Users of Apple Maps in the US and Canada will start seeing adverts in the app. It’s hard to imagine they’ll serve any purpose except to annoy people. CC-licensed photo by Steve Shook on Flickr.

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

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I watched my village disappear in an instant • Kathmandu Post

Arjun Poudel:

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I was on my way to the Kantipur Publications office in Kathmandu on Wednesday morning when my wife called.

“There’s been a flood in the Trishuli,” she said. “Something’s happened to Sole Bazaar and Betrawati — people are saying there’s nothing left. Everyone’s out on the road. There are videos of them panicking.”

I didn’t believe her. Sole is my village. I played in its lanes, worked its fields, walked its road to school every morning for years. If anyone should know that place, it’s me — so surely I would have known if something like this were possible. I hadn’t even heard that the rain had been unusually heavy. And this isn’t a settlement the river reaches, not even in a bad monsoon. I let it go. I had a news meeting at eleven, and I hurried on.

Betrawati Bazaar is where we shop, where the buses stop, where you can get on one and ride straight into Kathmandu. It’s where my parents used to wait for me, knowing I was on my way home. It’s the heart of the place: a Ram temple, a Krishna temple, the crowds that gathered for Ram Nawami and Krishna Ashtami. Being an old Newar settlement, it had its Gai Jatra too, and in recent years, bull-fighting at Maghe Sankranti that drew people from as far as Kathmandu.

All of that, I would soon learn, was already gone.

I opened a news site to check what my wife had told me, half expecting nothing. The headline read: Massive flood in the Trishuli. Something in my chest tightened. I called Niranjan, a journalist himself, whose family lives in Sole Bazaar — they’d moved down from the village once the bazaar grew, and his uncle lives even closer to the river. He picked up on the first ring.

“I just heard too, dai,” he said, the words coming out in one breath. “I can’t get through to anyone. Not Mummy, not Buwa, not my uncle, my aunt — nobody’s phone is even ringing.”

…There is no road left, no electricity, no phone signal, no internet. Downstream, the flood took the headgate of the Trishuli hydropower station, and then the power station itself. I remember that even during the years of nationwide load-shedding, back in 2010-11, our village never once lost power. Now the whole district sits in the dark.

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Another story at the Post notes that the Nepal government is requesting donations rather than physical help. More than 500 foreign nationals are still missing; it’s not clear how many Nepalese are.
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Fake flood footage inundates social media after Nepal disaster • AAP

Will Nicholas:

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Facebook users are sharing photos and videos falsely claiming to show deadly flooding in Nepal.

The region straddling the Himalayan border between China and Nepal experienced catastrophic flash flooding on Wednesday, August 26, local time.

While many images and videos online are genuine, some social media users have posted either AI-generated content or clips of unrelated disasters.

One Facebook post [shown in the article] features a dramatic before-and-after image supposedly showing the flood’s trail of destruction through an unspecified town.

Meta has labelled the post as “AI content”, indicating the images could be AI-generated.

OpenAI’s detection software1 also found invisible watermarks, known as SynthID, confirming it was AI-generated.

Dozens of other social media accounts have republished the same fabricated images. One YouTube video (below), for example, opens with the fake images before showing a video of bridges straining and collapsing amid a raging torrent.

But YouTube has flagged this video’s sounds and visuals as altered or generated using AI. Google’s SynthID tool also confirms the clips were generated using AI.

Another X account posted an image purportedly showing locals, tourists and rescue workers watching on as a flooded river tears through a valley, with helicopters in flight up above.

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Weird. Why would you want to create fake stuff, when there were plentiful of the real, painful event? And that’s beside mentioning that using AI to create this junk adds incrementally to the atmosphere’s carbon load, and thus to the problem which caused this disaster.
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Grand Theft Auto VI has a new trailer and grand ambitions • The New York Times

Christopher Byrd:

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Since Grand Theft Auto V was released in 2013, it has sold 230 million copies and generated billions in revenue for Rockstar.

“Most blockbusters have an opening weekend,” Geoff Keighley, the creator and host of the Game Awards, said in an email. “G.T.A. has an opening decade.”

Grand Theft Auto VI, the subject of leaks this month, will be expansive: Vice City, its alluring interpretation of Miami, is twice the size of Los Santos, the version of Los Angeles in Grand Theft Auto V, according to Rockstar. The overall map, the studio said, is three times as large as the playable area of its previous game, Red Dead Redemption 2.

It also promises to be incredibly immersive. Unlike in other Grand Theft Auto games, a player in this one cannot whip out a shotgun or a rocket launcher and walk down the street without expecting the nonplayer characters to call the police.

Rob Nelson, who oversees Rockstar North with Aaron Garbut, said he considered Grand Theft Auto VI an evolution of what the studio achieved in 2018 with Red Dead Redemption 2, which told the story of a man unsettled by the erosion of the Wild West. That game’s systems were built to be responsive to a wide array of actions, whether the player was hunting animals, helping someone in hope of a reward or unrepentantly robbing that person instead.

“Once we managed to accomplish that level of interactive fidelity in a more sparsely populated version of America 100 years ago,” Nelson said, “we were already imagining what it would be like if we could do that at the scale and density of a modern environment.”

…Nelson ducked [the game’s protagonist] Jason into a gym, where he walked past people on treadmills and stepped into a squat rack. Unlocking higher weights requires working out and a mastery of technique. By pressing down on the controller’s triggers, players can manage the rise and descent of the movement. Flub the rhythm and it is harder to get out of the hole, which results in stamina drain. Success has a material effect on the character.

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It’s that last point that leaves me thinking: why? Why try to fake real life?
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BBC chief proposes ‘public service algorithm’ with YouTube-style user-generated content • The Guardian

Michael Savage:

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The BBC director general has suggested opening up the BBC to YouTube-style user-generated content as he backed the idea of a “public service algorithm” free from the interests of US tech companies.

Matt Brittin, who arrived at the BBC after 10 years leading Google in Europe, said the corporation and public service media in Britain had the opportunity to build a platform “unadulterated by commercial interests, by algorithms that have other interests at heart”.

Speaking at the Edinburgh TV festival, he said concerns about the influence and impact of social media algorithms were now the “most interesting public debate” in the US. Meta agreed on Wednesday to pay out $18bn (£13.2bn) and make big changes to its platforms after claims of addicting and harming children with dangerous products.

While stating it was not BBC policy, Brittin raised the idea of turning an “iPlayer 2.0” into a YouTube-style site hosting appropriate content from creators. It would be built around an algorithm aimed at “educating, informing and entertaining the public here and ideally around the world”.

“I’d like to be an open platform for creativity,” he said. “What if we could say to people, create content about where you live, about the sports teams you follow, about the skills and the businesses that are in the area, and do that in line with our guidelines,” he said. “You don’t have to be Lyse Doucet, but there would be some BBC guidelines.

“We should have a public service algorithm … [iPlayer] should do it in a way that’s not biased towards the incentives of a US tech company or commercial interests. It should be biased towards what we want public service to be all about.”

Brittin said it would allow creators to access “the expertise and the platform and the reach and the trust in the BBC, in return for signing up for some policies that might be different from YouTube”.

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This is just bonkers. It could never work. First: YouTube exists, and people can make money off it. Second: the amount of moderation and algorithm-tuning required demands lots of resources, which the BBC can’t afford. Third: why not just make iPlayer better by improving its algorithm so I’m not shown rubbish suggestions, given the incredible wealth of content in the BBC archives?
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NVIDIA’s reported $12.9bn Hugging Face deal would turn the compute landlord into the model marketplace • Forkast

Lena Park:

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NVIDIA’s reported $12.9bn acquisition of Hugging Face represents the seventh installment of the compute landlord thesis, marking a definitive shift from merely owning the silicon to controlling the marketplace itself. The Information reported the agreement on August 26, and Reuters confirmed the following day, though neither company has officially confirmed the transaction and NVIDIA has declined to comment.

If realized, this move would transform a platform that has functioned as a neutral utility into a proprietary gateway, allowing the hardware giant to dictate the primary distribution channel for the global AI ecosystem. This follows a series of strategic moves—detailed in our prior coverage of OpenAI, SpaceX, and NVIDIA’s own record-breaking quarterly revenue—that solidify the company’s grip on the infrastructure layer.

Capturing every stage of the compute lifecycle has consistently been the focus of NVIDIA’s playbook. By securing Hugging Face, which hosts nearly 2.96 million models, 1 million datasets, and serves over 50,000 organizations, NVIDIA gains unprecedented visibility into the research and development priorities of the entire industry.

This is not merely a horizontal expansion; it is a structural consolidation. NVIDIA has previously utilized a strategy of licensing and talent acquisition to bypass traditional regulatory scrutiny, a pattern evident in its recent moves involving SchedMD, Groq, Illumex, and the $8bn Poolside deal. By absorbing the Hub, NVIDIA can optimize its hardware roadmap based on real-time data regarding which architectures are gaining traction, turning the infrastructure that builders rely on into a proprietary feedback loop for its own competitive advantage.

Profound geopolitical tension is introduced by this acquisition, particularly regarding the distribution of open-weight models. Hugging Face currently serves as the primary conduit for models like Qwen, DeepSeek, and GLM, which have seen massive adoption. According to the Hugging Face blog ‘State of Open Models: Summer 2026 Observations,’ as of May 2026, Chinese models accounted for approximately 61% of tokens consumed on OpenRouter, and China has surpassed the US in monthly model downloads, capturing roughly 41% of the total. By bringing this infrastructure under the control of a US-based, publicly traded entity, the acquisition creates a potential choke point for the flow of open-source AI technology.

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You can imagine that any US administration – and particularly this one – would be delighted by a US-based entity having that control.
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Apple Maps launches ads on iPhone; here’s what’s new • 9to5Mac

Ryan Christoffel:

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Earlier this year, Apple announced that Maps would get ads in the US and Canada starting this summer. With September almost here, that window was closing.

But Apple has officially hit its target: Apple Maps now officially includes ads.

Apple confirmed to 9to5Mac that the ads rollout in Maps began in the last few days. And it will continue ramping in the weeks ahead to all users.

There are two places you’ll find ads in the Maps app:

1: Before searching: Suggested Places in the search screen will feature an ad.

2: After searching: Ads will appear in search results when relevant.

Ads appear just like every other business listing, except they have a small blue badge that says ‘Ad.’ You can see examples of ads in the images at the top of this story.

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Detestable. The amount of revenue this generates is a fart in a hurricane compared to Apple’s total revenues, and the ill will it will generate means that it’s a net loss. John Gruber was very unimpressed with his results.

When will Americans learn that people enjoy having fewer adverts?
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Fire Emissions Watch • Copernicus

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Wildfire intensity, carbon emissions and smoke for every region — derived from satellite observations by the CAMS Global Fire Assimilation System and compared against 23 years of history.

Fire Emissions Watch shows where wildfires are burning worldwide, how much carbon they release into the atmosphere (as an indicator of a range of pollutants resulting from wildfires), and where the smoke plumes travel. All data comes from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) and is updated every day.

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Fascinating and, as always, muildly depressing to see the scale and location of these. A lot, strangely, seems to be in central Africa.
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Passenger data stolen from major UK airports • Computer Weekly

Alex Scroxton:

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Manchester Airports Group (MAG), the parent organisation that runs East Midlands, Manchester, and London Stansted airports, has admitted an unnamed threat actor has stolen a significant quantity of personally identifiable information (PII) on approximately 8.7 million people who parked at or flew through its airports.

The data breach is understood to relate to parking, lounge and Fast Track bookings, and airport Wi-Fi network sign-ins, and while the IT systems breached did not contain bank or payment details, MAG said the stolen dataset includes identifying email addresses, phone numbers, post codes, and vehicle registration plates.

The incident has not led to any operational disruption, and MAG said the affected services are available as normal with upcoming bookings valid and unaffected. Its online Manage My Booking service, however, is currently offline – travellers who need to make urgent changes to any services due before Sunday 30 August should call 0208 163 8001.

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So MAG was hacked, and its stupid insistence on having your email address and so on to log on to its Wi-Fi (and even more stupid insistence on logging it – why?) means that’s all been stolen too.
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Six Flags rollercoaster lands two women in hospital with alarmingly similar brain injury • CNN

Blake Ellis, Melanie Hicken and Kyung Lah:

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In the span of less than a week this July, surgeons at a Southern California hospital raced to save the lives of two women suffering from alarmingly similar brain hemorrhages.

The severe injuries were the kind doctors encounter in patients after high-speed collisions or other violent accidents that cause the brain to twist and slam inside one’s skull.

Neither woman, however, had been involved in a crash, fall or other such incident.

Instead, they had ridden an extreme roller coaster at Six Flags Magic Mountain, known as X2, which draws thrill-seekers from around the world with its rotating seats, near-vertical drops and unpredictable movements. It has long been the park’s marquee attraction — promoted as a “[rite] of passage for the ultimate daredevil.”

But behind the ride’s legendary reputation lies a troubling record of serious injuries, a CNN investigation has found.

X2 has been linked to more than a dozen reports of serious injuries and hospitalizations over nearly two decades, a review of medical records, depositions and legal filings shows. Among the casualties are riders who suffered life-altering disabilities, fell into comas and two who died of their injuries. Park officials, meanwhile, have long fielded scores of complaints about other head and neck injuries sustained after riding the attraction, according to internal records cited by an expert witness for a plaintiff in court filings.

Yet despite years of warnings from the park’s visitors, attorneys and medical experts about the perils of riding X2, officials at the theme park – located in Valencia, California – and state regulators allowed the attraction to continue operating.

“I personally don’t think head injury should be an expected risk from going on a roller coaster ride, and there is no reason a ride can’t be properly designed to prevent injuries like this,” said Lyndia Wu, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of British Columbia who has researched the effects of roller coasters on the brain.

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Been to Six Flags. Didn’t honestly enjoy it. Certainly didn’t go on that ride. But neck problems seem like an obvious risk, and women have less strength in their necks than men.
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified