operator is believed to have made tens of thousands of dollars by placing bets on more than a dozen of Trump’s speeches on the prediction market Kalshi, federal investigators with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission found, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

Gabriel Perez, a technical assistant to the president who has been operating Trump’s teleprompter since 2016, is in talks with federal regulators to settle allegations he used his inside knowledge of the president’s speeches to win more than $100,000, the sources said.

According to the sources, Kalshi alerted its regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), to the suspicious activity on its “Mentions” market, where users can bet on whether specific words, phrases or topics are uttered during a public speech. 

“Our surveillance team promptly flagged and referred these trades to the CFTC, and we are cooperating and assisting regulators,” Kalshi’s head of enforcement, Bobby DeNault, said in a statement provided to ABC News.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Thursday afternoon, following ABC News’ report, that Perez has been put on unpaid administrative leave. Leavitt said she spoke with President Trump about it, and he thought it was a “disgrace” and made the decision himself to put Perez on unpaid leave. 

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A part-hilarious element of this is that sometimes he was found to back out of bets he had made when Trump skipped over things that were in the teleprompter script. The best part is this, though:

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“The White House has strict ethics guidelines that we expect all staffers and officials to follow,” said White House spokesperson Davis Ingle when contacted by ABC News.

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Those guidelines being: don’t do it for small amounts. Seven figures minimum, or what’s the point?
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When eyeing a predator, horses keep a poker face as their hearts race • EurekAlert!

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Horses know a predator when they see one – even if it’s only on a video screen they’re watching in a stall, with no sounds, smells or previous experience providing context to what they’re viewing, a new study suggests.

And though sensors indicated the horses’ heart rates increased when they were looking at wolves on the screen, they otherwise kept a poker face. They didn’t bob their heads or swish their tails, and their gaze wasn’t fixed in a way that would indicate their brain was processing a threat, results showed.

“Rather than just spooking, horses show remarkable cognitive restraint when evaluating a potential threat,” said lead author Zeynep Benderlioglu, a senior lecturer in evolution, ecology and organismal biology at The Ohio State University. “And not all fear or stress will result in overt behavior. They’re not in fight-or-flight mode, but they’re assessing, and they’re doing it in a remarkably fast way. But their hearts are racing at the same time.”

The findings are relevant to horse and human welfare, Benderlioglu said: riders and handlers may not be able to tell when a horse is agitated.

“This visual recognition means horses may be experiencing an internal state of agitation while remaining physically still,” she said. “Understanding this disconnect is vital for ensuring both rider safety and the welfare of a horse that is processing a threat, especially if that threat is a canid – any dog.”

The research was published on July 15, 2026 in the journal PLOS One.

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Business Insider’s big bet against aggregation • Nieman Journalism Lab

Andrew Deck:

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It’s a Tuesday morning news meeting at Business Insider’s headquarters in New York’s Financial District. More than a dozen editors have gathered in the conference room, while several more chime in remotely on Zoom.

[BI editor-in-chief Jamie] Heller is shouting out senior correspondent Hugh Langley, who recently ran a feature on Google employees protesting the Pentagon’s use of the company’s AI products. It was a follow-up to his exclusive on leaked internal messages showing that Google is “leaning more” into national security contracts.

“He had a scoop, he had a follow-on spot, he had a discourse piece, and then another spot. It’s an example of how the work should flow,” said Heller, who joined Business Insider in September 2024 after more than 20 years at The Wall Street Journal.

Today, editors are discussing how best to frame their coverage of AI-related layoffs. Coinbase, the crypto exchange, has just cut several hundred employees in its attempt to become “AI-native.” Editors in London have been on the news for hours, and are handing off coverage to their New York counterparts. Heller is pushing for an exclusive.

“Have we called them for an interview?” she asks.

Business Insider says that since Heller joined the organization, the amount of “original content” it publishes has more than doubled. In 2024, the company says, about 40% of its content was scoops, exclusives, and other original stories. Today, that content makes up more than 80% of its output, as the publication has made a concerted effort to move away from news aggregation and break its own news. Last year, the newsroom landed 788 scoops, the most it’s ever recorded annually, former CEO Barbara Peng wrote in a recent memo.

Business Insider is trying to overhaul its editorial strategy as the digital news industry reckons with major traffic declines. Google’s AI Overviews and chatbot products like ChatGPT are killing traditional search traffic. Social platforms like Facebook and X have deprioritized news links.

In May 2025, Business Insider laid off 21% of its staff. “We must be structured to endure extreme traffic drops outside our control,” Peng wrote in a memo to staff that month. “We’re reducing our overall company to a size where we can absorb that volatility.”

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Original news? At a news outlet? What a radical concept. Everything old is new again.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified