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.
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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:
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…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.
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 