You might think that being an electrician or builder is AI-proof, but could you actually survive doing it? CC-licensed photo by Rainier Martin Ampongan on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Sparky. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
BT agrees rescue deal to buy broadband operator TalkTalk • BBC News
Mithcell Labiak:
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The UK’s biggest broadband provider, BT, has agreed to buy rival operator TalkTalk to save the company from collapse.
The takeover would end of months of speculation over the future of TalkTalk and mean services for its millions of customers will continue as normal. BT boss Alison Kirkby said it provided “a safety net” for TalkTalk customers. The administrator, Alvarez & Marsal, said it also provided certainty for TalkTalk’s 900 staff based in Salford, Greater Manchester.
However, Virgin Media called it a “stitch-up” which allows BT to “tighten its grip” over the market. The government has given itself the power to have the final say on the deal, citing its importance to vital public services. TalkTalk has 1.5 million retail customers and one million wholesale customers across the UK.
BT’s Kirkby told the BBC’s Today programme: “Two and a half million customers, including vulnerable households, and key emergency services might have lost their services if Talk Talk had failed, which it was on track to do. So BT stepped in as we were the only viable option to take the business forward.”
…TalkTalk began as a challenger to BT in the broadband market. It was listed on the London Stock Exchange, but was taken over by private equity in 2021. [In fact: taken private by its founder and others – Overspill Ed.] Since then, the firm has built up debt while losing customers, leaving it unable to pay some of those it owes money to.
Despite this, TalkTalk remained the fourth biggest broadband provider in the UK, with 6.6% of customers, during the March to June period of this year, according to figures from analytic firm Opensignal. BT has 32.5% of customers, Sky 19.9%, and Virgin Media 19.1%.
Rivals who were beaten to the deal by BT have said it will be bad for consumers. Tom O’Hagan, a former TalkTalk executive who was leading a takeover bid for the firm, told the BBC he was worried about “reduced choice and potentially an increase in price for consumers and for businesses” because of the BT deal. He added that he was particularly concerned about competition in the wholesale market, where TalkTalk’s subsidiary PXC was BT’s main rival.
Virgin Media, which has also reportedly tried to buy TalkTalk in the past, said the BT takeover has “all the characteristics of a stitch-up masked as a rescue deal in the public interest”.
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The quiet collapse of TalkTalk had completely passed me by. But why has Lisa Nandy approved BT rather than Virgin or Sky, the two smallest, to buy it? Was Virgin’s price so wrong? This entrenches the largest company which also has control of the network provision – taking us back to the time before TalkTalk existed. Another great piece of work by Nandy, who rivals chocolate teapots for usefulness.
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Siberian anti-plague institute staff isolated after worker’s death • Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL)
RFE/RL’s Siberia.Realities and Alex Raufoglu:
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More than 60 staff at a Russian plague research facility have been isolated following the death of a laboratory worker, sources told RFE/RL’s Siberia.Realities, and the United States said it was monitoring reports of a suspected case of pneumonic plague.
Darya Shipilova, a 28-year-old laboratory technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East, was hospitalized on September 29 and died at a hospital early on October 2, according to news reports and sources.
Independent Siberian news outlet Lyudi Baikala (People of Baikal) reported that Shipilova accidentally broke a test tube containing pneumonic-plague bacteria on September 25 while working at the institute. Russian authorities have not publicly confirmed that account.
Rospotrebnadzor, Russia’s consumer and public-health watchdog, said Shipilova had been diagnosed with “pneumonia of unknown etiology,” meaning that its cause was unknown. The agency said additional testing was conducted because of her professional activities but did not detect microorganisms associated with her work.
Rospotrebnadzor also said no accidents involving pathogenic microorganisms had been recorded at the institute.
…In a Telegram post on October 5, regional Governor Igor Kobzev said the “sanitary and epidemiological situation in Irkutsk” and the nearby district where Shipilova had been hospitalized “is currently stable.” He added that no new cases of institute employees seeking medical care had been reported in recent days.
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OK, it’s just about possible that Shipilova caught pneumonic plague from a wild animal. But you’d really look to Occam’s Razor to tell you that it’s more likely she was involved in a lab accident. (This reads across oddly to Covid, of course.) Seems like the Russians have already got their own watching brief going on this one.
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AI glasses face their first major government crackdown • Financial Times via Ars Technica
Richard Milne:
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Norway has become the first major country to propose a temporary ban on the use of AI glasses in selected public places amid growing privacy concerns over wearable technology.
The rich Scandinavian country’s centre-left government said on Monday that it would introduce a law to parliament soon on a temporary ban for places such as parks, beaches, schools, and kindergartens. It will also set up an expert group to propose permanent national rules.
“I am concerned about the introduction of powerful new technology where people risk being photographed, filmed, or recorded without their knowledge,” said Torgeir Micaelsen, Norway’s digitalization minister. A temporary ban “will give us time to conduct a thorough assessment and hold an informed debate that can lay the foundation for permanent regulation,” he said.
Governments around the world are grappling with how to regulate AI glasses—including those from Facebook owner Meta and cheaper copycat devices—amid worries that they are being used to film people without their consent, including children and women in settings such as changing rooms.
Parts of Norwegian society have already reacted with their own bans, including schools in the capital Oslo and the country’s biggest company, oil and gas major Equinor, which has banned them from its offices and offshore facilities.
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Very rare for a government to get out ahead of (or level with) a new technology; bravo Norway for at least bringing it up.
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Micron CEO says memory supply will be much tighter in 2027 and 2028 than in 2026 • TechPowerUp
Usman Saleem:
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Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra says memory and storage supply will likely be much tighter in 2027 and 2028 than it was in 2026. He made the remarks during Micron’s fiscal Q4 2026 earnings call on September 30, where the company reported record quarterly revenue of $54.2bn. Here’s what he said:
“Industry demand has strengthened since our last earnings call, and we expect memory and storage supply-demand conditions to be much tighter in fiscal 2027 and 2028 than they were in 2026. AI is becoming super intelligent, and memory enhances this intelligence and the competitiveness of our customers’ platforms. Even with additional industry DRAM clean room space plans with robust demand trends, including new upside requests from customers, we do not have line of sight to when supply and demand will return to balance.”
In June, Micron CEO said they expected industry supply to improve gradually in 2028, but couldn’t predict when supply would catch up with demand. The company now says it still has no line of sight to a balance, even with additional industry cleanroom space planned.
New capacity takes time as well, since Micron’s Idaho ID2 fab is only expected to start wafer output in late 2028. Mehrotra also said more than 75% of Micron’s 2027 output is already committed to customers. On the consumer side, Micron said DRAM prices rose in the high-teens% range last quarter, with NAND up about 30%.
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Well, that’s the PC and (to a lesser extent smartphone) businesses screwed for the foreseeable, then.
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Webster man celebrating the 100th birthday of the kidney his mom donated to him as a teenager • WHEC.com
Jennifer Lewke:
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A Webster man is celebrating the 100th birthday of the kidney his mom donated to him as a teenager. In March 1978, surgeons at Strong Hospital transplanted a kidney into 16-year-old Ray Vetuskey. The story behind that kidney is now one for the record books.
Vetuskey grew up in Seabreeze as the youngest of five kids and always had a special bond with his mom Betty, “she was a great lady; everyone loved her in the neighborhood,” Vetuskey recalls.
When he was a teenager, Vetuskey started having health issues and doctors ran several tests. “They told the doctors that the kidneys aren’t working and put me on dialysis,” Vetuskey says. The dialysis did not help; his kidneys didn’t recover and the only option was a transplant.
Betty Vetuskey, who was 52 years old at the time, offered one of her kidneys to her son. “I don’t think she gave it two thoughts, anything she could do to help her son, I think she would have done anything which she did in my eyes,” Vetuskey remembers.
Vetuskey still has his calendar from March 1978, with the date of his surgery circled along with another date for a Genesis concert. “We were both on the gurneys, holding hands and mom was crying and said don’t worry about a thing because I got a concert to go to and I’m not going to miss it,” he says with a laugh.
The transplant was a success and Vetuskey made it to the concert, “I have the ticket still, I have the ticket stub still,” he says.
Forty-eight years later, Betty’s kidney is still working for her son, making him the longest surviving kidney transplant recipient in Strong Hospital’s history.
…A living kidney donation typically lasts 15 to 20 years. “The special connection, biologically it’s important as well as mom and son sharing a lot of DNA but also emotionally that’s a different connection,” Dr. Molnar says.
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This seems like a much more interesting story than just being an anniversary. Is the DNA similarity why this kidney survived so well?
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So you think you could be an electrician? • Asterisk
Jesse Smith:
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When I was 20, I broke both my heels in a construction accident. The right one was surgically reassembled using four heel fragments and extra bone from my hip. Workplace accidents seem to have worse outcomes than similar accidents occurring elsewhere, and at the time this specific injury had a generally poor prognosis, so doctors were initially uncertain whether I’d be permanently disabled.
When I think about my teenage son or daughter working in construction, my mind often goes to The Accident. I picture my daughter, who’s three years younger than I was at the time, wheeling to The Beer Store in a Workers’ Comp rental wheelchair each day, and coming home to down 12-pack of Molson Canadian. Or I think of my son sleeping with a fan every night to overpower the ringing in his ears. Over enough time, physical jobs exact a physical toll that desk jobs largely avoid.
Most white-collar professions have a trivially small risk of death. Even in gray-collar jobs that are widely perceived as dangerous, such as policing, most workplace deaths are caused by motor vehicles. But some trades jobs carry a risk of death or serious injury connected to specific and inherent job demands. That is, something that seems dangerous that you often do is the most likely to harm or kill you.
Jobs performed at heights, such as ironwork or roofing, have a high mortality due to falling. Electrical linesmen tend to be killed by electrocution. Arborists can be killed in a variety of ways: falling from heights, being struck by trees or electrocuted. For people in these jobs, these risks are widely understood and accepted. Almost every tradesperson knows someone who’s had at least one protracted absence due to a work injury, and many of us know someone who was permanently disabled or killed. These risks are probably less salient for people who have worked mainly white-collar jobs and know few people employed in dangerous professions.
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Easily overlooked but undoubtedly true.
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What’s the future for pure math research in the age of AI? • Stephen Wolfram Writings
Stephen Wolfram (you know, one of the guys who produced Mathematica in 1988):
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We’ll talk later about the general character and value of pure mathematics. But before that, let’s address the issue of the moment: the role of modern AI.
And the first thing to say is that it’s unquestionably useful, sometimes very useful. For me, its greatest use in mathematical pursuits has been its ability in effect to thematically mine the knowledgebase of human mathematics. Starting back in the 1970s, being able to do keyword searches of the scientific literature was a crucial enabler of quite a bit of the research that I did. And now, with modern AI, one can do so much more. Because somewhere inside those LLMs—in a way that we don’t yet scientifically understand—there’s what amounts to a representation of raw ideas gleaned from all those millions of papers and books about mathematics.
And, at its best, it’s not just about retrieving things. It’s also about making connections. Of being able to see that this result here can be put together with that result there to come up with a surprising and useful conclusion. Humans routinely do that too. But they tend to have only read hundreds of papers; AIs have effectively read millions, and it’s cheap for them in effect to try out lots and lots of possible combinations.
So can one expect to just launch an AI off and have it come back with great math? As we’ll discuss, great math is—more than anything else—defined by the questions it asks. Yes, the AI can successfully automate things that humans would normally have had to do themselves before. But—as we’ll discuss later—at the core of pure mathematics is the human imagination that guides what questions to ask.It’s worth understanding the difference between what modern AI does, and what pure computation does. Modern AI is, first and foremost, a way of leveraging the existing corpus of human knowledge. Computation is—at its most powerful—an open-ended way to generate things that are fundamentally and irreducibly new. Start from some rule or axiom, and just repeatedly run the computation of applying it, and my all-time favorite phenomenon of computational irreducibility guarantees that you’ll go on getting fresh, new results that can’t be reached except by doing all those computational steps.
…So, yes, having nothing to do with AI, computation can generate an infinite sequence of new theorems, representing an infinite sequence of new facts, etc. And among those theorems there’ll be all sorts of “originality” and, in effect, “surprise”. But there’s a catch. Those theorems are in a sense just “results plucked from the computational universe”. And as such they certainly fall under the purview of the new—and I think very important—field of ruliology on which I have spent so much effort. But are they math?
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Wolfram is one of those people who, when they speak, deserves hearing.
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OpenAI “rogue” agent activities found on Wikimedia projects • Wikimedia
Selena Deckelmann:
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The Wikimedia Foundation conducted its own investigation to see whether Wikimedia websites had been similarly affected by AI agents, focusing on those operated by OpenAI. We can confirm that we have discovered some activity by these “rogue” OpenAI agents on Wikimedia platforms. The unauthorized bot activities included edits to our wikis, some unsuccessful attempts to exploit a public note-taking tool we host, and heavy traffic, which are described more below.
We did not find any evidence that our systems were used for coordination among agents, nor did we find any evidence of our systems or data being compromised. However, we are concerned about what could have occurred here, the difficulty and effort involved in investigating and attributing this activity, and the growing risks of agentic AI activity on our platforms in general. The open web is a public good. We should not allow this behavior to become the “new normal” for the people or organizations that maintain it.
…Wikipedia was designed for humans – and agentic behavior clearly poses challenges that no one has solutions for. Because of our unique and successful knowledge creation model, Wikimedia’s volunteers are the ones who come in first contact with, and clean up the mess left behind by AI agents. Rising bot traffic and agentic activity is showing a real impact on the Wikimedia projects and the infrastructure that makes it available for millions of users globally. In 2025, the Foundation reported that its bandwidth usage had increased by 50% due to the surge of bot activity on its websites since 2024. At the same time, 65% of the most resource-consuming traffic on its projects was coming from bots.
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A lot of the edits and accesses were trying to use Wikimedia resources to access other sites. But you can see how the demand would grow and grow. This ins’t going to be sustainable in the medium or long term.
arXiv is rate limiting submissions because it can’t keep up with AI slop • 404 Media
Matthew Gault:
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arXiv, an open-access repository where researchers publish preprint academic research, has announced it will rate limit submissions because it has been inundated with AI-written papers. A researcher can now only send in two pieces per calendar month and have a total of three active submissions at any given time. In a blog post about the change, arXiv said AI has made it too easy to spam the publisher’s inbox and its volunteer moderation team is overwhelmed.
“The heart of arXiv’s process for detecting and rejecting low-quality papers is our many volunteer moderators,” Thomas Dietterich, an Oregon State University professor emeritus and the chair of arXiv’s editorial advisory council said in a statement. “We are so grateful that they donate their time and expertise every day. However, a relatively small proportion of authors are submitting a large number of low-quality papers and consuming a disproportionate fraction of the moderators’ time. This is unfair to authors who continue to submit quality papers — their papers can be delayed for days or weeks as a result.”
According to arXiv, it received 9,869 submissions in September 2016, 20,569 submissions in September 2024, and 40,363 submissions in September 2026. Submissions on the site have doubled in the last two years and have sextupled in the computer science category.
AI is driving this surge in multiple ways. Researchers are using LLM to parse massive data sets, write code, and design portions of experiments; some are also using AI to write the papers.
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Pure ICE cars fall below 50% of global sales for the first time • Electrek
Fred Lambert:
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Gas cars are now a minority of the world’s new car sales. Gasoline-only vehicles made up 49% of global new-vehicle sales in the first half of 2026, down from 73% in 2021, according to Mobility Global data first reported by Nikkei.
It’s the first time on record that they’ve been under half. But there’s a catch: most of the cars taking their place still have a gas tank.
Mobility Global is the auto data firm formerly known as S&P Global Mobility, which was spun off from S&P Global this year. Nikkei reported its first-half numbers last week, and they show sales of gasoline-only cars down 10% from a year ago to 20.25m units between January and June.
Their share fell three points in a single year, from 52% to 49%.
Battery-electric vehicles grew 12% to 6.87m units and took 17% of the market, up three points. Conventional hybrids grew 10% to 7.27m units, or 18%.
…Nikkei ties the acceleration to oil. Fuel prices spiked with the conflict in the Middle East, and buyers went looking for lower running costs.
The whole car market shrank about 5% in the first half, according to the IEA, so gas-only sales fell twice as fast as the market.
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A tipping point? There are still problems with home charging, which is the ideal.
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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
