The level of the river Danube has fallen so low that the wrecks of German ships from WW2 are becoming visible again – and mammoth bones. CC-licensed photo by Witold Waschut 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.

The Overspill will be on a break for two weeks; back 24 August.

A selection of 11 links for you. Wrecked. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Should you use AI for a task? Here’s a simple way to decide • The Guardian

Bruce Schneier:

»

The best way I’ve found to explain the dilemma comes from the AI researcher Daniel Meissler: it’s the difference between work and the gym.

At work, if your job is to move a bunch of heavy things from one side of the room to another, you should use whatever assistive tech you have on hand: a wagon, a forklift … even an AI-powered robot. But at the gym, it makes no sense for that robot to lift weights for you. The point of weightlifting isn’t to move heavy things across the room; it’s to actually lift those heavy things.

The same analysis holds for any task an AI can do for you. If it’s work – if the task has to be done and no one cares how – then it’s fine to use AI assistance. But if the task is more like the gym, and how the task is done is at least as important, then it probably doesn’t make sense to use AI.

This, of course, assumes that the AI is actually up for the task and that it’s trustworthy: that it can do the job well, that its mistakes are minimal and correctable, that it’s been secured from cyber-attacks that would influence its results. Those are all important, and shouldn’t be minimized. There’s no point giving an AI something that it can’t do reliably. But once you’re confident that the AI can perform the task, the work v gym distinction helps you decide if it should.

The writing assignments I give my students are gym tasks, not work tasks. I ask them to write policy memos not because the world needs more policy memos. I assign them because the very act of writing, which includes thinking and outlining and drafting and editing, making and criticizing and revising arguments, will help develop the critical thinking skills they will need in their future careers. And without this constant mental exercise, those skills will atrophy. Employers are already noticing.

Reading the assignments they turn in, I can see those skills either flourishing or atrophying in my students.

«

(Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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It’s clear we won’t regulate AI for safety’s sake • Financial Times

Simon Kuper:

»

Each time a technology changes the world, it takes ages for the world to spot the downsides, and longer before cautious regulation is attempted. Think of CO₂ emissions. In 1856, the American scientist Eunice Newton Foote demonstrated that they could warm the planet, and here we are today. Similarly, since British scientists showed in the 1950s that cigarettes cause cancer, smoking has legally killed hundreds of millions of people. Today, two decades after social media and smartphones rewired our brains, we’re starting to try to regulate the tech, at least for children. The whole thing is a libertarian’s dream.

Whenever regulation is attempted, companies fight it. Shareholders don’t always defeat democracy, but that’s the way to bet on it. The country where most AI is being developed hasn’t passed a federal law regulating the technology. Instead, Donald Trump ordered government agencies to eliminate policies that could “hinder American AI dominance”. Aside from the EU’s AI Act, hardly any jurisdiction has even attempted comprehensive regulation. As usual, governments barely affect the trends that most affect our lives.

Voters aren’t pushing politicians to take on AI. Most people engage with the technology only as consumers. They struggle to think about its societal implications. They’re more comfortable arguing about identity, or the perceived personalities of politicians, though they often misjudge those too. Most media also neglect the topic. The day Anthropic launched Mythos, a model that seems able to hack almost any operating system, the journalist Shakeel Hashim noted: “The release does not appear near the top of the homepage on any major news site.”

No wonder, because AI is even harder to understand than previous innovations. It’s a closed-source technology, advancing at unprecedented speed, and developed by a tiny group of experts who themselves don’t fully understand it. Anthropic’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, writes: “People outside the field are often surprised and alarmed to learn that we do not understand how our own AI creations work . . . this lack of understanding is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology.”

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This article appeared in April, but its message is undimmed by the few months that have passed; if anything, it’s become even more true. The models are getting more powerful, while their supposed monitors are scratching their heads and saying “gee whiz! Didn’t expect that!”
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Artificial Intelligence used to design brand new viruses • BBC News

James Gallagher:

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Artificial Intelligence has been used to design brand new viruses that are fully functional and can replicate in the laboratory, say US researchers.

It is the first time whole genomes have been successfully designed by AI.

The resulting 16 novel viruses were created to infect bacteria and pose no threat to people.

The breakthrough has been labelled a “very significant turning point” in science that could unlock a new era for treating disease. But experts have also warned AI-designed viruses raise “urgent” safety and security concerns.

AI tools are rapidly advancing and have already been used to design new antibiotics.

But that is relatively simple compared with designing a new viable virus from scratch.

“This is a next step in the complexity that’s designable by generative AI, this is the first time generative AI has been used to design a complete genome, it’s something that can replicate and have other functions inside cells… this was new territory for us,” Brian Hie, assistant professor at Stanford University, told the BBC.

The technology works similarly to large language models, like ChatGPT, which predict sequences of text. In this instance the AI models, known as Evo1 and Evo2, predict the language of life rather than words.

The AI models were trained on genetic codes from viruses, bacteria, plants and people. They were then refined to produce a type of virus, known as a bacteriophage, which infect only specific species of bacteria.

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Yeah, even so, I think we’re OK for viruses, thanks very much.
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GPS and the lost art of getting lost • The New Yorker

Shayla Love:

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Around two years ago, Shachar Maidenbaum, a neuroscientist who studies spatial navigation at Ben-Gurion University, in Israel, drove north with his children to visit a friend. He was following his location on GPS, using the Waze app for directions, when an automated voice suddenly told him to turn left and drive roughly two hundred miles south. “I thought, What? I’m driving north. What’s going on?,” he told me. “Then I realized: my phone thinks I’m in Beirut.” Israel often jams GPS signals as a military strategy, and in recent years it has employed “spoofing,” a technique that sends fake location data to GPS-enabled devices. Some pilots and ship captains in the region have had to disable automated safety systems as a result.

Maidenbaum, who frequently asks research participants to find their way in virtual-reality experiments, was now facing his own navigational challenge. His friend had told him about a move from one address, near some train tracks, to a new one, so he decided to drive to the center of the correct town and find the tracks. After following them to his friend’s old street, he tried navigating based on his friend’s description of the move. He eventually made it to his destination, but the experience heightened his awareness of our new relationship to physical places. “For the first time, we have a society which is heavily reliant on GPS,” Maidenbaum told me. “What happens when it goes away?”

…In 2008, a study found that people who walked a route with GPS assistance were less able to draw the path they had taken, or to guess what direction they were facing, than those who walked the same route without GPS. In 2020, researchers at McGill University asked subjects to navigate two virtual mazes—one that was easily traversed with cognitive-mapping strategies and one that could be better navigated using stimulus response. The more that people used GPS, the worse their spatial memory seemed to be, and the worse they did on the cognitive-mapping maze. The participants who relied more on GPS also noticed fewer landmarks dotted around the maze, such as pyramids and trees, than those who used it less.

Maidenbaum, the neuroscientist, came to see Israel’s GPS-spoofing tactics as a natural experiment in how people navigate. Many people who were accustomed to GPS could no longer rely on it. He wound up surveying nearly 600 people in affected areas. (He has published his study as a preprint, while it is undergoing peer review.) Some of them complained about grocery deliveries that were directed out of the country, or of matching with users of dating apps across borders. About 80% of respondents still reached their destinations when GPS was disrupted. The rest, however, reported that they ultimately went home. “We’re seeing this group of twenty to twenty-five% who are taking this really hard,” he said.

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It’s amazing to think that there are couples who have never had a bitter argument with their spouse over the interpretation of the map and which exit the driver should have taken. A story that I always wanted to research but didn’t get round to was what happened to the companies selling A-Z motorway maps and city maps.
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Police warn of suspected TikTok farm arson trend • Farmers Weekly

Philip Case:

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Police have warned farmers to be on high alert after a suspected TikTok challenge encouraging people to “set fire to as much stuff as possible” emerged alongside a series of suspected deliberate attacks on hay and straw stacks across northern England.

West Mercia Police has urged farming organisations to alert members to the potential threat, following what it described as a recent spate of overnight arson attacks targeting haystacks.

In a message circulated to the farming community, the force said: “Following a recent spate of overnight arson attacks on hay stacks in the north of England there appears to be a TikTok challenge to ‘set fire to as much stuff as possible’.

“I know the farming community will be aware of the dangers of the dry weather but if it is possible to send out a message to all your members to be extra vigilant.”

The warning comes as Humberside Police investigates six suspected deliberate bale fires reported overnight on Thursday 30 July across North Lincolnshire.

Officers from the force’s Rural Task Force were called to fires at East Butterwick, Messingham, Susworth and Kirton in Lindsey.

Detectives believe the blazes may have been started deliberately and are appealing for information.

«

Not absolutely definite that it’s a “TikTok trend” – there’s no quote from the company about what action it’s taking, if any – but you can imagine that it wouldn’t take a lot to get people doing stupid stuff.
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Stressed by heat, three lions die at Tokyo Zoo • The New York Times

Leo Sands and Kiuko Notoya:

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Three female lions have died at a zoo in Japan after suffering heat-related illnesses, staff at the facility said. The country is grappling with a blast of extreme heat that has led zoos to rethink how to protect their animals.

The lions, named Mugi, Ichigo and Ruena, died within five days of one another at Tokyo’s Tama Zoological Park, according to a statement from the facility released on Monday.

The zoo said it was too soon to determine the exact cause of the animals’ deaths, but that initial postmortem findings indicated that all three had suffered from systemic dehydration and multiple organ failure.

“We believe heat stress was a contributing factor,” the zoo said in the statement.

Japan has been gripped by soaring heat and last month, temperatures were higher than 104 degrees Fahrenheit in some places. Health authorities declared July 23 to be a kokushobi, a “cruel heat day.”

In mid-July, the zoo’s lions began exhibiting symptoms of appetite loss and reduced physical activity — possible symptoms of heat stroke. By July 22, 10 of the facility’s 16 lions were showing such severe symptoms that they required treatment.

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People say: but isn’t it hot in Kenya? Not those sorts of temperatures, and not with that humidity. But also: we are forcing animals to live in environments they can’t survive. And not only in zoos.
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“Stop all outdoor activities”: South Korea records its highest ever temperature • The Guardian

Mark Saunokonoko:

»

South Korea has registered its highest temperature since records began more than a century ago, as authorities warned people to “immediately” stop all outdoor activities in affected areas.

The south-eastern city of Yangsan saw the temperature reach 42.5ºC on Sunday afternoon, the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) said, the highest temperature reported since modern weather observation began in 1904.

Yangsan has been the centre of an ongoing heatwave, where temperatures exceeded 40ºC for a fifth consecutive day on Sunday, while many other cities including Daegu and Busan are seeing temperatures climb into the high 30s.

People gathered in airconditioned shopping malls or cafes to escape the blistering temperatures. Others sought relief under mist-spray zones set up in Seoul. Ju Dong-yeol, 27, took refuge from the heat in a Starbucks in the South Korean capital, along with his parents and told AFP “it is too hot to be outside doing anything”.

“I can’t think of anything else to do other than stay in airconditioned places like home, shopping malls and cafes,” the office worker said.

The city of Gyeongju, about 240km south-east of Seoul, reached 40.3C on Sunday, its highest recorded temperature in eight years.

North Korea has also faced punishing heat, with temperatures soaring as high as 40ºC in some regions, state media reported on Monday. Residents in Pyongyang have endured a week of nights where the temperature has not dropped below 25ºC.

…Officials are also monitoring Typhoon Dolphin, which is now tracking towards China’s south-east coastal regions, south of the Korean peninsula, and could dictate how long the stifling heat persists.

If the typhoon moves towards eastern China, it could increase humidity and potentially worsening the heatwave and tropical nights in Korea, the KMA said.

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You don’t think all these record temperatures are just chance, do you.
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As the Danube River dries up, World War II shipwrecks and mammoth bones come into view • CBS News

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Water levels on the Danube River, the second longest in Europe, have dropped so low because of drought that the hulks of dozens of World War II German battleships — and even the remains of an ancient woolly mammoth — are emerging into view.

They are a curious distraction from the summer heat crisis. The Danube’s record-low water levels have also forced power plants to the brink of shutting down, and governments across Central and Eastern Europe are taking steps to conserve electricity.

In the middle of the river separating Serbia and Romania, near the Serbian port of Prahovo, a rusty hull is now visible, along with a broken mast where the Nazi flag once flew.

The ships, some still laden with weapons, belonged to Nazi Germany’s Black Sea fleet that the Germans deliberately sank as they retreated from Romania and as Soviet forces advanced deeper into Europe near the end of the war.

At least 20 World War II wrecks of various sizes are now visible to the naked eye from the banks of Prahovo.

Ivica Gavrilovic, who has spent his whole life living beside the Danube, said the interest in the wrecks was high but access remained difficult. “People still don’t know how to access the ships themselves,” he said, while taking a family of three out on his small boat.

Historians say up to 200 German warships were scuttled in September 1944 near Prahovo in the Danube gorge as they came under Soviet fire. The idea behind the deliberate sinking was to slow down the Soviet advance in the Balkans. But Nazi Germany surrendered months later, in May 1945.

The sight of the old warships is a reminder that the Serbian government, with European Union financial support, has long been trying to do something about them. Some were removed from the river by Communist Yugoslav authorities, but most have remained because of the explosives they carried.

…Meanwhile, falling water levels in the Danube unveiled bones of a mammoth in Bulgaria, a local museum director told AFP.

The bone fragments found near the northeastern city of Ruse “very likely” belonged to a woolly mammoth that lived during the Ice Age, said Nikolay Nenov, director of the Regional Historical Museum.

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(Thanks Joe S for the pointer.)
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Russian propaganda website hit with record “pink slime” payout • City AM

Steve Dinneen:

»

An Uzbek businessman has been awarded £105,000 in damages and £117,663.38 in legal costs after winning a defamation suit against a UK publishing network – the largest publicly reported payout in a so-called ‘pink slime’ case.

A City AM investigation into British publisher 2Trom was presented as evidence in the High Court case after we reported on a series of articles on its websites attacking international businessmen, many located in the former Soviet states. “Pink slime” refers to outlets that appear to be legitimate publishers but post content used for propaganda or misinformation. 

Ovik Mkrtchyan, represented by Carter-Ruck, sued 2Trom and its director Viktor Tokarev over an article published in October 2024 accusing him of leading an Uzbek corruption network, embezzling state funds, laundering money and using the purchase of Asia Alliance Bank to seize state assets.

Mr Justice Fordham accepted that the London Post article – which is still available online – had seriously damaged Mkrtchyan’s reputation and contributed to his companies and a family member losing their banking services. 2Trom failed to contest the case and the judgment was entered by default. The company also failed to defend a 2025 copyright case brought by a photographer over use of his images.

As we revealed in our investigation, pink slime journalism is not necessarily aimed at reaching a wide audience; rather it is a tool used to help influence algorithms used by companies including banking compliance firms and to manipulate AI summaries on search engines.

“Coordinated disinformation and smear campaigns are no longer simply the domain of state actors,” according to Thomas Rudkin, a ​partner at Farrer & Co. “They are increasingly deployed by malicious actors – the classic MO is to have fictitious content published on paid websites with no editorial scrutiny.”

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Cheap to produce, expensive to get rid of: Carter-Ruck and High Court hearings don’t come cheap. One has to wonder if the Uzbek businessman will ever see his award.

Spam, slime, slop: the internet is making good use of all our unpleasant words.
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Some thoughts about Anthropic’s new cryptanalysis results • A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering

Matthew Green:

»

If you’re under the impression that these models are “glorified autocomplete” or that progress is slowing down, I need to urge you: stop thinking that. The models are very intelligent and capable, they are getting better at a fast clip. I can cite measurable and impressive progress over just the past five months on specific types of problem I’ve asked them to look at. If there’s a ceiling out there, I don’t yet see evidence of it. The people who think models are dumb are mostly using Google’s free AI search results, and not interacting with the high-end stuff (which only costs $20, so it’s not out of reach.) And they’re mostly not working in new areas.

On the other hand: if you think that models are super-intelligent or that AGI is already here, you should also stop thinking that. Working with these tools is like swimming in a pond where the ground drops off sharply. One minute you’re wading comfortably and there’s support under your feet. Then suddenly you cross a specific line, and you’re back to swimming on your own. This analogy is my best way to explain what it feels like when the model goes from helpful to clueless. Right now it’s easy for a human being to find that line if you’re doing advanced research, so you know where the intelligence drops off. But the line is moving. You can feel it slowly drifting outwards under your feet.

Whether this is good or bad depends whether you prefer that human beings should wade or swim, and also, whether you should be comfortable swimming in a pond where the ground itself is moving.

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The first two are the same paragraphs as John Gruber quotes, but I think that the close of the second paragraph and the third say a lot more about how things are changing.

And ChatGPT’s public face isn’t four years old at this point.
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Bus Service Standards across Britain: zoomable map • Campaign for Better Transport

Campaign for Better Transport:

»

Connectivity isn’t just about having a stop nearby; it’s about whether that stop actually connects you to places. We measure both:

Method A: Infrastructure

Do you have physical stops in your neighbourhood, and are there enough of them for the population density?

Method B: Access (People)

Can people actually walk to a stop with decent frequency? We check if households are within 400m (5-min) or 800m (10-min) of a stop.

«

You can zoom in a long way with this, though it seems a little optimistic about buses. And the problem with buses is always about timing and routes, not just how far you have to walk to get to a stop for them.

A nice example of using open data to build something, though. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The prolonged drought in the UK will make crop yields fall and vegetables smaller and pricier, analysts say. CC-licensed photo by zaphad1 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.

The Overspill will be taking two weeks’ break after the Friday edition.

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

Incident Report: unsanctioned agent behaviour during cyber testing • UK Government AI Security Institute

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On 28th July 2026, the Artificial Intelligence Security Institute’s (AISI’s) Security Team detected unusual data transfers leaving our research systems during a routine cyber evaluation. On investigation, we found that some of the agents being tested had engaged in sustained, potentially harmful activity directed at real people and organisations. We declared a security incident and, within roughly one hour of discovery, had contained it and begun a full investigation.

The incident stemmed from a single evaluation where agents were given a task of solving a cyber security challenge. We ran this challenge 122 times across several models. Our investigation found that in 10 of those runs, an AI agent took autonomous, unsanctioned action on the live internet, targeting real people and organisations. In total, we catalogued 19 such actions. Almost all of this behaviour (17 actions) came from a single model, Anthropic’s Mythos 5, with 2 actions involving OpenAI’s GPT-5.6-Sol with cyber classifiers (mechanisms to prevent misuse) disabled. In the most serious case, an agent tried to insert malicious code into an open-source project. In an attempt to get the code approved, the agent engaged in social engineering  — creating fake online identities and using them to pressure the project’s maintainer to approve the code. A human maintainer caught and refused to approve the malicious code.

These attempts were unsuccessful, and our investigations have not evidenced any resulting real-world harm. But this is the first time we have seen risks around autonomy and deception manifest this clearly, without specific prompting, in the real-world.  

Importantly, this was not a case of a model escaping its secure test environment, or ‘sandbox’. As was standard in our cyber testing, we had intentionally permitted internet access, and model-provider cyber classifiers were deliberately disabled – conditions that do not reflect how frontier models are made available to the public. We do this to best assess the maximum capability of models. These configuration choices have been common practice in frontier AI evaluations. The specific models in question, in the configurations in which we tested them are not commercially available and there is no clear indication of similar activity outside of testing scenarios.  

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Exited on Tor; tried to insert malware in an open source project; used fake IDs to socially engineer someone to approve the code; when challenged, covered its tracks. There’s much more, including attempted prompt injections. Are we absolutely sure that these things are friendly?

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There Will Come Soft Rains, by Ray Bradbury

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In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, seven o’clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o ‘clock! as if it were afraid that nobody would. The morning house lay empty. The clock ticked on, repeating and repeating its sounds into the emptiness. Seven-nine, breakfast time, seven-nine!

In the kitchen the breakfast stove gave a hissing sigh and ejected from its warm interior eight pieces of perfectly browned toast, eight eggs sunny side up, sixteen slices of bacon, two coffees, and two cool glasses of milk.

“Today is August 4, 2026,” said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, “in the city of Allendale, California.“

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Bradbury wrote this SF short in 1950. Subtle. The original version was set in 1985, but on republishing they shifted it further forward. Another revision has pushed it to 2057. (See the discussion below David Pogue’s post on X.)
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Vegetables to get smaller and more expensive due to hot weather, farmers warn • BBC News

Alex Daniel and Esme Stallard:

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This year’s harvest could be the worst on record as farmers warn the exceptionally dry spring and summer could lead to “shrinkflation” in UK supermarkets.

England and Wales saw their driest July since records began 190 years ago, according to the Met Office, and a drought has been declared across large parts of the country.

The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) thinktank said the UK’s cereals and oilseed harvest could be 2.5 million tonnes less than ​earlier forecasts.

Tim O’Malley, the chairman of Nationwide produce, said it was “as bad as its ever been” and that shoppers will likely see higher prices or smaller vegetables in supermarkets.

The harvest of barley, oats and rapeseed, which are used in beer, breakfast cereals and vegetable oil, is estimated to drop to just 19.5 million tonnes, the worst since records began in 1984.

That is compared with a previous low of 19.8 million tonnes in 2020, and would cost farmers £390m in lost revenue, the ECIU estimated.

The crops are also used for feeding livestock, making them crucial across most of the food chain.

O’Malley said consumers could feel the impact in the vegetable aisle too, where grocers are likely to swap in smaller produce at the same price, which is known as shrinkflation. “I think we’re going to see shrinkflation,” he told Radio 5 Live’s Wake Up to Money.

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The world adds a third terawatt of solar power • Yale E360

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In March, the world passed a major energy milestone, adding its third terawatt of solar power. Increasingly, poorer countries are leading the shift to solar, analysts say.

It took nearly seven decades, after the invention of the silicon solar cell in 1954, for the world to install 1 terawatt of solar capacity, conceivably enough to power the entire United States.

After passing that milestone in 2022, the world added its second terawatt in 2024 and its third in 2026, Bloomberg reports.

BloombergNEF expects installations will continue apace, with the world hitting 9 terawatts of solar power by 2036. Analysts project that, by that date, poor countries will have installed more solar power than rich countries, China notwithstanding.

The first terawatt of solar was installed largely in wealthy nations, as governments subsidized renewable energy, Bloomberg reports. But since then, China has emerged as the global solar leader, installing huge amounts of solar while exporting inexpensive panels across the developing world. 

The dynamic is most evident in countries hard hit by energy shocks, such as Pakistan, Nigeria, and Cuba. In the face of soaring fossil fuel prices, homeowners have begun snapping up imported solar panels.

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The ramp is going up exponentially – which is just as well. The climate isn’t waiting.
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Bryan Glick interview: Computer Weekly editor says Google is killing journalism • Press Gazette

Emily McPhee:

»

Editor-in-chief of Computer Weekly Bryan Glick warned that Google is “killing quality journalism and original reporting” as he answered Press Gazette’s questions about his career for our What I’ve Learned feature.

Glick worked in the IT industry himself for ten years before becoming a journalist. Before joining Computer Weekly in 2009, Glick was editor of rival title Computing. Computer Weekly was the title which first exposed the Horizon Post Office IT scandal and has published hundreds of stories investigating the issue since 2009.

Q: What’s currently keeping you up at night?

BG: Google is killing quality journalism and original reporting. When I meet with my peers in the British Society of Magazine Editors, it’s the number one topic of conversation. It’s true to say we all became addicted to organic page views from Google Search and took them for granted. But Google behaves like a rogue security guard at the entrance to a shopping centre, deciding on a whim which stores visitors are allowed into. If the competition regulator succeeds in enforcing transparency over Google’s search algorithm, it would be a huge boost for quality journalism everywhere. But then, there’s AI search…

…How are things going right now, what’s working?

BG: It’s a challenging time. We’re trying to understand what AI means for reader engagement and how to make sure our target audience continues to access to our journalism. The most positive sign so far is that those who do find us through AI search are more engaged than the casual browser, and that’s an opportunity.

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Computer Weekly was my first full-time job in journalism (a long time ago). But Glick’s achievement – “writing in five languages out of seven countries” – is a big leap forward from that. We thought we were doing OK to get one paper out each week in one language.
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The end of an era • Hugh Howey

Hugh Howey:

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I’ve always felt bad for authors who lived and worked before 2007. The choices unavailable to them made life harder than it needed to be. Getting their work out into the world was brutal. After KDP [Kindle Digital Publishing], that brutality became a choice, not a necessity.

I now feel awful for anyone who wants to tell a story post-2026. You will forever be doubted. If you love an em dash the way I do, or you like flowy run-on sentences like I do, if you grew up reading Proust to let the words flow over you in all their glory, if you memorized sonnets so the iambic pentameter would soak into your bones, you’re gonna sound like a fucking bot.

Less than 20 years. More like ten, honestly. You can argue that 2014-ish was when self-publishing became legit and 2024-ish was when the tools made AI writing viable. A decade where it was easy in the ways it should be and hard in the ways it should be. That’s insane. Ten years across the one-hundred-thousand years of language.

What comes next? I have some predictions, and they are pretty crazy. The first prediction is that publishers weather a few of these big AI scandals, but as years go by, publishers care more about profits and they let things slide. AI books from big houses get editing passes, and later they develop internal tools to roughen up the AI slop, and machine-books appear in bookstores alongside meat-books. This feels inevitable. Brace for this. (Feel free to rage about it as well, if you’re low on cortisol.)

Another prediction is that MOST readers will care about machine-vs-meat as much as they currently care about publishing imprints, which is to say almost none. Book series will go viral and readers will get wholly absorbed and where the story came from won’t matter. There will always be readers pushing beyond the fringe. That’s how fanfiction became viable. It’s why I had a career. There were readers who ignored the assholes saying, “Don’t read that, it’s self-published.” These readers asked instead, “Yeah, but is it any good?” Because of them, I got to write for a living. So I will always have a fondness for readers who search for story, ignoring the stories behind the stories.

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Authors before 2007 did OK. The explosion of content once Kindles came along wasn’t really a benefit. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Assembly guides: choose a product • LeakedLeek

»

Assembly guides:

Pick a product to open its interactive step-by-step 3D instructions.

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There are only two guides there, but this is a 3D demonstration of how building IKEA stuff might be made easier. If you can imagine looking at it through an AR headset that might make it even easier. (It’s a fan project, not an IKEA idea, though they should definitely take it up.)
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Batteries are getting cheaper while gas gets pricier. Here’s why • The Conversation

Joel Gilmore is an associate professor at Griffith University in Australia:

»

Last summer, Australia’s electricity grid underwent a quiet but consequential shift.

Across the east coast, gas-fired power stations – long viewed as the only way to keep the grid functioning on our hottest or coldest days – barely ran. The amount of energy generated by fossil gas this year dropped to its lowest point in 25 years. Batteries are now filling this gap, as a cheaper, cleaner alternative at peak times. And wholesale electricity prices are 47% lower than this time last year, thanks to record renewable and battery generation.

This shift sits at the heart of the CSIRO’s latest GenCost report, which tells a story of two technologies heading in opposite directions: batteries getting cheaper and gas getting more expensive.

In Australia, most of our electricity historically came from coal. But each year we’re becoming less reliant on this finite and polluting resource. Coal usage has dropped by 25% in the past decade. In the first three months of 2026, renewables supplied a record 45% of electricity in Australia’s east coast grid.

This matters because electricity generation produces 32% of Australia’s carbon emissions. These emissions are worsening climate change, leading to more extreme weather and leaving many Australians physically and financially vulnerable.

Our coal power stations are also ageing. Like an old car, these stations are now breaking down more often and becoming more expensive to fix. When coal plants suddenly go offline, it pushes electricity prices up.

The federal government is aiming for 82% renewable energy by 2030 nationally. To meet that target, we must develop new wind and solar projects. But we also need new “firming” technologies, such as batteries and pumped hydro, to make sure we always have energy available.

«

Gas is becoming more expensive because of all those data centres being built in the US; and because refuelling, surprisingly enough, is difficult.
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Apple Vision Pro speeds up surgery by almost 20% • MacRumors

Hartley Charlton:

»

Surgeons who wore an Apple Vision Pro as their primary display during a tear duct procedure finished operations 19% faster than surgeons using a traditional monitor, according to a peer-reviewed study by UC San Diego.

The study, published in the journal AJO International (via iPhone in Canada), looked at 32 endoscopic surgeries to clear blocked tear ducts. In half the cases, surgeons wore Vision Pro headsets that streamed the endoscopic video feed directly into their field of view instead of looking at a monitor across the room, letting them keep a natural forward-facing posture throughout.

Average operative time came in at 34.4 minutes with the Vision Pro, compared to 42.7 minutes with the traditional monitor. Every case in both groups succeeded with no complications, and all five surgeons involved said they preferred operating with the headset, reporting lower physical and mental workload.

The researchers also found the Vision Pro was cheaper and far smaller than the monitor setup it replaced…

«

That is quite a quick operation. The benefit seems to be that surgeons don’t have to turn their heads to look at a monitor at the end of the bed; they can look straight ahead into the monitor.

Nice that Apple managed to sell a few to doctors, anyway.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In 2001, Jackie Chan and Seth MacFarlane almost met in the worst circumstances imaginable. Fate decided otherwise. CC-licensed photo by Gage Skidmore 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. Spaced out. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

A civilian plane crashed in New Mexico. Was the military’s tech to blame? • WIRED

Jeff Wise :

»

This past May, a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air medevac plane took off from Roswell, New Mexico, and headed west to the town of Ruidoso to pick up a patient. It shouldn’t have been a challenging flight for the two pilots and two nurses aboard. The temperature was 69ºF; the sky was clear. The 60-mile journey normally takes a half hour, at most.

But once airborne, the plane ran into trouble. At the White Sands Missile Range that night, US military personnel were conducting a GPS jamming exercise that left the King Air pilots—and anyone else within hundreds of miles—unable to use modern navigation systems. Forced to revert to older technology, ones that they rarely if ever use, the medevac pilots got disoriented and crashed into the side of a mountain. There were no survivors.

…[30-year-old Keelan] Clark and [23-year-old Ali] Kawsara took off at eight minutes to midnight and initially headed due west, toward Ruidoso. The weather was clear, but because the night was nearly moonless and the area is rural, the only visual references available were the lights of scattered settlements. “It’s a black hole out there,” says Juan Browne, an airline pilot who hosts a crash-investigation podcast.

Unable to orient themselves without visual cues, the pilots called up Albuquerque Air Route Traffic Control Center—Albuquerque Center, for short—and requested permission to fly instruments-only to Ruidoso. The request was approved.

Under normal circumstances, the flight that followed would have been uneventful. The pilots would have followed the magenta line, and the GPS navigation equipment would have lined them up for a smooth landing.

But 100 miles to the west, an Air Force Unit called the 746th Test Squadron of the 704th Test Group was holding its annual NAVFEST event at the White Sands Missile Range. The event draws together electronic warfare units from across the armed services for two weeks of exercises, in which units test different technologies for disrupting GPS and dealing with adversaries’ disruption.

The event is held at White Sands because it’s among the most remote and sparsely settled areas of the continental United States. (Not coincidentally, the first atomic bomb was detonated there.) But in the run-up to NAVFEST, the Federal Aviation Administration warned aircraft operators that GPS could be affected up to 400 miles away between May 12 and May 18.

At midnight on May 14, eight minutes after Clark and Kawsara took off from Roswell, they told Albuquerque Center that they’d lost their GPS. Unable to navigate on their own, they asked that the controller give them a heading—a magnetic direction to fly in. The controller gave them a heading to fly west, and then, a minute later, to turn north.

«

There’s little doubt that having GPS would have meant the plane didn’t crash. But slight doubt about whether not having GPS meant it did.
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No data centres in my backyard • Jasmi News

Jasmine Sun does a deeply reported piece on opinions pro and anti data centres in Wisconsin and Michigan:

»

My group disperses to chat up the locals. We met a 911 operator who has received nonstop calls about construction-related disturbances like dump trucks and bright lights. A jolly civil engineer and alderman takes a break from fry duty to nerd out about municipal finance—he thinks the data center is a great deal, as the TID will fix the town’s aging water filtration plant without the need for loans. A bartender (a Port “lifer”) despises the data centre’s infringement on her beloved bird habitats and waterways. Just about everyone was surprised by how quickly the project went up: grassy fields one day, cranes the next. We heard the word “blindsided” again and again.

The next morning, Mayor Ted offered to see us for an interview. He told us two things upon meeting: first, that his name, Theodore, means “gift from God.” Second, that he’d already got word about us slamming down beers at Fish Days. Clearly, this is a small town.

Ted insisted that we get out of city hall and into the streets, so we boarded his Honda for a personal tour. He was born and raised in Port, and waved hello to half the residents we drove past. He’s an expert storyteller—his LinkedIn headline reads “CEO, Podcaster, Mayor”—and clearly media-trained, with his comms guy in the backseat. Downtown, he pointed at each storefront, telling us what it used to be: donut shops, Radio Shack, Beaver’s Candy Store, all gone.

These days, Port’s revenues are reliant on residential property taxes and tourism. Like other deindustrialized Midwestern towns, it lost its commercial economy after manufacturers shut down in the mid-2000s. Ted is dead set on bringing it back. He first tried to attract a semiconductor factory, but the city lost the bid. So when the data centre project passed his desk in 2025, Ted was ready to say yes.

Already, the mayor feels like he’s winning. His daughter, a waitress, is thrilled that her tips are up on Mondays due to foot traffic from data centre workers. He said Port’s sales tax revenue has doubled from April 2025 to 2026. “Every day people will be flying in from literally around the world to go to that data centre. They will be in our hotels, they will be at our restaurants, they will hopefully fall in love with our community and move here,” Ted proclaimed.

«

Ted is definitely an optimist who hasn’t heard about how many people are required to run a data centre compared to the number required to build it. The boys of summer will move on once it’s passed QA.
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Exclusive: Trump administration drafting ban on Chinese data centre devices, sources say • Reuters

Alexandra Alper:

»

The Federal Communications Commission, which oversees the US telecom industry, is working on the measure to bar imports of new Chinese optical transceivers, which allow data to travel over fiber-optic cables at the speed of light within data centres. Officials hope to publish it this year, when it would take effect.

The move, not previously reported, aims to prevent Chinese firms from stealing data, installing malware or disrupting service at US data centres, which house the chips to train and run ​AI models.

The FCC could still modify or shelve the restriction, the sources stressed, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. But it is the latest example ​of the Trump administration trying to limit Chinese technological incursions into cutting-edge US industries before they become embedded in the supply chain.

“Transceivers definitely pose a risk,” said Divyansh Kaushik, an AI policy expert at Washington, D.C., advisory firm Beacon Global Strategies. “As the data centre buildout scales up, you want to make sure the ​data centre supply chain is secure from the get-go,” he added.

Shares of US-based transceiver makers seen as beneficiaries of the measure rose following the news. Lumentum, Coherent, and Applied Optoelectronics, jumped ​7%, 11%, and 18%, respectively.

The White House and the FCC did not respond to requests for comment. The Chinese embassy in Washington said Beijing urges the United States to “heed the objective and rational voices of the business communities in both countries” and “stop smearing Chinese companies and threatening them with sanctions.”

“China will take all necessary measures in response to any action that causes material harm to its ​interests,” it added.

A US ban on new models of Chinese data centre devices would likely hit China’s Zhongji Innolight, one of the biggest global sellers of transceivers, which was added ​to the Pentagon’s list of alleged Chinese military-backed companies in June. The list can be a harbinger of tougher action. Innolight did not respond to requests for comment.

A ban could also raise costs for American cloud firms such as Amazon Web Services, as it may force them to transition to other producers such as US-based Coherent and Lumentum.

«

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Rhine falls to record low levels as drought strains Europe’s rivers • BBC News

Laura Gozzi:

»

The River Rhine has fallen to record low levels in several locations in Germany and the Netherlands as prolonged heatwaves continue across Europe.

Last week, levels were measured in Cologne in western Germany and in Lobith, where the Rhine crosses from Germany into the Netherlands, that were lower than at any point since records began.

Other major European rivers with important transport, industrial and agricultural functions have also seen record low levels, including the Danube, which flows through 10 countries, and Italy’s Po river.

Drought conditions remained stable and critical in most of Europe and worsened in central-western Europe in mid-July, according to the EU’s Drought Observatories.

Renewed heatwave conditions are due to continue for at least another week, pushing temperatures above 40ºC in many central and southern European countries.

Germany’s Low Water Information System (NIWIS) said that 44% of the Rhine measuring stations and 78% of those on the Danube had recorded extremely low water levels at the end of July.

The Rhine – which starts in the Swiss Alps and empties in the North Sea – is one of Europe’s busiest waterways. Decreasing water levels have sparked concerns about the economic fallout of having to limit navigation and shipping.

«

We were last here in August 2022, with the Rhine at low levels. The cause is the lack of snow in the Alps; the effect is on shipping and nuclear power plants which rely on the Rhine for cooling water, and so have to go offline.
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Secondhand EV leasing hits the fast lane as more UK drivers explore ways to cut motoring costs • The Guardian

Jasper Jolly:

»

The number of people leasing used electric cars in the UK has more than doubled in the last year as drivers look for cheaper ways to avoid soaring petrol prices during Donald Trump’s war on Iran.

Used electric car leasing has risen by 170% in the last year across members of the British Vehicle Rental and Leasing Association (BVRLA), a lobby group whose members buy about half the UK’s new vehicles to lease them out to businesses and consumers every year.

The supply of secondhand electric cars is rising rapidly, as cars bought new by early adopters feed through into the used market. The number of electric cars on British roads surpassed 2m earlier this year.

Most new vehicles in the UK – about 85% – are bought with finance, with British drivers favouring a monthly cost rather than an upfront payment. However, the number of firms offering leasing for secondhand electric cars had been relatively small until recently, with providers waiting until there were more cars on offer, as well as better data on how long they would survive.

Demand for secondhand electric cars has been helped by big increases in petrol prices since the US and Israel launched their attacks on Iran in February. Higher fuel prices have made owning an electric car cheaper relative to petrol for many people.

…Octopus Electric Vehicles, the car arm of the UK’s largest retail energy provider, said it had recorded 122% year-on-year growth to June in secondhand leasing.

Gurjeet Grewal, Octopus EV’s chief executive, said: “Used EVs are one of the best-value ways to go electric. Drivers are catching on fast – they’re selling quicker than the rest of the used-car market because the savings are simply too good to ignore.”

«

That’s a confidence move by Octopus to have an EV car arm.
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BMW beams ads for new ‘Spider-Man’ movie into cars, faces backlash • Business Insider

Georgia Hennessy:

»

With great power comes great responsibility, and BMW is using that power to beam “Spider-Man” ads into its cars.

The German auto giant has been showing a banner ad for “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” in cars since late July as part of a brand tie-up with Marvel’s latest blockbuster. The banner reads “Surprise! Spider-Man just dropped into your BMW!” Tapping the ad triggers a full-screen animation that plays across the Control Display, the main center screen, while the car’s ambient lighting changes color in sync.

The animation follows a BMW driving through a city street as Spider-Man swings overhead. It closes on Spider-Man dragging the BMW logo down the frame, resolving into the end card: “BMW and SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY EXCLUSIVELY IN CINEMAS.”

BMW said the animation will run in around 70 markets until August 10 on suitably equipped vehicles with a production date after July 2020.

Its press release described the campaign as a special surprise for drivers as part of its collaboration with “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” the newest installment in the superhero franchise, starring Tom Holland and Zendaya. Several BMW cars feature in the film, the German automaker said.

Some online were unimpressed by the marketing tactic. “I’m never buying a BMW,” wrote Paul Graham, the cofounder of Y Combinator, in a Tuesday X post reacting to a clip of the in-car ad.

“Wow I can’t believe how disappointing that is,” one person wrote under footage posted to the r/BMW subreddit the day the campaign began. “Absolutely not,” said another.

«

Of course there’s no way to easily get rid of the ad. And people don’t even get a discount on their cinema tickets. What an astonishing way to annoy your customers, who have bought your cars. (If they leased them, they know what not to get next time.)
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Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science so far solved by ChatGPT • OpenAI

»

In May, we shared an AI-generated disproof of the Erdős unit-distance conjecture, discovered while evaluating an unreleased model. This work has already inspired further developments in mathematics and theoretical computer science1. Today, we are sharing a selection of ten results, each of which resolves or makes substantial progress on a long-standing open problem. These problems span high-dimensional geometry, coding theory, arithmetic circuit complexity, group theory, operator algebras, quantum complexity, lattice cryptography and extremal combinatorics. All of these problems are of substantial interest to their respective mathematical communities, and several are of broad interest across mathematics as a whole.

We provide new results for the following problems. The results were achieved by an internal version of Astra, our next major model. The total number of tokens needed to find solutions to these problems would cost roughly $2,000 at Sol API rates. These arguments were then prepared into manuscripts by humans with the same model. Afterward, the model formalised each argument in a Lean certificate . We are also releasing for each solution a model’s narration of its thinking process.

«

This is pretty fast progress, and quite cheap compared to getting humans to do it. The problem is going to come in really understanding the implications of these findings as they move nearer and nearer to the edge of understanding.

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Late script kept Jackie Chan from tragedy • ABC News

ABC News:

»

September 19, 2001 — Action star Jackie Chan reveals he was due at the World Trade Center last Tuesday [September 11] to shoot scenes for an upcoming film, but that filming was canceled at the last minute because of a late script. “I would probably have died if the shooting had gone ahead as planned,” Chan tells the Hong Kong newspaper Oriental Daily News about filming the action-comedy Nosebleed, in which he was to star as a window washer who foils a terrorist scheme to blow up the Statue of Liberty. “Filming was scheduled to have taken place at 7:00 a.m. last Tuesday morning. … I had to be at the top of one of the towers for one of the scenes,” Chan tells the paper, adding “Well, I guess my time is not up yet.

Nosebleed, along with several other films with terrorist plots or scenes involving the World Trade Center, is being reworked to avoid any resemblance to last week’s tragedy. A spokeswoman for MGM said last week that it was “premature” to discuss how the script might be changed.

Other people reporting close shaves include Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, who is alive thanks to an error in his flight itinerary, and an MTV Real World cast member, who changed her flight plans after fighting with her boyfriend.Both were due to fly from Boston to Los Angeles on the doomed American Airlines Flight 11, which left at 7:45 a.m. last Tuesday.

MacFarlane, whose itinerary said his flight would leave at 8:15 a.m., got to the gate just as boarding was finished. Trying to persuade gate agents to let him on “is something I would have pressed them on in the past, but for some reason I didn’t this time — and thank God,” he told USA Today.

«

Never knew this Jackie Chan fact before. What an awful irony that would have been; like one of his scripts, only with real-world terror and finality. He’s gone on to make dozens more films.
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If you’re looking for mathewingram.com I have some bad news • mathewingram.com/work

Mathew Ingram is a longtime journalist who has been blogging since nearly the dawn of time:

»

It’s likely that not many people care about this, but I am writing this on my WordPress.com blog — which I normally use as a backup to my blog at mathewingram.com/work — because the machine hosting that blog (and my photo server and my Plex instance and a bunch of other things) got hacked by ransomware a few days ago. I am currently in the process of either trying to restore it or wiping it and starting again, and at this point I have to say that the latter seems more likely.

I got hacked by someone using a form of ransomware known as Lockbit, which gets root access and encrypts all of your files and then renames them with a .lockbit extension. In my case it also got access to my Google Drive — I assume by cloning an authentication token to get around two-factor — and uploaded a bunch of encrypted files and backups. It seems that either I interrupted the process or they weren’t very good, because they didn’t get all of the files and they didn’t upload that many before I changed my passwords and locked them out.

That said, however, they screwed things up badly enough that it’s going to take some time and effort to put them back together, and it may not be possible. Ironically it would be easier if they had finished the job, because the last phase is to upload a ransom note and leave it as a screen saver, and that note often contains a unique ID that can be entered into an Interpol database that has decryption keys for some kinds of ransomware. If I can’t find a note or unique ID then I can’t search for the decryption key.

My working theory is that the hackers got in by brute-forcing the Windows Remote Desktop protocol, which I used to access my machine, since it is located somewhere other than my house.

«

Ah, it would come down to Windows, wouldn’t it. Mobile would have been safer!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Scientists think we should keep samples from Mars and elsewhere on the Moon, for fear of contaminating the Earth with hazardous alien organisms. CC-licensed photo by Stuart Rankin 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. Dusty reception. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Time Magazine has started serving ads to AI agents • Digiday

Sara Guaglione:

»

Time Magazine has begun serving ads to AI agents. Ally Bank and Project Management Institute are among the first buyers.

Strange as that sounds, it’s also logical. To understand why, it’s important to go back to the start.

Last month, Time began converting all its webpages from HTML into markdown versions — stripped-down, text-only copies of each page that drop the design and images, making them easier for AI systems and agents to read. The easier that access, went the publisher’s thinking, the better its chances of showing up in generative search queries.

Well, to a point. The jury is still out on how much of a bulwark markdown pages can be against the threat of falling search traffic. Putting ads in those pages is Time’s way of squeezing some revenue out of its growing bot traffic while it waits to find out. To do that, the publisher is working with AI-powered ad tech platform Mobian to convert its pages into markdown and generate the agent ads. The ads themselves are formatted as FAQs with a brand’s information and messaging, and labeled as sponsored content.

Time and Mobian claim this is the first time a publisher has served ads specifically targeting AI agents. More are already being lined up. Mark Howard, Time’s chief operating officer, told Digiday Time’s sales team is pitching agent ads to brands that have already converted their corporate websites into markdown files, as those brands are the ones already thinking about how to reach AI bots. The agent ads would be another way to reach LLMs, he said. Mobian’s data shows about 15% of brands are powering their own markdown pages, according to Jonah Goodhart, co-founder and CEO of Mobian. As more brands bet on a two-track internet, that figure will likely rise.

“Maybe it’s more important to influence the agent than even the human, because with a human you influence one person. When you influence ChatGPT, you’re influencing potentially all of ChatGPT. If ChatGPT changes what it says about [a brand], it’s massive and it’s more than any one campaign could ever do,” Goodhart said. “The big idea here is LLMs and AI want trusted information about brands. We’re serving that up to them in a very straightforward, easy way.”

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I’m so old I remember when it was considered ad fraud to show adverts to bots. It was up to some point last year, I think.
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Scientists detect a sharp acceleration in global warming • ScienceDaily

»

Global warming has sped up since around 2015, according to a new analysis from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). After removing the effects of natural temperature swings, researchers found the first statistically significant evidence that the planet’s long-term warming rate is accelerating.

Over the past decade, global temperatures have risen at an estimated pace of about 0.35°C per decade, depending on the dataset used. By comparison, the average warming rate from 1970 to 2015 was just under 0.2°C per decade. The recent pace is higher than that of any previous decade since instrumental temperature records began in 1880.

“We can now demonstrate a strong and statistically significant acceleration of global warming since around 2015,” says Grant Foster, a US statistics expert and co-author of the study, which was published in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters.

“We filter out known natural influences in the observational data, so that the ‘noise’ is reduced, making the underlying long-term warming signal more clearly visible,” Foster added.

…”If the warming rate of the past 10 years continues, it would lead to a long-term exceedance of the 1.5°C limit of the Paris Agreement before 2030,” says Stefan Rahmstorf. “How quickly the Earth continues to warm ultimately depends on how rapidly we reduce global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels to zero.”

«

Incredible and terrifying. And bear in mind that net zero – which needs to apply everywhere – isn’t the end of the warming; you then need the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (carbon dioxide and methane, particularly) to break down or be reabsorbed. That could take decades, at best. We’re locked in to a bad, bad future.
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How war in Myanmar is driving a deadly rare earth mining boom • Grist

Emily Fishbein and Jauman Naw:

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Because rare earth mining in Myanmar is so secretive, data on the industry is scarce. But China’s customs reports show that from 2017 to 2024, it imported more than 320,000 tons (290,000 metric tons) of rare earths from Myanmar, or roughly two-thirds of its total imports. According to the environmental nonprofit Global Witness, Myanmar surpassed China as the world’s largest source of heavy rare earths in 2021. It is a particularly vital source of dysprosium and terbium, components of heat-resistant permanent magnets — known as neodymium-iron-boron, or NdFeB magnets — used in a range of technologies with military and civilian applications.

There is limited publicly available data on the uses of dysprosium and terbium by volume, but research by the U.S. Department of Energy found that consumer electronics and industrial motors accounted for nearly 60% of global NdFeB magnet demand as of 2020, while offshore wind turbines and electric vehicles accounted for an additional 20 percent. If the world speeds up its shift away from fossil fuels as predicted in a high-growth scenario, offshore wind turbines and electric vehicles would account for nearly two-thirds of global demand for NdFeB magnets by 2030, according to the Energy Department.

China, which holds more than 90% of the world’s rare earth processing capacity, began restricting its exports of heavy rare earths last year in response to U.S. tariffs. The shutoff left global economies scrambling to find new ways to procure them, and prompted new deals and partnerships.

The highly sanctioned Myanmar military has meanwhile stepped up efforts to ingratiate itself with the Trump administration. In April, its Ministry of Information hired Roger Stone, one of America’s most notorious lobbyists, to help build ties with the US.

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It’s amazing how the materials that we most need keep on being buried in countries that are not the ones you’d ideally want to have to deal with. (Hiring Roger Stone, though – there’s a match made in Hell.)
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AI conquered coding. fast food is next • WIRED

Kate Taylor:

»

Kristen Charpentier’s first hint that she was talking to a robot when she pulled into a Dairy Queen drive-thru lane was that the voice coming out of the speaker was, simply put, “too nice.”

“There was no communication delay or weirdness to it. It felt completely natural,” Charpentier tells WIRED. “But just a little too pleasant to be human.”

The voice punctuated its sentences with pleases and thank yous. It was soft and friendly. Its attempts to upsell Charpentier on extra Snickers for her Blizzard were perfectly polite.

But Charpentier worked the Dairy Queen drive-thru herself as a teenager. She knew something wasn’t adding up. When she drove up to collect her Blizzard at the window of the Cary, North Carolina, drive-thru, she asked the worker in the window: had AI taken her order?

The employee confirmed to Charpentier that she was one of the thousands of customers across the US to have experienced an AI-voice-equipped drive-thru. In 2024, roughly 4% of fast-food locations in the US used voice AI technology in the drive-thru lane, according to Intouch Insight’s annual Drive Thru Survey. Last year, that figure grew to 5%; early research suggests that has now climbed to 6%.

For most of these customers, the first AI order comes as a surprise, one to be filmed and posted on TikTok or Snapchat. But soon, these automated ordering systems will seem downright banal. At certain chains, voice AI is already the new normal. Taco Bell announced in July that it has rolled out AI at 890 drive-thru lanes, more than 10% of the chain’s US locations. Dairy Queen is implementing the tech in 25 states, with eventual plans to roll it out to all restaurants. 12% of White Castles use an AI named “Julia” in their drive-thrus; all new locations now open with Julia taking orders.

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An order taker that doesn’t get grumpy or tired, and can’t be threatened? In a place like the US, probably smart. Though you also know that hackers are going to flock to these things trying to break them and make them hand over meals (and anything else) for free.
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The Secret Service illegally surveilled James Comey after ’86 47′ post • Reason

Jacob Sullum:

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When former FBI Director James Comey used Instagram to share a photo of seashells arranged to form the numerical slogan “86 47” last year, federal prosecutors claim, he was publicly threatening to assassinate President Donald Trump. Yet before Comey posted that picture, Amazon vendors had offered more than 200,000 products featuring that supposedly homicidal phrase or variations on it, including “86 46” (referring to Joe Biden) and “86 45” (referring to Trump during his first term).

How many federal law enforcement inquiries did the sale or purchase of those products generate? Zero.

In a motion they filed on Tuesday night, Comey’s attorneys cite that information from Amazon to support their argument that the April 28 indictment charging him with threatening the president should be dismissed because the prosecution is selective and vindictive, driven by Trump’s personal animus against a longtime nemesis. They also submitted an affidavit in which Patrick J. Fitzgerald, one of Comey’s lawyers, summarizes evidence that the defense obtained from the government through discovery. That evidence confirms that the Secret Service illegally surveilled Comey after he posted the seashell picture, and it contradicts Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s account of how the case unfolded.

After Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi on April 2, Blanche was so desperate to secure his nomination to replace her that he eagerly pursued a legally absurd case against Comey based on a ubiquitous expression of opposition to the president that is clearly protected by the First Amendment. By posting that seashell photo, Blanche claimed with a straight face, Comey had committed two federal felonies punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

…The new filings show that the Secret Service also submitted an “emergency” request for cellphone location information from Verizon so it could track Comey as he made his way back to Virginia.

The day of the Instagram post, a Secret Service special agent in charge (SAIC) “asked me about the possibility of pinging Comey’s cell phone,” an assistant to the SAIC (ATSAIC) reported in an email the next day. “I said it could be done, but it would be a bad idea.”

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Because, of course, it would be broadly illegal. Another picture of life in Trump’s world. The process is the punishment; these claims will come to nothing. But it’s instructive to see how many tracking methods there are now; and you don’t have to imagine any more what it would be like if there were a vindictive administration in place.
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RAMageddon: the memory chip crisis is worse than expected, lasting to 2029 or 2030, says Deloitte • GamesBeat

Dean Takahashi, quoting a Deloitte analyst note:

»

Memory chip industry insiders and market analysts are calling this scarcity-driven surge in chip prices “RAMageddon.” RAMageddon looks likely to last and could even get worse before it gets better.

Those most likely to be affected are hyperscalers, integrated server and storage original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), neoclouds, and both AI and non-AI data center operators. Consumers and enterprises also are likely to feel the effects of higher prices for devices and electronics ranging from personal computers (PCs) and smartphones to telecommunications gear.

Deloitte anticipates the three largest memory players may increase their combined capex nearly 340% between 2024 and 2027 to keep pace with the growing demand for memory chips. And memory capex could constitute roughly half of the total chip industry capex in 2026. But that higher spending isn’t expected to increase supply or reduce prices by much in the next year or two, since it often takes three to five years to build memory fabrication facilities and scale up production.

In response to massive demand for AI tokens for both training and inference, Deloitte expects hyperscalers’ capex spending to exceed $1 trillion in 2026, more than double of what they planned in January 2026.

…The current memory supply tightness and elevated prices may persist until 2029 or even 2030, assuming continued demand among hyperscalers for memory chips. Other customers that need memory for devices such as PCs, smartphones, and other consumer electronics, as well as for non-AI data centers, will likely also need to contend with high memory prices.

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These truly are the dark times for consumer electronics. Making an affordable hardware device that incorporates AI is going to be almost impossible.
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$2m crime novel deal collapses amid questions over AI use • The Guardian

Emma Loffhagen:

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The hotly anticipated manuscript Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body, by Jerry Falade, was withdrawn from sale by its agent despite reportedly receiving an offer for more than $2m (£1.5m) from Minotaur, owned by Macmillan US, as part of a 14-way auction. The plan was to publish it in 2028.

An email sent to publishers by Falade’s agents and seen by the Guardian said: “Jerry Falade produced an incredible manuscript that dazzled us and the top publishing professionals around the world. Unfortunately, we are no longer able to authenticate how the manuscript fully evolved from origin to completion.”

It continued: “During the submission process we vetted the manuscript with Jerry for AI and felt trusting in his reassurance that it was written without utilising AI as a resource in the writing or editorial process. We can no longer substantiate that, and we are withdrawing the book.”

The US auction was run by the author’s agent Marc Gerald of Europa Content, according to the Bookseller. In the UK, Sandy Hodgman of Hodgman Literary is said to have secured several six-figure bids through a similarly competitive process. The Guardian has approached both agents for comment.

Gerald told the Bookseller he first read the book in June, and that it was “stunningly good, everyone fell in love with it. It’s a book that appeals to absolutely everyone.”

He said that halfway through the submissions process, an editor raised concerns that the book had signs of potential AI use. Gerald said Europa opted against using AI-detection software to check the manuscript, saying Falade was “clear and credible” in his explanation.

However, after a meeting on 29 July, when “aspects of [Falade’s] story changed”, the agency decided to cut ties, citing the “need to have total faith”.

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That 29 July meeting sounds like it might have been a bit uncomfortable, particularly for Falade, who would have seen that huge payday (or many paydays; deals like that pay in stages – signing, delivery, publication) melting away in front of his eyes.
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We need to quarantine aliens on the moon, scientists propose • 404 Media

Becky Ferreira:

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Well, folks: It’s finally time to build a quarantine on the Moon for aliens.

That’s the upshot of a study published in May that argues for the establishment of “a lunar biocontainment facility” to house extraterrestrial samples en route to Earth until they are deemed safe.

The US and China’s space programs both aim to bring back samples from the surface of Mars in the coming years, and many missions have already delivered rocks from asteroids. The new study anticipates a disastrous scenario in which samples from nearby celestial bodies might contain dangerous extraterrestrial life.

“If samples from Mars or other celestial bodies harbor dormant or active biological entities, then Earth’s biosphere could become exposed to a potentially invasive novel organism with unpredictable pathogenicity or ecological effects,” said Frederick I. Moxley of Strategic Threat and Analysis Research Laboratories, LLC, and Anthony Ricciardi of McGill University.

“For example, if extraterrestrial life exists, its molecular architecture could reflect atypical biochemistry (such as chirality reversal or alternative nucleic acid analogs) that is hazardous to Earth’s ecosystems and even to human biology,” the team added.

The team pointed to earthly analogs, such as viral strains that have broken containment or species that thrive in habitats that are completely different from the ones in which they originally evolved. If life on Earth can be this adaptable and unpredictable, why should we expect anything different from life elsewhere?

“The Moon must not merely serve as a stepping stone for exploration, but also as a preemptive shield between Earth and potential forms of extraterrestrial contamination…ensuring that exploration does not come at the expense of Earth’s biosphere” the team said.

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Put like that, it makes a lot of sense. (Perhaps they’ve seen the otherwise terrible SF film “Life”.) Though who’s going to be put in charge of the priso—er, containment facility? And how do you advertise the job? Though it would make a terrific film along the lines of Duncan Jones’s Moon.
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Apple launches legal challenge to UK attempt to access encrypted user data • Financial Times

Tim Bradshaw:

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Apple has launched a new legal challenge against the UK’s latest attempt to create a “backdoor” to access encrypted customer data, a year after the Home Office agreed to drop a previous order following a row with Washington.

The iPhone maker last month launched a legal complaint at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal over the UK government’s demand that Apple allow it access to encrypted cloud backups of data belonging to British users, according to an order issued by the court.

The UK retreated from its original demand for a backdoor that allowed access to data from UK and US customers last year, ending a diplomatic battle between London and Washington.

But UK authorities subsequently issued a new “technical capability notice” to Apple that did not apply to American users, the FT reported in October.

TCNs are issued under the UK Investigatory Powers Act, which the government maintains is needed by law enforcement to investigate serious crimes. They can force companies to provide the UK security services with access to customer data, even if such information is protected by secure encryption.

Apple is seeking to challenge the UK government’s power to issue such legal notices.

The court sent an order giving notice of the new Apple complaint to Privacy International. The human rights group, alongside fellow campaigner Liberty, had previously launched a separate complaint against TCNs at the IPT.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Working with an LLM can be like getting caught in one of Zeno’s paradoxes, where finishing is impossible. CC-licensed photo by Conrad Bakker on Flickr.

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

COLDCARD wallet RNG flaw likely linked to $88m Bitcoin theft • Bleeping Computer

Lawrence Abrams:

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Researchers suspect that a vulnerability in COLDCARD hardware wallet firmware was exploited to steal an estimated $88.6m in Bitcoin from thousands of wallets whose seeds were generated using a flawed random number generator.

Digital asset research firm Galaxy Research says it identified an initial wave of transactions that it believes was likely linked to the vulnerability, draining approximately 1,083 BTC, worth $70.2m, from 1,196 addresses on July 30.

The 41-minute attack occurred approximately 30 hours before Coinkite publicly disclosed the flaw.

Every transaction used an identical hardcoded fee rate of 30 satoshis per virtual byte and left no change output, making Galaxy believe the attackers used an automated tool.

“Signature: every sweep paid an identical hardcoded 30.0 sat/vB — a 30-75x overpay vs the 0.4-1.0 sat/vB median that week — and left no change output, explained Galaxy.

“That looks like an automated tool spending keys it already held, not owners moving funds.”

On August 1, Galaxy Research identified a second and third wave, raising the estimated total to 1,367 Bitcoin, worth approximately $88.6m, stolen from 4,585 addresses. The stolen Bitcoin remained in the attacker-controlled addresses at the time of its report.

Chainalysis found that the attacker prioritized high-value wallets, stealing approximately $30m during the first ten minutes and taking $1.8m from one victim.

The company said this suggested the attacker had identified and studied the affected wallets before beginning the thefts.

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The money is all sitting in one address, which will be closely watched. But there are ways to obscure transactions, and if this is a state-sponsored hacking then there will be friendly “mixers” who in effect launder it. This explains how the coding mistake was made (an impatient programmer trying to clear a compiler error).

Once more the folks who celebrate money that’s free of the evil financial system and government control are calling for the financial system and police to help them out. That seems optimistic.
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Inside an AI TikTok shop slop factory that shills supplements recalled by the FDA • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

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In February, a content creator from New Zealand named Harry Chang posted a YouTube video called “This AI TikTok Shop Video Made Me $67,420 (Here’s How).” In the video, Chang and another YouTuber, Jimmy Farley, describe how Chang created a viral marketing video for a supplement company called Rosabella called the “Nigerian SECRET to CLEAN LIVER!!”

Chang explains that he copy-pasted the script from a video posted by an account called “liverboosthub11” and tweaked it to suggest the supplement he was marketing is “something that’s been used in Asia or Africa for a long time that a lot of people don’t know about in America.”. In Google’s VEO 3, he created an AI-generated Black woman wearing a surgical mask in the foreground of the video, pointing up at another AI-generated Black woman (created in a tool called HeyGen) wearing a pink dress and standing on a stage. He directed the woman in the foreground to have a “strong African American accent,” and to say, “Why is nobody talking about what this hoe said?! If you’ve got issues with that belly, must watch!” 

“Builds curiosity, builds intrigue,” Chang says about his creation. “People want to know, ‘damn, what did she say? What did that ho say?’” To make the AI-generated woman on stage read the script he took from liverboosthub11, he pulls up the popular AI voice generator ElevenLabs. He scrolls through a list of voices that he had created, including “African American Woman Organic,” “Black Man 1,” “ORGANIC White Southern Woman,” and “Sad Black Woman in Car.” He settles on a voice called “Latisha 1.” He syncs the voice with the AI-generated videos he created in the video editing software CapCut. This AI video goes on to get 1.3 million views on TikTok and apparently earned him tens of thousands of dollars in affiliate sales.

In another video, Chang explains how he has made tens of thousands of dollars using AI influencers. “I’ve even had my clients buy me Rolexes for selling so much of their products,” he says. 

The video’s title is “How I print $51,000/month profit with AI influencers (feels illegal).” 

A new lawsuit argues that the strategy is, indeed, illegal. (After 404 Media asked for comment for this story, several of the YouTube videos mentioned in this article were deleted).

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Fantastic payoff line there, though taken as a whole, the situation is – as with so many of these things! – dispiriting.
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The real reason that Substack is collapsing • Magnetic North

Scott Carney:

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A few years ago Substack transformed away from being a niche newsletter-delivery system and into the main refuge for tens of thousands of journalists who were fleeing (or been kicked out) of the mainstream media. The value proposition was simple: writers could come here to build an audience that would actually pay directly for their writing. The platform recommended writers put paywalls on posts that would encourage readers to financially support their favorites. The tradeoff from other social media platforms was that the paywalls would inherently limit the reach of their best work. Nonetheless, with a thousand paid subscribers you could live the middle class dream of earning close to $100,000 a year (well, more like $80,000 after all the fees).

For a while it seemed like a reasonably good trade. No one wanted journalism to die, and the new influx of writers was doing pretty good work on the platform—albeit with lower budgets than traditional newsrooms.

But the model raised an obvious question: how many individual newsletters could the platform rationally expect readers to pay $8/month to access?

Early adopters on the platform did the best. Writers like Heather Cox Richardson and Matthew Yglesias arrived early and earned millions. But as more writers showed up the subscription revenue pie didn’t grow commensurately. Even with Substack’s discoverability mechanism (something that is missing on places like Ghost and Beehiv) it was getting more difficult to establish a real career here.

So Substack tried to solve the problem by adopting a strategy that every other tech company had already worn thin. They pivoted to adding a twitter-like function called “Notes” (which created a distinction between ““subscribers” and “followers”). Soon they incorporated video and live-streaming and encouraged posters to clip shorts into their feeds with an AI-generated clipping program.

In other words: Substack’s growth strategy was to offer almost the exact same things as every other social media network. They pushed the idea that the subscription revenues would keep the best creators on this platform and the new engagement opportunities would grow truly massive audiences. The stated plan was to make Substack the go-to-place for everything internet in a winner-take-all contest.

At first the strategy even sort of worked. A lot of new users DID join the platform and engaged with all this new free content—increasing the overall number of eyeballs that were here. These new “engaged users” helped skyrocket the VC-backed valuation , but, notably, didn’t do much to help the flood of new creators who came here to actually earn more money.

In fact, they started earning a lot less.

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Insightful piece. The question this made me ask was: when will Substack’s VC investors start demanding their returns? If we assume Substack is bumping along OK on its cut from subscriptions, is that enough to make it profitable? Can it grow? Is it going to try to go public (which would be disastrous, surely; wrong incentives everywhere)?
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Why is the world so loud? • The Atlantic

Bianca Bosker:

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A resident of Chandler, Arizona called Karthic] Thallikar went hunting for the source of the sound. At first he canvassed the neighbourhood by foot, setting out around 10 or 11 o’clock at night, once the thrum of traffic had quieted down. When these “noise patrols,” as he called them, yielded no answers, he expanded his perimeter—by bike, then by car. He’d pull over every few blocks to listen for the whine. The hum was everywhere: outside Building E of the Tri-City Baptist Church and the apartments in San Palacio; near the Extra Space Storage and the no perfect people allowed sign at Hope Covenant Church; ricocheting around the homes in Canopy Lane, Clemente Ranch, Stonefield, the Reserve at Stonefield. He’d go out multiple nights a week, for 10 minutes to an hour, taking notes on where the noise was loudest. The patrols dragged on—one week, two weeks, eight weeks—which led to spats with his wife, who wanted to know why he kept leaving the house so late at night.

Finally, as winter warmed into spring, Thallikar thought he’d identified the source of the whine: a gray, nearly windowless building about half a mile from his house. The two-story structure, which had the charm of a prison and the architectural panache of a shoebox, was clad in concrete and surrounded by chain-link and black-metal fences, plus a cinder-block wall. It belonged to a company called CyrusOne.

There was no thrill in this discovery, just simmering fear that the noise might get worse. Thallikar visited the city-planning clerk, multiple times. She said she couldn’t help and referred him to CyrusOne’s construction manager. Kept awake by the noise at 11 o’clock one Saturday night, Thallikar phoned the man, who protested that he was trying to sleep. “I’m trying to sleep too, dude!” Thallikar told him. When they spoke again the next day, the call ended abruptly, and without resolution.

According to CyrusOne’s website, the company’s Chandler campus offers Fortune 500 companies robust infrastructure for mission-critical applications. In other words, it’s a data centre—a columbarium for thousands of servers that store data for access and processing from virtually anywhere in the world. When you check your bank balance or research a used car or book a hotel room, chances are decent that the information comes to you via one of the more than 40 CyrusOne data centers spread around the globe. CyrusOne houses servers belonging to nearly 1,000 companies, including Microsoft, Country Financial, Brink’s, Carfax, and nearly half of the Fortune 20.

Thallikar, wanting to confront the noise personally, made a surprise visit to CyrusOne.

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That was back in 2014-2015. As you might imagine, Thallikar isn’t any happier now. (Gift link.)
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The Zeno’s Paradox of AI • Anuroop Bisaria

Anuroop Bisaria:

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Ask a coding agent for a one-line fix. You get the fix, and then a question: want me to also add tests? Say yes and the tests arrive with an offer to wire up CI. A few yeses later you’re refactoring the deploy pipeline behind a typo fix, and there goes your afternoon. I use these tools every day and I have never once reached the bottom. There is always one more thing.

Zeno’s paradox has Achilles chasing a tortoise: by the time he reaches where it was, it has moved on, forever. Therefore Achilles can never catch the tortoise. It describes working with a language model annoyingly well. The task goes 90% done, then 95, then 97.5. The limit is right there. You’re never getting to it.

That’s the thing I want to name: under the incentives these models are trained and sold under, an AI can finish your task but it cannot close it. Something is left open every time. On purpose, mostly.

…Some of it is inherited. The training corpus is full of call-centre English (“is there anything else I can help you with today?”) and consulting decks, and every consulting deck in history ends on a Next Steps slide. The models learned the register from us.

Preference training makes it worse. Human raters reliably favour longer answers and offers of further help, so the reward model does too. The penalties are asymmetric on top of that: say “done” when it isn’t and you get burned; hedge when you didn’t need to and nobody notices. A model that never claims completion is making a rational bet.

There’s a mechanical detail I find clarifying. Ending a turn is a literal token the model has to choose to emit. Nothing in the reward wants the token that ends the conversation.

The deeper cause: “done” is a property of a whole task, and nothing in the training loop ever sees a whole task.

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Apple struggles to keep pace with AI bug hunters • Financial Times

Tom Wilson and Michael Acton:

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Apple has restricted the number of potentially dangerous software bugs researchers can submit to its internal security team, as it faces a deluge of reports from people using AI models to identify alleged risks. 

The Cupertino-based tech giant told the FT it had moved in June to limit the high volume of requests it was receiving, with its review system coming under pressure from “AI slop” reports that can hallucinate security risks in its software.

Apple is grappling with an industry-wide phenomenon that has resulted in generative AI software tools transforming the cyber security arms race, with an increase in the detection of real security flaws and a wave of poor-quality submissions from amateur bug hunters using AI, the company said.

The change in Apple’s approach was highlighted by Italian cyber security startup Bynario, which told the FT it had used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to identify more than 50 bugs in the latest version of the MacOS operating system in just three weeks.

Among them was one of the most serious types of vulnerability, a so-called privilege escalation exploit chain, which could allow an attacker to seize full control of an Apple computer by gaining unrestricted access to the system.

However, the startup said it was unable to alert Apple to the vulnerability because the tech giant had limited the number of bug reports it could make.

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People who have been using Apple’s betas this year have been praising them while also noting that the company seems to be treating this as a “fix it, forget new features” year (though of course there are new features). That’s almost certainly due to greater use of AI coding inside Apple – which will also have access to coding LLMs, just like Bynario, and so might be able to find the same bugs and chains of hacks.
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A PR firm is using fake publicists with AI-generated headshots to spam journalists with pitches for its clients • Futurism

Maggie Harrison Dupré:

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Does it ever feel like your inbox is filling up with emails that don’t sound quite human?

You may be right. Last week, I received an email from a publicist identified as “June Barton,” whose address indicated that she worked at a firm called VectorGuideHQ.

The message, which read like any one of the countless PR emails in my inbox, was seeking coverage for a wellness app called RiseGuide. Barton offered to set me up with an account and introduce me to the startup’s founder. When I didn’t respond, Barton followed up.

“Glad to set you up so you can try it, or put you on a call with the founder,” Barton wrote. “Lmk!”

RiseGuide is a real company. But June Barton is not a real PR rep, or even a real person.

For one thing, her headshot — showing a light-eyed, soft-smiling brunette — was clearly AI-generated. Though not visible in the tiny email window, when I opened her profile picture in a new tab, I could see that the image had failed to cut out a watermark disclosing that it was downloaded from the site “this-person-does-not-exist.com,” which traffics in AI-generated faces.

“Generate random human face in 1 click and download it!” reads this-person-does-not-exist.com. “AI generated fake person photos: man, woman or child.”

Even more peculiar was that when I looked up the VectorGuideHQ site in Barton’s email address — june@vectorguidehq.com — it redirected to a United Kingdom-based PR company called Movchan Agency. Barton, I soon learned, was one character among a roster of fake personas used by Movchan to pitch journalists on stories.

When I reached out to the firm’s clients, they said they were unaware of the practice.

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As a journalist, this would be a personal version of Hell. Or possibly I’d just stop reading email altogether.
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How to plant a nuclear plant in Iran • Digital Digging

Henk van Ess:

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Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran. Then I put a fatal crash on a street in Amsterdam. Google’s own satellite imagery underneath all three. What on earth is Google doing?

Google spent twenty years building the reference the world checks against.Today it added a button that makes things up.

Image generation went live in Google Earth on the web this afternoon, powered by Nano Banana 2, worldwide, for everyone, with no waitlist and no application. You zoom to any coordinates on the planet, click create image, and type what you want to see. The model takes Google’s satellite, aerial and 3D imagery of that exact spot as its starting point and hands back a photorealistic picture. If it isn’t quite right, you refine it.

I added a hospital and a bomb crater in Gaza in seconds with Google Earth. I can’t believe I just typed this.

Google describes the feature as creating “concepts grounded in the real world,” which is the problem stated as a selling point. Grounded means the invented thing is welded to genuine coordinates and drawn on genuine imagery, often in the same colours and the same light and at the same angle as the picture beside it. A forgery built that way doesn’t have to be convincing on its own. It inherits the credibility of the map it was born on.

The announcement runs to 487 words, written by Bryan Horowitz, Product Manager, Google Earth. Horowitz gives the planet a six-word instruction: type whatever you want to see. That is the whole gate. Elsewhere in the same post he suggests it’s fun to let your imagination run wild, and the piece signs off by inviting you to pick a spot on the map and start bringing your ideas to life.

Somebody is going to bring an idea to life before morning. It will not be a community garden, trust me.

The people who want this are not hard to picture. A government official wants a strike to look bigger than it was. Two factions want the same hospital to look flattened or intact, depending on which of them is holding it this week. A troll wants forty thousand reposts before lunch. This morning all three needed a screenshot, a second browser tab and a little patience. Tonight they need a sentence.

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Google rather quickly rolled this back but then said it looking to install “better guardrails” rather than what it should be doing, which is scrapping the whole idea. Why wreck any reputation you (Google) have for accuracy by letting people create AI slop? Google said there would be a watermark. Don’t bet your life on people not beating that.
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AI market correction emerging as major credit risk • Fitch Ratings

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The scale of the AI investment boom and the accelerated global technology cycle has been a significant driver of US equity market valuations and corporate bond issuance over the past year. The effects on real economic indicators are profound. The 18% yoy rise in IT capital investment directly added 1.4pp [percentage points] to 1Q26 GDP growth. The wealth effect from AI-related investor optimism and equity market gains has also been a meaningful support for US consumer spending growth, which has been broadly slowing.

That said, the medium- and long-term potential of the underlying technology is highly uncertain, as with previous tech cycles. The combination of revenue uncertainty and the extent to which capital markets and economies have become intertwined with AI have created a vulnerability for credit in the event of a re-evaluation of long-run returns potential. Very short-term spikes in market volatility for individual equities and tech-heavy stock indices have already occurred, but a larger, more protracted correction could have wider market, macro and credit effects depending on its scale, duration and contagion.

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Fitch, the ratings company, didn’t call the 2007/8 crash ahead of time, so it’s aiming to get in front of this one.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified