Despite what you think you know, landfill is actually a better option for waste disposal than many others. CC-licensed photo by Elliott Brown on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Filling up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
US arrests tech CEO accused of smuggling $300m in Nvidia chips into China • Ars Technica
Ashley Belanger:
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The US has arrested another suspect accused of smuggling high-end computer servers containing export-controlled Nvidia chips into China.
In a press release on Thursday, the Department of Justice accused 38-year-old Greg Lui of using false paperwork to mask shipments of servers worth more than $300m that he allegedly knew were ultimately destined for China.
As the CEO of Earthmade Computer, Lui allegedly conspired with freight-forwarding firms in South Asian countries like Malaysia and Singapore to illegally divert chip shipments into China, including Nvidia’s A100 GPUs and H100 GPUs, the FBI’s indictment alleged. These are not Nvidia’s most advanced chips. However, the chips can process large amounts of data and train large language models, which the US fears could pose national security risks if China suddenly gets access to enough chips to drastically advance its AI or strengthen its military.
Emails and bank records exposed the smuggling scheme, the DOJ alleged, which started in October 2023 and continued until August 2026.
One key piece of evidence is a 2024 email discussing an order for 70 servers with export-restricted GPUs that were fraudulently claimed as destined for Malaysia. After “Lui submitted a purchase order to a US manufacturer for 27 of these servers for approximately $7,614,000,” the DOJ alleged that a co-conspirator told a Malaysian government official that all 27 were shipped to China.
A similar shipment of 92 export-controlled servers was allegedly routed through Singapore to Malaysia, then Hong Kong. Finally, the chips went to a Chinese firm based in Hangzhou, the FBI alleged, which The Wall Street Journal last year described as China’s AI hub.
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It’s the new arms trading!
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I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken • The Atlantic
David Robinson:
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What I’m about to tell you has, I realize, become something of a cliché: I resigned this week from OpenAI. I led the writing of the safety reports we published with each major launch. Now I’m joining a parade of former colleagues—at OpenAI and the industry’s other leaders—who have decided that the current path is unacceptable.
I agree with other recently departed staff that the companies building this technology aren’t being nearly careful enough. But I believe that we need to look deeper than specific rules or new laws. We need to talk about culture.
The future depends on wisdom that Silicon Valley lacks. Wisdom about how to handle dangerous technology and, more fundamentally, wisdom about what it means to care for people. This moment needs a degree of humility that isn’t natural for people who have succeeded through their extreme confidence. My former colleagues at OpenAI were prescient: They came to understand the scaling laws that meant bigger AI systems would be smarter—and so they went all in on building bigger systems, at great cost. A can-do attitude of achieving the seemingly impossible—coupled with work timelines that amount to perpetual sprints—are common across the industry.
…This summer, in the Hugging Face incident, OpenAI let a swarm of agents out by mistake. The company responded by making security improvements. But even after those changes, OpenAI reported that its safety controls failed again, when a model in training bypassed restrictions on internet access: A monitoring system alerted human staff but did not automatically turn the model off as it was supposed to. Anthropic, too, has acknowledged accidentally turning off its own safeguards because of a misconfiguration. I believe that such mistakes are typical of the industry, given the speed and flexibility with which people operate.
…Two changes are urgently needed. First: AI companies need to rely more on the safety expertise that already exists in other fields. And second, before we create systems significantly more capable than the ones we have today, we need new science to ensure that more capable models (and their successors) will make safe choices when we aren’t looking.
Given today’s risks, frontier labs need to run like nuclear-power plants or busy airports, with layers of redundancy and careful, time-consuming planning, so that the occasional and inevitable human error does not open a door to disaster.
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(Gift link.)
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How computer software bugs led to F1’s Malaysia farce: “totally unacceptable” • The Athletic
Luke Smith:
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A heavy shower just before the cars went to the grid prompted the race director to sensibly delay the start. After 40 minutes, once the rain eased sufficiently, a call was made to get going, with a damp track offering the first wet racing of the year.
Max Verstappen led the field away behind the safety car, ready to discover how these all-new cars would perform in the rain. After two formation laps, they would line up on the grid and get racing. Until they couldn’t.
First it was [Max] Verstappen, reporting he was pushing down on the accelerator and feeling nothing, causing him to slow. Then Lewis Hamilton. Then Nico Hülkenberg, Esteban Ocon, Ollie Bearman, Sergio Pérez, all coming to a crawl. One by one, the same problem emerging. Amid the uncertainty, cars around them slowed down to avoid overtaking and a possible breach of the rules.
…The total confusion left race control with no decision but to abandon the plan to get started and return the cars to the pit lane, now in a jumbled-up order. It led to another, longer wait to get going.
The reason for the wait? The FIA, motorsports’ governing body, had to issue a software update for all the teams to install on their cars to fix the computer algorithm that controls the engine and prevent the issue from repeating after a bug had emerged. By the time the race finally began on a considerably drier track, more than 90 minutes had passed since the scheduled 3 p.m. start time.
This season’s all-new engines rely heavily on the software to manage when power is delivered by the battery, which is responsible for almost half of the total power output.
Drivers have complained regularly through this season about how difficult it is to trust the energy deployment at times, with changes from lap to lap. The complexity of the engines has made them hard to understand and created cars that are unnatural to drive. Verstappen referred to F1’s 2026 rules as “anti-racing” back in February.
In Malaysia, that same complexity reared its head in frustrating fashion.
Mercedes and Honda engines were unaffected, but the bug, previously unidentified in the limited wet-weather testing conducted with these cars, left many drivers frustrated.
“It’s obviously not great what happened,” said Pérez, who said his car felt like a rental go-kart. “I’m sure we will learn from it, but what happened today is totally unacceptable for the sport.”
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Analysis: wind and solar save UK from gas imports worth £5.9bn during Hormuz crisis • Carbon Brief
Simon Evans and Ho Woo Nam:
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The UK has avoided the need for gas imports worth £5.9bn since the start of the Hormuz crisis as a result of record generation from wind and solar, reveals Carbon Brief analysis.
While gas prices are surging to levels not seen since the 2022 energy crisis, the UK has been generating record amounts of power from wind and solar, up 14% year-on-year.
This unprecedented clean-power generation is directly cutting the need for gas-fired electricity, which is down by nearly 10% year-on-year in 2026 to date. In total, wind and solar have generated a record 41% share of the UK’s electricity needs in 2026 to date, compared with 25% from gas, according to Carbon Brief’s analysis.
Wind and solar has avoided the need for UK gas imports worth £5.9bn, since the outbreak of war between the US and Iran in February 2026. These avoided gas imports would have required the UK to secure the equivalent of more than 100 additional tanker deliveries of liquefied natural gas (LNG).
…From this Thursday, 1 October, typical household gas bills will be 33% higher than they were in April, some £200 per year, according to thinktank Nesta. By contrast, household electricity bills will only have risen 4%, according to Nesta’s analysis, as a result of growing generation from clean-energy sources.
Andrew Sissons, director for sustainable future at Nesta, explained in a social media post that “the link between electricity and gas prices has already begun to break”.
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Would have been useful to know how many LNG tankers came in over that period. Are we talking about a 1%, 10%, 40% reduction? Also: a typical 15,600 cubic metre LNG tanker can carry cargo worth about $2m, but the “100 tankers avoided” equation suggests the cargo is worth $59m. Anyway: it’s a lot.
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Just bury your trash • Works In Progress
Alex Chalmers and Rob Wiblin:
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The case against landfill has two parts. The first part is that there are efficient, cheap, or environmentally friendly ways to practically reuse or recycle materials, rather than landfilling, meaning that there is a reasonable alternative. The second is that landfill itself is unsustainable, or environmentally unfriendly, meaning that we need an alternative. Both are false.
It’s natural to assume that reusable always means better. But this intuition treats different materials as interchangeable and ignores the cost of making them in the first place. Once we account for energy, labor, and other inputs, reuse pays off only in selective cases.
Producing tiny slivers of plastic uses almost no energy. Making the polyethylene resin for a single thin plastic bag, then blowing and sealing it, uses something like 0.6 megajoules, roughly the same energy as boiling a kettle of water. By contrast, cotton is extremely energy intensive, partly because cotton bags need to be much thicker to work, and weigh around 200g as compared to 8g for polyethylene. Instead of a simple blowing and sealing process, the cotton must be made into yarn, woven into fabric, prepared, dried, sized, dyed, and finished, which takes around 17.5 megajoules, around 29 times as much energy.
In total, Britain’s Environment Agency calculated that a conventional cotton bag needed to be reused 173 times to beat plastic. Denmark’s equivalent public body estimated a similar ratio. Sufficiently well-worn cotton tote bags can beat plastic for environmental cost, but only for the most consistent among us.
The same pattern shows up almost everywhere we have tried to replace disposable goods with durable ones. Steel is more energy intensive than plastic, and a steel straw requires 10g of steel, compared to just 0.2g of plastic for a plastic straw. So even if the steel is never washed (hot water is also energy intensive), it would take 150 reuses for a steel straw to use fewer resources than a plastic one. And who would go without washing it?
A ceramic mug only beats a polystyrene cup on energy use after 1,000 uses, and even then only if your dishwasher is fairly efficient. Run a less efficient one and the disposable cup wins on energy forever. Cloth diapers feel greener than disposables, but once you account for the cotton, the laundering, the hot water, and the detergent, the UK Environment Agency found the two are roughly tied in overall demand on resources. A returnable milk bottle takes much more energy to produce and much more fuel to transport than a plastic carton, and has to make around ten or more trips to use less energy than a bottle made from polyethylene plastic.
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But, you object (I did), all that plastic is thrown away and pollutes places, surely? No:
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Richer countries have near-universal refuse collection and almost none of their waste winds up in the ocean. In low-income countries, however, over 90% of waste is improperly managed, and typically ends up dumped, burned, or escaping into waterways. Plastic flows into the ocean overwhelmingly come from a small handful of rapidly growing Asian economies. Approximately a hundred rivers, mostly in South and South-East Asia, account for half of ocean plastic. And a substantial share of plastic in the ocean isn’t domestic waste at all, but rather discarded fishing gear.
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There’s more, too, about how modern (properly managed) landfills work.
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Meta wants your next gadget to be Muse-infused • TechCrunch
Kirsten Korosec:
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Meta’s Muse, a personal AI agent that books travel, fills out forms, and shops on a user’s behalf, has already proven popular with the masses, but a new side project could be particularly alluring to tinkerers and hackers.
On Friday, the company introduced Muse Gadgets, an open-source project that lets developers build their own hardware that connects to Muse.
Meta is providing open-source firmware (the low-level software that runs a device), and a Linux software development kit (SDK), along with a few project ideas to get users started. These include giving Muse a color e-ink display or loading it onto a stick that plugs into a TV’s HDMI port.
There don’t appear to be many limits, either. Users can set up a low-cost hobbyist computer like a Raspberry Pi or an off-the-shelf ESP32 board, and then connect Muse “to your displays, buttons, sensors, actuators, and whatever else you’ve got lying on your workbench,” Meta notes.
The company has also set up a Discord channel to support users.
Meta has already tried the code itself, naturally. Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, said in a post on X that the company built a gadget called Muse Home Link. The USB-C-powered device lets Muse connect to a home network and talk to the smart devices on it, including speakers and smart TVs.
Meta made 5,000 of these Home Links, in fact, and is giving them away for free to Muse subscribers while supplies last, according to Friedman. Considering Friedman’s post about Home Link received nearly 30,000 views in a few hours, we’re guessing those freebies have been claimed. Friedman said Home Link would be ready to ship a few weeks.
Muse Gadgets may not have wide appeal, but it fits nicely into Meta’s all-in strategy to make Muse more than a standalone chatbot. Meta isn’t content to push Muse on everyday consumers; it’s also trying to woo small businesses and enterprises.
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Clever little Trojan Horse strategy they’ve got going on there.
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my9albums: pick the 9 albums that made you
Nahue Alberti:
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Pick the 9 albums that made you.
Search more than two million albums, put your nine in order, and share the poster.
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Fun little distraction which has shown us how disparate people’s music tastes can be. (Also that post-2006 or so it’s difficult to think of things in terms of albums.)
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Things that apparently cause cancer • Breakthrough Journal
Deric Tilson and Adam Stein:
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It would shock you to know that Costco, according to a new Harvard School of Public Health methodology, caused 120,687 cases of cancer mortality nationally every year, simply due to living in close proximity to their warehouses. Private colleges accounted for 83,782 more. Harvard itself is responsible for 5,842 cancer deaths. Living near a Major League Baseball field causes almost 19 times as many cancer deaths as living near a Major League Soccer pitch. These conclusions are obviously absurd, but they come from the exact same methodology that researchers at Harvard use to “prove” that nuclear power plants cause cancer in nearby communities.
Earlier this year, Adam Stein and I called out a series of Harvard studies showing that nuclear power plants were associated with higher rates of cancer incidence and cancer mortality as nonsense. Now that we’ve spent the last few months replicating the analysis and expanding it, we are able to show that no matter what landmark you use, their methodology will show an increased cancer risk and mortality. The studies simply do not prove anything about cancer incidence.
…The papers construct a “proximity score” based on distance from nuclear plants, up to 120 km in Massachusetts and 200 km in the national studies (about 75 and 125 miles). Every ZIP code or county inside those radii is treated as exposed, with closer locations receiving higher weights. If a ZIP code or county is within range of multiple sites, then the effect is cumulative. That means that a county that is in close proximity to one nuclear power plant could have a smaller score than another county that is further away from any one power plant but within range of many.
From this proximity score, the authors run regressions testing the outcome (cancer incidence, cancer mortality, or total mortality) on the proximity of the county and a collection of covariates. From this, they use the statistical coefficients, construct the Relative Risk for each county, age, and sex group, and compute the Attributable Fraction, from which they derive the number of attributed deaths from the nuclear power plant from 2000 to 2018.
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Basically, living near enough to any object “causes cancer”, using that methodology.
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FedEx believes $300m electric truck spend will save them $800m in diesel • Electrek
Jo Borrás:
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In a record-setting commercial truck deal, international shipping giant FedEx has placed an order for 2,000 all-electric box trucks from American startup Harbinger in a deal that’s reportedly worth more than $300 million – but the ROI could be much higher.
FedEx is making serious moves to fully electrify its operating fleet by 2040, and this latest Harbinger deal is believed to be one of the largest binding orders for electric medium or heavy-duty trucks in history. It’s certainly Harbinger’s largest order, at least.
…Harbinger estimates that each of the electric Class 5 and 6 medium-duty box trucks delivered will reduce FedEx’ fuel costs by around $20,000 annually compared with the conventional diesel-powered vehicle they replace. Additionally, Harbinger says its vehicles are designed for a functional service life of 20 years.
2,000 trucks x $20,000 in fuel savings per year x 20 years. That works out to $800m in total savings, for a whopping ~166% ROI.
“Electrifying a fleet at this scale requires vehicles that can perform the work our robust operations demand while also delivering meaningful economic benefits,” said Paul Melander, Senior Vice President Safety & Transportation, FedEx and member of Harbinger’s Board of Directors. “Expanding our deployment of Harbinger vehicles gives us an opportunity to continue making progress toward our fleet electrification goals while reducing fuel and operating costs.”
Saving money is great, but the much more important issue for you and me is that the move to Harbinger electric trucks will help FedEx avoid more than 1.7m tons of CO2 emissions over their projected operating lives.
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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. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
