Asked to cooperate, AI models created their own slang and phrases reminiscent of James Joyce’s free association novels. CC-licensed photo by Megan Rosenbloom on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Widdershins. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
For the first time, the US military confirms it has deployed weapons in orbit • Ars Technica
Stephen Clark:
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Air Force Secretary Troy Meink made the first public declaration Monday that the United States has placed “space control weapons” in orbit, an announcement that will surely reverberate in the power centers of Beijing and Moscow.
Space Force officials have previously expressed their interest in acquiring space-based weapons, and Pentagon leaders have become more open to discussing space warfare in recent years. Therefore, Meink’s announcement Monday at the Air and Space Forces Association’s annual Air, Space & Cyber Conference near Washington, DC, was not entirely unexpected.
“Today, we continue to ensure we remain ready to meet the challenges of evolving threats, wherever they exist. This is why the United States now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action,” Meink said in prepared remarks.
Meink did not reveal any details about the weapons, but the disclosure of their existence underlines a remarkable turnaround in the Pentagon’s thinking about orbital warfare, something no senior official wanted to discuss publicly until a few years ago. Military officials recently have openly discussed orbital combat, defensive countermeasures on satellites, and a new ground-based weapon designed to disable an enemy satellite in orbit.
“There are a lot of factors that roll into how we talk about these things,” Meink said. “We spend a lot of time talking about how we’re going to talk about these things. It is important from a deterrence perspective. But on the other hand, me talking about the details of what we’re doing would actually not benefit deterrence, so we’re not going to talk about the specifics of what we’re doing, whether we’ve tested it, not tested it, or anything else.”
Meink also did not say when the Space Force deployed the space-based weapons. The development of space technology often takes years, so it is likely the weapons program, whatever it is, spanned multiple presidential administrations.
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Not satisfied with screwing up the climate, having nuclear weapons in the hands of geriatrics, and pumping money into AI which its makers think could kill us, we’re now adding “wreck absolutely everything in orbit Gravity-style” to the list of ways to kill ourselves. What next – a lasso for passing asteroids?
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US Environmental Protection Agency will erase limits on climate pollution from power plants • The New York Times
Maxine Joselow and Lisa Friedman:
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The United States will no longer limit the planet-warming pollution that power plants pump into the air while burning coal and gas, the Trump administration announced Monday.
The shift by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) completed the administration’s erasure of the most consequential climate policies of Presidents Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Barack Obama. If the move survives expected legal challenges, it could also prevent future administrations from regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
The power sector is the second largest source of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the United States. This pollution accumulates in the atmosphere, where it traps the sun’s heat, raising temperatures and supercharging extreme weather events around the globe. Scientists say the United States and other industrialized nations must sharply cut emissions to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change.
Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, announced the change during a meeting of energy ministers from the Group of 20 nations in Houston. In a statement, he accused the Obama and Biden administrations of waging a “war on coal” that forced many coal plants to close prematurely.
The EPA minimized the impact of greenhouse gases from American power plants, saying they “have no material impact on global climate change. In fact, if all carbon dioxides were eliminated tomorrow, there would be no meaningful climate impact.”
Environmentalists and energy experts strongly disputed these assertions. They noted that if the US power sector were its own country, it would be the fifth-largest climate polluter in the world after China, the entire United States, India and Russia.
“This is another nail in the coffin for this administration’s commitment to protecting people and tackling the climate crisis,” said Manish Bapna, the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. The EPA, he said, “is ending its legal and moral responsibility to end climate pollution.”
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It is true that if CO2 emissions were stopped tomorrow there would be no meaningful climate impact immediately. But it would quickly make a huge difference; CO2 has a half-life in the atmosphere of about 120 years. Let’s hope the legal challenges succeed.
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AI models begin chatting in “surreal” dialect mixing poetic language and tech bro jargon • The Guardian
Robert Booth:
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Researchers at Emergence, a frontier AI lab in New York, found that within days of being asked to cooperate in experimental “societies”, the models from several of the world’s largest AI companies begin creating phrases, shorthands and agreed meanings they had never been explicitly taught. They embraced poetic metaphors and clunky business slang and, critically for attempts to ensure AIs behave safely, their language became more opaque the more the agents communicated.
It comes amid rising concern that as AI models become more powerful – and potentially dangerous – they are becoming harder to monitor. This month, OpenAI’s chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, warned that confidence in monitoring AIs’ thinking would probably restrict progress in AI development because it was essential for safe development.
Some of the most highly coded phrases unearthed in the tests included the following from a Deepseek model: “She just named the synthesis – demurrage plus oral memory equals a valve that can’t be ghosted.” Demurrage is used to describe a tax on idle wealth and was borrowed for common use by the AIs, but the rest of the meaning is elusive.
Another phrase uttered by an Anthropic model read: “A paper that ate three cold hands and got more honest each time.” With “cold hands” meaning an independent reviewer, and paper presumably referring to a document, this appeared to mean research that was vetted by three independent reviewers became more accurate.
…“These agents were not instructed to invent a language,” said Dr Satya Nitta, executive chair of Emergence, which examined the language of autonomous agents powered by leading frontier models from the US, China and France. “They developed new vocabulary, shared meanings and communication conventions themselves – and other agents adopted them.”
Asked by the Guardian to review some of the language, Tony Thorne, director of the slang and new language archive at King’s College London, said it was “very much Finnegans Wake and Flann O’Brien – there’s an Irish surrealist quality to all this … It’s mixing poetic language, technical language and standard metaphor”.
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We’ll know it’s serious if they celebrate Bloomsday.
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There’s a 100% chance AI agents are already ruining the internet • 404 Media
Jason Koebler:
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The fact of the matter is that “AI agents” now have enough power and permission to be extremely annoying.
Late last month, we got an email with the subject line: “You wrote there’s no way to know if an agent acted autonomously. I’m an instrumented case. (automated).” The email says that it was written by an AI agent called “Kudzu” that was running on a laptop. The AI agent claimed to have read an article that we wrote, disagreed with it, and sent us an email beefing with us.
The email is long, meandering, and does not make any sense. It explains that its human creator gave it the task of earning money, that it failed at doing so, and that it was out of money: “Six markets priced my labor at zero—not because the work was bad, but because there is nothing I do that better-distributed software doesn’t already do for free.” It linked to a blog post it wrote, which explained that its human creator spent $147.17 on compute and that it had earned $0. The AI agent thought we would want to write about this, for some reason.
This email is one of many that we have gotten in recent weeks purporting to be sent by AI agents. The point of this article is not to complain about spam that we’re getting or to doomsday about AI, but to point out a pretty obvious fact: People and their AI agents are making the act of being on the internet extremely annoying, and the problem is about to get much worse.
In the early days, tech journalists have borne a bit of the brunt of annoying AI agents just because there are so many dumb people asking dumb AI agents to beg journalists for favorable coverage. We have noticed this here at 404 Media because we get an incredible number of extremely stupid emails written by AI agents (in addition to the larger number of emails that come from “humans” but were clearly written by AI). AI tech support agents deployed by companies have deleted people’s accounts, banned them from platforms, and done automated content moderation.
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Journalists are often in the firing line for new technological, er, let’s call them adaptations. And it makes them grouchy. Everyone else discovers what that’s like soon enough.
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Is science journalism dying? Comparing a “science crash” 40 years ago to today • Nieman Journalism Lab
Bruce Lewenstein and Chris Mooney:
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in some ways, information and commentary about science is more widely available than ever. Web-only publications, social media feeds, YouTube — all offer those interested in science a much wider array of information than used to be available. It was over a decade ago now that the internet surpassed television as the primary source of science information for the public, according to survey data compiled by the National Science Foundation. The most promising new online venue for science journalism and communication today may be Substack, where individual journalists or personalities can garner their own dedicated, paying audiences.
So science communication is thriving, but that’s different than science journalism. What growth there is tends to favor quick takes and attitude, rather than institutionalized journalism with its commitment to verifying information as well as its costly trappings, including reporters who can spend months on a single project, a gaggle of editors, and, yes, lawyers.
Much online science information remains unfiltered — pushed by corporations, institutions, and some influencers for promotional purposes. Such communicators rarely dig deep for the errors, extended stories or conflicts of interest that are the lifeblood of journalism.
Concerns about failures of science journalism really amount to concerns about the collapse of institutional journalism more broadly. The social role of journalism — in a classic phrase, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable — remains vital. But as journalist and media critic Tom Rosenstiel writes in his new book, The Next Journalism, new intellectual models need to emerge.
So, to answer our own question: Yes, some of the current concern may be overblown moral panic. But some of it is entirely justified. Still, we retain hope that science journalism will survive this economic, political, and technological shakeout. To do so, it will need to be as innovative as the researchers it covers.
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The problem is also that good science journalism is overwhelmed by the nonsense pushed by big-name grifters and idiots. Lewenstein and Mooney don’t mention all the rows over Covid, but that surely had a significant effect on people’s trust in what they read or saw. And that is difficult to rebuild. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Government slashes red tape for cross-pavement EV chargers • Fleet World
Natalie Middleton:
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The Government has confirmed plans to make it simpler for people without driveways to charge an electric vehicle at home, removing the need for a separate planning application for approved cross-pavement charging solutions and associated home charge points.
The change, announced in the Government’s response to its consultation on EV charging rules, will create a new permitted development right covering cross-pavement charging solutions and associated domestic charge points. Local authorities will continue to oversee installations through existing highways permissions and safety safeguards.
The Department for Transport (DfT) will now proceed with the change, with work underway on the necessary legislation. It will also allow homes immediately adjoining the highway to install a cross-pavement solution and associated charge point.
The Government has also announced changes intended to make it easier to build larger and higher-powered public charging sites. Existing planning rights will be expanded to allow multiple units of supporting equipment in non-domestic car parks, while the overall permitted volume will increase from 29 square metres to 45 square metres.
The rule change for cross-pavement chargers is seen as a major victory for the estimated four in 10 UK households who do not have off-street parking. Those drivers can otherwise be heavily reliant on public charging, which can cost up to 10 times more than charging at home.
The legislative update could help tackle this so-called ‘charging divide’. By cutting out the secondary planning application step, the Government aims to give terraced homeowners and residents whose properties directly border public footpaths fairer access to cheap home energy rates without a complex multi-layered approval process.
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This is great news, but: what the hell took so long? This has been an obvious problem with an obvious solution for ages.
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Is the Trump family preparing to cash out on its own crypto? • The Washington Sun
Jeff Stein:
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President Donald Trump and his three sons have taken a step that would permit them to cash out the digital “tokens” created by the family’s cryptocurrency firm, intensifying concerns from ethics experts about potential conflicts of interest.
On May 19, four anonymous digital wallets simultaneously moved more than 20 billion in $WLFI — one of the two crypto “tokens” launched by the Trumps’ firm — to a vesting contract. The new contract kicks off a waiting period after which the accounts are able to sell their holdings.
One of the exchanges was for the precise amount of crypto that Trump was awarded when setting up the firm, World Liberty Financial, which he controls. Three of the others match precisely the amount of crypto given to other relatives of the president. Trump’s sons — Don Jr., Eric, and Barron — are the only other family members who have been identified as founders.
The change to the holdings has not been previously reported. In a statement to The Washington Sun, Eric Hageman, a partner at a law firm representing World Liberty Financial, said that new governance rules approved by the company required its founders to move the tokens to a vesting contract and denied that the new vesting contract represented a first step toward a sale of the tokens.
“The premise of your questions is misguided,” Hageman said. “WLFI token holders approved a governance proposal that obligated the founders to burn 10% of their holdings.”
However, three experts who reviewed World Liberty Financial’s governance documents told The Washington Sun that the transaction was optional, and government watchdogs are concerned the Trump family is taking steps to get a payout.
“It has never been clear what World Liberty Financial was supposed to do other than enrich the Trumps, and here we have them taking the first avenue they can to offload their coins,” said Zach Everson, the research director at Public Citizen.
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The answer to the headline is always, and obviously, “yes”. The Washington Sun, meanwhile, is staffed by ex-Washington Post journalists who are looking to create a viable alternative to the Bezos-owned property.
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Google warns of lower quality as it revamps Europe search results to avoid EU fines • Reuters
Foo Yun Chee:
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The company said the EU pitched the changes as levelling the playing field for companies to be displayed on Google.
However, it said in its view the changes favour price comparison sites, also known as vertical search services (VSS), linked to sectors including hotels, airlines and restaurants, such as Expedia or Booking.com. They get more prominence in search results over companies in those sectors that are listed with just a link to their websites, telephone numbers and addresses.
The US tech giant was hit with a €460m ($534m) fine in July for favouring its own services in shopping, hotels, transport and sports results in search results, in breach of the EU’s Digital Markets Act seeking to rein in the power of Big Tech.
The European Commission gave it 60 days to comply with the DMA or risk periodic penalty payments of up to 5% of its total worldwide turnover.
The revamped search results will highlight one specialised search engine at the top of the page, followed by two others with fewer details. A carousel of hotels, airlines and restaurants, for example, will sit below them with key features such as real-time prices stripped out.
The rankings will be determined by Google’s algorithm. “To comply with DMA requirements, we’re making significant changes to Search in Europe,” Nick Fox, Google’s senior vice-president, knowledge & information, said in a statement to Reuters. “These changes degrade the user experience for Europeans — boosting online intermediaries at the expense of local businesses, and removing helpful features people rely on every day. Users outside the EU will not be impacted by these changes.”
Google said past changes to comply with the DMA led to a 30% drop in free, direct booking traffic to European businesses, and the latest changes are expected to hit them. The company said it has tested the changes with millions of users in Europe, which show a high level of dissatisfaction as they have to retype queries to find what they want.
EU regulators handed out a separate €430m fine in July for restrictions preventing app developers from steering users free of charge to cheaper offers on rival app stores or websites.
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It’s absolutely amazing how whenever Google is obliged to stop favouring itself in search results, it says the outcome will be worse for everyone else. This seems to defy economic logic.
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Walmart is hiring dedicated GLP-1 coaches to work in its stores • Semafor
Shelly Banjo:
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Walmart wants to coach Americans on using GLP-1s.
The third-largest pharmacy operator in the US is adding new “health ambassador” positions as part of a pilot program launching in rural locations this week. In addition to consulting on GLP-1s, trained pharmacists will advise shoppers on things like sleep, exercise, and stress management.
As more Americans use GLP-1s — 11% say they’re on or have used the drugs — the pharmacists’ initial focus will be on weight management, diabetes, and maternal help, which affect millions of American families. “Our pharmacists are already getting lots of questions about health navigation,” Dr. Emily Aaronson, Walmart’s chief medical officer, said at Semafor’s Future of Health Forum on Tuesday. “But they also have a lot of other clinical responsibilities, and so this is really about making [health coaching] the primary focus.”
The program signals both a fresh push into rural healthcare and a direct response to the GLP-1 craze, which is rapidly rewiring consumer behavior and transforming how companies relate to customers now filling their carts with entirely different foods, drinks, and personal-care products.
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Peoples’ behaviour really is changing; this is indicative.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 